How I stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid
(This article is by Robert Jensen – a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009).
I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.
Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning” (http://www.uaine.org/).
In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.
Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.
Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.
Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.
The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?
Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).
Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.
However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.
As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
Everything this fellow says is true, but still I hesitate to completely trash Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s just that I like stuffed turkey (stuffing IN the bird please… who wants a bunch of cubed cornbread and bacon in a frigging pan!) and a reason to eat and laugh with friends and family.
Maybe.
Regardless, I think its disingenuous to think that the only way anyone can interpret a holiday like this one is through the rigid and dour, somewhat puritan, lens of those who would boycott it and deny the fact that almost every action, game, musical tradition, act and product of genius, has as a strain in its genesis of some story of the bloody turpitude of the human species. I decline to give up simple joys because of this, but instead prefer to make the traditions new and imbued with my own political and ethical standards. I encourage everyone to do the same.
Own the holiday as an opportunity to recognize the great wrongs done in the name of kinds, emperors, faux-liberals and ravenous capitalists.
Use the time at the holiday table to connect with loved ones and educate them.
Enter into spirited and mutually enlightening conversations that reinforce your love and connection and deploy the most thankfulness you can muster to be grateful that you, at least, have been delivered from the miserable masses who will listen to those who continue to believe that their god and their country is owed the blood of others and the resources their homes sit upon.
Remember that many of the Pilgrims were only the front line of the push to deconstruct and disembowel the Native American homelands… they were often working people forced out of their own homes and communities and, slyly, given the job of clearing the “new world” of its inhabitants through disease and violent overthrow by fantastically wealthy and lazy overlords half the globe away.
Even if you cannot fathom the nature of their claim to Native Land, see their story too as the story of workers and farmers all over the globe who have been perennially forced off their ancestral lands by poverties enforced by their kings and emperors and faux-democracies, much like our own children and grandchildren whose opportunities here to have a home and meaningful employment have been taken away in such a way that many inevitably become the new pilgrims fighting off the new tribes over our leaders’ lust for the new gold: oil.
Bob, thank you for your thoughtful comments. I posted Bob Jensen’s piece because I thought it was an honest attempt to come to terms with what the holiday is all about and our own collective history, particularly for those of us with privilege.
He does end with an invitation to hear from what people have done to respond to all of this and in that sense you have already provided people with another way of approaching this.
Thank you!
Yup… That’s why I spouted off!
Hope you have a good one Jeff…. we’re not getting down your way as hoped. Sometime soon I hope!
Maybe it would be helpful to Robert Jensen to consider the fact that the history of Thanksgiving and its meaning is continually evolving.
Thanksgiving started as nothing more than a harvest festival in some New England states. During the Civil War, President Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving that had nothing to do with the Pilgrims; it was to celebrate Union war victories and also a day to pray for the widows and orphans created by recent battles. The entire South, needless to say, did not participate–and ignored Thanksgiving for decades after the Civil War because of Lincoln’s initial declaration.
It wasn’t until later that editor Sara Josepha Hale, having unearthed the lore (probably more myth than fact) about the first harvest festival at Plymouth, successfully fused it with the idea of Thanksgiving. The story of the Pilgrims and the Indians making peace was very popular in the 1870s and 1880s…particularly since its wide distribution followed the complete subjection or eradication of the indigenous nations, with climaxes at places like Little Big Horn.
As a country, the United States has always had a short attention span. The fact that Thanksgiving hasn’t always been focused on White domination over other races means that it doesn’t always have to be. As Bob Vance pointed out, Thanksgiving can be about whatever we choose.
Thanks Kate for your contribution to this dialogue. I agree that there has been an evolution of the idea of Thanksgiving, but I think that the dominate image of Thanksgiving, whether in news media, entertainment media or advertising is that of the “first Thanksgiving” between happy Indians and Pilgrims. So at some level I think it is crucial to come to terms with how that mythology plays into the national denial about the systematic genocide of native peoples within the geographical boundaries of the US.
