Daniel Rubin: Giving thanks as a Native American lifestyle

Historians are not certain whether the holiday meal we eat today can be traced back to a harvest feast Pilgrims and Indians shared in 1621, let alone whether turkey was involved.

"I find it doubtful," says Drew Isenberg, a Temple historian who specializes in American Indian history. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was an imagined-memory exercise."

Is it possible that the settlers and the natives actually sat down together at Plimoth Plantation?

"Yeah," replies Susan Klepp, a professor of colonial history at Temple. "When they weren't fighting each other."

One document offers the best evidence of a first Thanksgiving. An English settler named Edward Winslow wrote to a friend in December 1621 of a three-day feast attended by 52 colonists and 90 members of the Wampanoag nation.

The letter mentions five deer and countless fowl, but no Detroit Lions, who did not become part of the tradition for 313 years.

Educators at the Massachusetts plantation say the Wampanoags were likely to give thanks every day, which leads us to the subject of this holiday column: Cherie Dancing Sun of Elizabethtown, Pa.

On Thursday, she will do what she normally does on this day of the week - drive 332 miles round-trip to minister to the American Indian population incarcerated at the state's Laurel Highlands prison.

"To me, it's not one day," she says, "as much as it's the lifestyle of giving thanks."

Thursday also is her 52d birthday. She'll spend the morning in the minimum-security prison, where she typically gathers about 35 inmates who practice the culture of their ancestors. She sets a calming mood with a purification ceremony called a smudging.

In a shell, they burn sage, cedar, or sweet grass, letting the smoke wash over their bodies. "It gets rid of any negativity or anything that is upsetting them," she says. "It just puts you in a better state of mind."

Then she asks each man to talk about something that makes him feel he has value.

I met Cherie (Cher-EE) one day last week at the Wiley Christian Retirement Community in Marlton, where she spent two hours sharing her story. She'd brought a trunk full of Navajo items: turquoise and squash-blossom necklaces, winter moccasins, a mutton-bone awl, a Western dream catcher.

She was wearing what she called a traditional rayon top - helps in blistering heat - and a long black skirt. A silver barrette pinned in place her waist-length, honey-color hair. She talked about how she does not dye the gray, or wear fake nails, sport a tattoo, or dress immodestly.

Her audience seemed rapt as she talked about the values of her nation, how children are not taught their history until they show interest, how her tough love comes from a belief that there are no second chances because one never knows if tomorrow will come.

Like her work in the prisons, her speaking pays just enough to cover the gasoline. She also sells real estate.

She was 19 when she discovered her heritage on a trip to the Southwest. She was called Cheryl Blevins then. She'd moved from group home to foster home in Lancaster County, had a juvenile record, was already the mother of a 4-year-old boy.

At the Hubbell Trading Post in Arizona, a woman started speaking to her in a language she didn't understand.

"She was looking at me like I belonged there," she says. The woman gestured for her to sit at a spare loom and weave a rug. She'd never tried. "For an hour and I half I sat there. It came very naturally."

Eventually she learned of her birth to a Navajo woman on Nov. 24, 1959, on what was called the Blue Gap Reservation in Arizona.

At 22, she started practicing her Indian culture. Tribal elders gave her the name Cherie Dancing Sun after hearing her story.

"I was told that through all the adversity in my life, I have always smiled as the sun has danced across the sky."

Her purpose, they told her, is to educate, to encourage, to give hope. She says many people with Indian blood refer to themselves as Heinz 57 because they have such mixed lineage. "It doesn't so much matter what we are," Cherie says, "as who we choose to become."