My Post-Thanksgiving Brag

FoxyJ has much more to brag about than I do, as she put together an amazing meal yesterday and did so while hardly breaking a sweat, but I want to show off the very cool namecards that S-Boogie and I made:


What's so cool about those namecards, you ask? Well, since you're so fascinated by every little thing I do, I'll tell you. Knowing that I was in charge of the crafty decorative stuff, Foxy sent me a link to a website that has cool Thanksgiving crafts to do with kids. The site did have some good stuff on it, but unfortunately if you want anything bigger than a thumbnail to print you have to pay for a membership. I could have searched more for free templates, but the site had given me enough of an idea to do it on my own. So I drew the pictures, cut the cards out, and penciled in the names. S-Boogie colored the pictures and traced the names with pen over my pencil.

What I really want to brag about, though, is not the cards themselves, but rather the innate talent for literary criticism shown by my four-year-old daughter. The observant among you will notice that I followed in the colonial tradition of my white ancestors and other-ized our Thanksgiving guest, Foxy's sister SkyeJ, by representing her as a stereotypical "Injun," feather headdress and all. (I also dehumanized my children by turning them into traditional holiday food items, but that's another story.) S-Boogie, in true postcolonial form, subverted my colonization of her aunt by other-izing Foxy and myself, turning our pilgrims into a Smurf and a demonic scarecrow. She also highlighted the crudeness of my caricaturization of Native Americans by making Skye look like a black-face minstrel show performer. S-Boogie's postcolonial "reading" of the "text" of my Thanksgiving namecard pictures reveals not only the oppressive history behind the holiday tradition but also my own latent racism. In my defense, I did extensive research to represent 17th-century Native American clothing accurately; SkyeJ's dress is based on the one worn by Pocahontas in the Disney movie.