This I believe is what Jensen is grappling with in his article. How do we as part of the dominant culture come to terms with this ongoing history? When I go to my parents house for Thanksgiving I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to visit with and enjoy the company of my mother and brothers, so I certainly echo Bob’s point about we make the holiday what we want it to be. However, at the same time, if someone in Germany was to create a holiday that mythologized some benign encounter between Germans and Jews would we say that it’s ok to celebrate the holiday with family if we give it our own meaning? I don’t know the answer to that, but that is the point of Jensen’s piece for me and why we need to constantly grapple with it since the genocide of Native people still continues, just in more subtle forms.
Jeff, I agree with you and understand Robert Jensen’s point of addressing the moral bankruptcy of the Thanksgiving story. It’s important that we focus on our national denial over what was done to indigenous peoples here.
I think, though, that both Bob Vance and I tended to react first and foremost to Jensen’s feeling that those on the left should completely reject the holiday on a personal basis, because “we don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning.”
I don’t agree with that statement. I think that most people’s holidays tend to have meaning specifically because of personal feelings and beliefs, combined with family memories and traditions developed with loved ones. So it was the idea that it’s necessary as a first step to forego the holiday completely that I was rejecting.
But I was also trying to make the point—and perhaps I’m being overly optimistic here—that the Pilgrim/Indian mythology seems to be shifting and changing even now. I see a difference in the way it’s handled in some (not all) educational materials…I see an awareness that the story of cooperation of the Pilgrims and the Indians was followed by the savage breaking of that trust on the part of the White settlers…and I think that tribal demonstrations have been highly effective in keeping a different view of the event top-of-mind in the past 10 years particularly.
I am part Abenaki Indian. I don’t know if you know anything about the history of the Abenaki, but my family was smack in the middle of the initial invasion of their lands by European settlers. Those who weren’t slaughtered were driven completely out of this country and ended up in Quebec. Now the US government refuses to acknowledge the remaining Abenaki here as a nation because their numbers in the US are not statistically significant—thanks to events that started at the time of the Pilgrims. It’s not as if I don’t have a personal stake in this question.
I like Jensen’s idea of developing educational events that could become part of a new tradition. I like Bob Vance’s idea of making family/personal time to reflect on the truth of the history of indigenous people in this country and what happened to them. And I also think that time and awareness will help break down the pervasiveness of the Pilgrim/Indian icons. Schoolchildren today are being given better and fuller accounts about the so-called “first Thanksgiving,” and they are going to grow up in that awareness. Here’s an example from a current elementary school reading selection:
“It would be nice to say that their friendship lasted a long time; but that was not true. More English people came to America. They did not need as much help from the Indians. Many settlers forgot all about the help the Indians had given them. The Pilgrims became intolerant toward the Indians. The Indians lost trust in the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims started telling their Indian neighbors that their Indian religion and customs were wrong. Settlers started taking more land. They took away the Indians’ hunting grounds and turned them into farms. Old friendships broke down. It was not long before the children of those who ate together at the first Thanksgiving were fighting a war, called King Phillip’s War.”
I certainly was never given this full an account during my elementary education. I can’t remember King Phillip’s War even being mentioned, and I never was taught that the Pilgrims broke trust with the Indians.
Even with my family background and my left-wing political beliefs, I don’t believe the holiday needs to be tossed out the window. My hope is that, with continued public awareness raised about the issue (as you and Robert Jensen suggest), with individuals changing the holiday on a family level to fit their belief system (as Bob Vance suggested), and considering the evolving nature of how we view practically everything in the US, Thanksgiving will survive, but in a better and more honest form.
This is an interesting discussion. It brings to mind the following:
There have always been strong indications through physical characteristics and passed-down family lore that I have a good portion of Native American blood. I was raised white so cannot claim belonging (although, in my interactions with Native people, I have found a unique generosity about this thing called belonging) to any tribe.
