Stolen Not Given

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THIS MORNING, in the Twitterverse, we were talking about Thanksgiving. As many of my friends are also people who work to extract themselves from, or diminish the effects and momentum of imperialism and its trappings (or who happen to be of indigenous blood), it is not unusual for us to talk about other sides of “Thanksgiving.” About not passing it on to children as we received it, about not practicing it at all, about practicing alternate forms of the holiday. One friend (Kai) related a story to me that I liked, saying

When I was a kid, my mom would roast a turkey + braise a duck on Thanksgiving. My parents said one was US tradition and one tasted good.

This bifurcated or dual function/form seems to me a good way to approach the holiday. Who wants to put away what some have come to know as a warm, happy time of gathering with family and celebrating food, love, taste, tribe, and life? The USA has so few “traditions” as it is, so as two-dimensional and full of tinsel that they are, they are dear to those of us who grew to know them as recurring events.

But using Thanksgiving as a time to teach children about both the myth and the damage done behind the Myth is crucial. And I capitalize “myth” that second time because this is not about being contrary or “radical” or anything. Thanksgiving is probably the most popular and earliest-given justification for invasion, murder, imperialism, occupation, and “othering” that we know of in this country. You see the harm wrought by the colonizer’s mindset time and time again, and even now in Iraq we hear fables fashioned on the same framework and it sickens. But Thanksgiving is Iraq, with its steaming platter of corpses. Iraq is Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving stands in place of the real story, one of greed and superiority and crusade and greater stores of weapons and greater capacity for violence.

In 1637, English soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many of them alive in their homes and shooting those who fled. The colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. By 1675, there were some 50,000 colonists in the place they had named “New England.”

—Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving”

Thanksgiving is the earliest fable given to us along the path of mental indoctrination that allows the USA to continue its method. Some say now a great change has come upon us and we may have to shift the way we do things. Global powers now, no sole hyperpower, diminished American might, changing demographics. We’ll see. “Time will tell,” as a reggae song often playing in my early household would promise the listener. Time will tell. (Obama’s words on not prosecuting anyone for war crimes etc tell us a lot already, though.)

Nonetheless, the path is in place and it is a path that begins with commercially-crafted tales designed to distract us from the USA’s long-running methodologies of exceptionalism and crusade and in place of that, offer us patriotic pablum; saccharine feelgood fakery that suffocates entire peoples and their struggles. Ultimately, who benefits from these fables and the lessons they instill? Who benefits from the invasion of Iraq? From the mercenary armies we have there and are now launching into many nations and onto ocean vessels? From our military bases that multiply like virus? Who are the myths of Thanksgiving designed to benefit? What are the truths they are meant to obscure?

What is it about the story of “The First Thanksgiving” that makes it essential to be taught in virtually every grade from preschool through high school? What is it about the story that is so seductive? Why has it become an annual elementary school tradition to hold Thanksgiving pageants, with young children dressing up in paper-bag costumes and feather-duster headdresses and marching around the schoolyard? Why is it seen as necessary for fake “pilgrims” and fake “Indians” (portrayed by real children, many of whom are Indian) to sit down every year to a fake feast, acting out fake scenarios and reciting fake dialogue about friendship? And why do teachers all over the country continue (for the most part, unknowingly) to perpetuate this myth year after year after year?

Is it because as Americans we have a deep need to believe that the soil we live on and the country on which it is based was founded on integrity and cooperation? This belief would help contradict any feelings of guilt that could haunt us when we look at our role in more recent history in dealing with other indigenous peoples in other countries. If we dare to give up the “myth” we may have to take responsibility for our actions both concerning indigenous peoples of this land as well as those brought to this land in violation of everything that makes us human. The realization of these truths untold might crumble the foundation of what many believe is a true democracy. As good people, can we be strong enough to learn the truths of our collective past? Can we learn from our mistakes? This would be our hope.

—Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving”

That’s a little Haunted Land talk there. I like the hope part. It’s not a “hope” built on simply escaping the utterly depraved last 8 years. It’s not one built on some illusion of letting bygones be bygones with no truthful accounting nor consequence doled out. It’s reality: You cannot move forward with great crimes unaddressed and build a shining city on a ransacked graveyard. (If you ask the Wampanoag people, they will tell you that the “First Thanksgiving” actually involved not “finding corn” but in stealing it and looting childrens’ graves.) You can try! You can scribble in the ledgers and change the stories and lie to the kids, but truth has a way of making itself known, even if the only pathways left to travel are the disease and disintegration of a standing lie.

So! With all that said, I do hope that everyone enjoys their day tomorrow, as well as their lives and their families and their full bellies. I also hope that more and more as we go forward, it can be a day not only for fine foods and laughter and friendship and family, but also for respect, truth and the debt we owe to others. We can dismantle the machine that enacts these crimes one generation at a time, stripping away the veneer of propaganda and revealing the hard beating heart underneath. We could use the words of the Seattle schools this year, who are urging their staff not to simply “celebrate, but to educate.” We can imagine ourselves strong enough to “learn the truths of our collective past” and yet rise.

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As you can see by my many links, I think a good place to begin is The Eleven Myths of Thanksgiving as discussed on the Oyate.org page, Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving” by Judy Dow (Abenaki) and Beverly Slapin.