from naivete to grief into solidarity: decolonizing thanksgiving

For some of us from the USA, this "Thanksgiving weekend" has been a time of quiet gratitude mixed with introspection, moments of grief, gratitude, and questions re: how to "decolonize" this holiday. For Di and myself, we chose to slip away from both the Black Friday madness and the cacophonous choruses of competing feast day narratives for a quiet time of solitude in a small country town surrounded by hills, trees, and rivers. Like the Celtic heretic, Pelagius, advised: if you want to know the Creator, spend time with Creation. Our banquet was modest - tourtière (meat pie), fresh veggies, and a crusty baguette - but our gratitude knew no bounds. 

Thanksgiving has been a holiday in transition for me. As a child coming of age in Congregational New England, the myth of noble Native Americans feasting with my Pilgrim ancestors - and saving these colonizing settlers from starvation - was normative: we made paper headdresses and Pilgrim hats for the annual Pilgrim Pageants, the story was told and retold in church, and the media informed how my parents explained the "why" of this feast day. For years I considered it to be an American Eucharist, the origins of the sacred melting pot where all types of people could find a resting place free from discrimination and fear. It was the driving reason for memorizing Hawthorne's 1855 epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" in first grade. I was genuinely grateful to the Indians and wanted to know more about the people who literally made my America possible.

I didn't know otherwise for a full decade because in bourgeois white Connecticut and Massachusetts alternatives were not discussed. I grew-up water-skiing on Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, the sacred fishing center and unceded ancestral home of the Nipmuck Indians. I watched countless Westerns with my dad on our black and white TV and came to respect Tonto as much as the Lone Ranger. The trust built between Indian agent, Tom Jeffords, and Apache Chief, Cochise, on Broken Arrow showed me it was possible for an Anglo and an Indian to become blood brothers. Even my hippie inclinations romanticized First Nations realities by the counter culture's rip off of faux Native fashion. I still failed to grasp the lies of the dominant culture concerning indigenous people even after devouring Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970. I simply could not connect the dots linking the genocide of the American Plains Indians to what had occurred n my own backyard.

My hunch is it took Tom Hayden's 1972 book, The Love of Possession is Like a Disease with Them, to awaken me. The title was taken from "an 1877 speech by Sitting Bull (where) Hayden masterfully draws compelling parallels between the Vietnam War and the genocide of Native Americans." (Good Reads) As a conscientious objector to Vietnam (who was granted noncombatant status but was never called to serve) I was leaving the safe and sheltered world of white, middle class New England behind. I read feminist analysis alongside civil rights histories, the polemics of 20th century pacifists with the same gusto as the anti-racist jeremiads of MLK, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, In time, I gave a number of years to the crusades of Cesar Chavez and finally completed my undergraduate degree in political science, writing my thesis on non-violent social change. And still I did not know the true story of Thanksgiving.

Langston Hughes took me to a new awareness with his poem: Let America be America again - it's never been America to me. Studying with Cornel West, Dorothee Soelle, James Washington, James Cone, and Walter Wink at Union Theological Seminary continued my awakening. But it wasn't until TV's Northern Exposure aired a Thanksgiving episode deconstructing the lies of our white dominant culture that I grasped why decolonizing Thanksgiving had to become a priority for me. 

An open-hearted and clear-headed dialogue between Edgar Villanueva and Hilary Giovale in YES Magazine is the single best articulation of what is at stake in decolonizing Thanksgiving. And I am of the opinion that this matters whether or not you have been shaped by the romantic mythology of dominant culture or not. Mr. Villanueva notes:

As a Native American, I’m often troubled by the way that (many) Americans approach Thanksgiving. By holding onto an idealized image of a harmonious feast between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, we’ve overlooked the brutality that Native people have faced since the arrival of Europeans. For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and remembrance—a reminder of the genocide of our people, the loss of our way of life, and the theft of our ancestral lands. We cannot change the past––but by changing how we tell the story of the past, we can avoid repeating a history that erases the trauma Indigenous peoples have experienced. While traditional decolonization hinges on returning stolen land and autonomy to Indigenous peoples, today our lives as Indigenous peoples and settlers are so intertwined that decolonization is more complex.

Ms. Giovale builds on this stating:

European-descended settlers have unique opportunities to bridge the colonial gap. It can begin by simply changing how we introduce ourselves. The first time I said out loud, “I am a ninth-generation American settler. All my life, and ever since 1739, our family has been living on stolen Indigenous land,” my worldview started changing dramatically. Within White settler culture, our identities as settlers tend to be invisible to ourselves. We are entangled with systemic White supremacy and national mythologies designed to keep us comfortable and complicit. Many of us have developed multi-generational bubbles of denial and amnesia about the genocide, broken treaties, and stolen land that enabled us to stay. Our opportunity is to willingly pop those bubbles so we can collectively decolonize and make repairs.

Their dialogue goes on to suggest seven life-changing ways that settlers and indigenous peoples can live together as allies in healing: grieve, apologize, listen, relate, represent, invest, and repair. (You can read the full article here and I encourage you to do so: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/ 2019/11/27/thanksgiving-colonial-gap-heal) In The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations a Wabanaki wisdom keeper suggests that one of the ways a person from an Irish settler background might begin to make peace with her family's legacy in real time is to first become grounded in her own roots. As she grew more and more comfortable in her own skin, she was able to move into solidarity with the still thriving resistant Wampanoag nation of Cape Cod. I find solace and hope in this story.  (Read more here: https://utorontopress.com/blog/2021/06/17/excerpt-the-gatherings/) If you're able, take some time with this You Tube overview, too.

This Thanksgiving, I find myself resonating with Kaitlin Curtice, a Potawatomie woman who finds the grace of God revealed in the universal Christ, when she confesses:

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.