Prayer
Search: "prayer"
As seen from the collocates generated by the search term “thanksgiving”, the word prayer has a fairly high Stat value. Understanding the context of forced conversions that accompanied efforts to assimilate indigenous tribes, there should be further analysis to see whether there are any specific insights that can be gleaned from the corpus. Since this alone could be an in-depth analysis, I am specifically going to focus on how or if Native Americans are mentioned in prayer.
Searching for the word “prayer”, the words with the highest associated Stat value are communion, ministers, humiliation, sermon, spirit, thursday, wednesday, and service. These are all words directly related to prayer in one form or another. Strikingly, there are no instances in which the words “indian” and “prayer” are in direct reference to each other. Even substituting the words “service”, “communion”, “sermon” and performing a search, there are no results found.
Although this is by no means an exhaustive search, looking at the collocates most associated with “thanksgiving” and “prayer” there is a noticeable lack of mentions of Native Americans. Thankfulness for the help of Native Americans was a common theme taught in my middle school education; the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to survive harsh New England winters and for that, the Pilgrims were grateful. However, it is now apparent that this narrative propagated to children in the 21st century does not align with the beliefs of those in the 19th and 20th centuries. This closely aligns with the overarching theme of racism seen throughout the corpus by portraying Native Americans as racially and socially inferior.