It’s that wonderful time of year again — when families gather in observance of Thanksgiving, a celebration of the first harvest and when the Pilgrims arrived in what we now call America. Turkey, yams, cranberries, corn and pumpkins are prepared in a variety of ways in homage to the staples that kept Native Americans and early settlers fed. A prelude to various religious and cultural holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa), Thanksgiving has also become a time to give thanks for all of the wonderful things that happened over the course of the year. While the intent of this holiday is positive, I often wonder: Just what are we celebrating?
Capitalism comes to mind as we are inundated with commercials for Thanksgiving products during the month of October and into November. Turkeys, canned cranberries and a wide variety of Thanksgiving necessities are for sale. If you don’t want to prepare the meal yourself, you can call ahead to various restaurants and pick up the meal on “Turkey Day.” Are we celebrating convenience or the fact that fried turkey, a Southern comfort, can now be purchased in many places throughout the country? The Food Network gives us days and days of recipes to satisfy young and old. As we stuff ourselves into oblivion, dishes mount, serotonin kicks in, and we fall limp in front of the television, watching the college or pro football game of choice. I guess there’s nothing wrong with this. But something is just not quite right about it — particularly when we think about all of the people out in the world who cannot afford to eat on a regular basis, let alone exorbitant amounts of food in one sitting, or those who have lost their homes due to predatory lending, massive layoffs and a piss poor economy.
Further, the idea of Thanksgiving is overshadowed by the precarious history of our nation. Just as we fail to recognize Native Americans even during Native American History Month, we fail to give voice to what really happened to them during this period of history. Because of what we now call ethnic cleansing, Native Americans are less than 2 percent of the United States population, even though they were once 100 percent of the inhabitants of this continent. We often tell part of the story — the pretty part. The Pilgrims and Indians met and got along. The Indians taught the Pilgrims how to survive in this New World, and the Pilgrims introduced the Native Americans to parts of their culture. Little is mentioned about how the early settlers turned on Native Americans, who did not want to “give” them their land, wiping them out through war and violence. European diseases also wreaked havoc on the lives of Native Americans, reducing their numbers drastically. In a culture that resists acknowledging wrongdoing, we pretend as if this chapter never happened, glazing over it like a Smithfield ham.
Just as we are content with having Native Americans tucked away out of sight on reservations so that we do not have to deal with the daily reminder of the atrocities that occurred, we are satisfied to tuck away the ugly part of this story from our children and ourselves. What are we really celebrating? The eradication of an entire group of people, whose history we rewrite or remove altogether, while we pretend that this holiday is based on a harmonious encounter?
Is this why we continue to circulate false stories about Native Americans throughout the year? Disney presents Pocahontas as a sexy love goddess who falls in love with her would-be captor, bridging the gap between natives and settlers. Yeah, not so much. Pocahontas was a young girl who was kidnapped, forcibly married to a settler, forcibly brought to England, forcibly baptized into the church and denied her last wish of returning to her homeland because she was dying from small pox. A mother to one son, she succumbed to this disease at the tender age of 21. Why do we not take the time during Thanksgiving to talk about these issues that are related to the time period, the people and the culture that we are supposedly celebrating?
I like to think of Thanksgiving as a time for giving thanks for what we have but also an opportunity to discuss some difficult moments in our history, while giving voice to those who often reside at the margins of society. Native Americans are much more than sorrowful tales or sanitized stories. Their culture is rich with the same values that we embrace, most notably tradition and family. How ironic is it that we sometimes watch the Redskins or the Chiefs play ball on Thanksgiving, yet do not discuss why Native Americans find these symbols offensive or denigrating? I believe that there is room for it all, and that by discussing the complexities of our culture, through the lens of Thanksgiving, that we really will have something to give thanks about — truth, honesty, sensitivity and integrity.
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2007.
Griffin strikes again – the same old tune, over and over and over and over. Give it up, Frank, you’re boring the hell out of everyone. I basically agree with his thoughts about Ms. Burton’s proposal to turn Thanksgiving into a guilt-a-thon – that’s the kind of drivel that only comes out of leftie academia. But Frank G is equally stereotypical, but in the opposite direction – the narrow-minded, America Love It Or Leave It, war-mongering dolt who can’t think beyond what he was brought up to believe.
As in “wrong thing being celebrated. The name of the holiday contains the word “thanks” not “guilt”. It was conceived in a religious context to give thanks to God. That is a very separate thing from holding a communal celebration of guilt, particularly when that which you wish Amercians to substitute for gratitude is not personal guilt, but rather inheireted guilt.
It is quite normal for people to express thanks for what they have without also having to confront the history of their ancestors. No man is made greater because his forbears were kings or saints, nor is a man made lesser because they were thieves or paupers: no one is responsible for the acts of his ancestors nor does any man bear the pain of chains worn by his forbears. We inheirit neither the guilt nor the honor, nor the pain nor the joy of generatoins unknown to us. No one has a claim on greatness passed on from his forebears, nor should anyone assume that the pain inflicted on those he has never met somehow impairs him today.