There is an end point in the genealogy on my father’s side that is unexplained, except through pictures of my grandfather’s mother: long straight black hair, epicanthal folds, high cheek bones and dark skin that she passed down to her youngest son and he in varying degrees to his descendents. They, this arm of the family tree, hailed from southern parts of the states of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.
Family lore tells of a sister of my grandfathers’ (one of six or seven older sisters, all with the same straight hair and dark skin in the black-and-white photos) who lived in a shack in a strawberry field. I have surmised that if there is a tribal connection the Shawnee and/or Kickapoo tribes would be their likely tribal base, however one cannot know. And these tribes have all but been disassembled in their ancestral lands with tiny remnant populations left there and, at least in the case of the Shawnee, with the larger populations of the descendents of the tribe forced to walk to “Indian Country”: Oklahoma.
In my family, if the darkness of the skin of my father or his mother were brought up, my grandmother, daughter of a German Anabaptist preacher who was also a member of the KKK, would hurriedly state that her husband’s mother was Spanish. Needless to say there were very few Spanish people in those areas in the mid 1800s, though I’ve never been sure why being Spanish would be a better option than being Native American.
My own educated guess about what might have occurred involves Indian Schools and forced semi-adoptions, when Indian kids were literally farmed out to farmers as cheap help. But I’ll never know, beyond my own near certainty and this has been reinforced since I have moved into an area with a large Native population. The shores of Lake Michigan, from Petoskey to Mackinaw, were summer home to the largest community of Native Americans in the Great Lakes until smallpox wiped out a good portion of them. The Odawa version of the story is that the sickness was introduced on blankets given as gifts to the tribal members who had traveled to Montreal for a pow wow with leaders of the white colonizers.
I am not entirely sure what this has to do with this conversation about Thanksgiving. My weak claim to having up to an eighth or more Native blood gives me no more right to be free of the collective white guilt for the horrific crimes against Native people. But I do like the idea of a feast day.
Here in Petoskey, closer to Halloween, tribal groups sponsor ghost suppers… these are feasts that are in honor of those who have gone before us. The food is largely made up of dishes that the ancestors liked. Ghost suppers are often open affairs to which anyone who wants, regardless of race, can attend. It is this generosity of spirit that does not hold grudges and sees such feast days and informal ritual gatherings as opportunities for healing and to re-acquaint ourselves with where we have been, and who has been here before us, that defines what I like to bring into my holiday meals.
I like this take on Thanksgiving especially. Surely the dishes I eat are dominated by foods and recipes I and my family have eaten for several generations. There is a chip dip that my mother introduced into our family holidays that I am sure each one of my sisters and their children too make for holidays. Some of the serving plates and bowls are those that I remember from my childhood and my parents remembered from theirs.
It is important to make these events ours, even as we recognize the truth and terrors in our own histories that were, most probably, reflected viscerally in the stories of the lives of our own ancestors here and from the places we crossed the ocean to get here. The vastest majority of all the people who arrived here, even Natives who crossed a temporary land bridge to get to this continent most probably looking for food, were forced to move on to survive. In my family history alone there are Hessian mercenaries, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish farmers, German farmers and Native Americans…. maybe even a Spaniard or two. I have recently discovered that my Hessian ancestry most probably was of Jewish background.
I like the idea of being thankful. It is an act that is at once contrite and humbling and doesn’t have to be wrapped in any fake and too-often repeated fables from any of the world’s holy books. Family and intimate community stories and oral history in one of the only places it currently lives (and where it was born) are the order of the day. I like the idea that we can have a feast to celebrate this. To be genuine about it does not demand that we boycott it because of the spin the capitalists and faux democratic overlords have imbued it with so they can profit. We can turn it on its head as we eat and laugh and mourn and love. This is grassroots. It is a holiday I can understand.
Wow, Bob. I love the idea of framing a Thanksgiving feast as a ghost supper. That makes a lot of emotional sense, and does bring the whole concept of the meal to a level of connection and communication that would be a perfect stage for a healing of past wrongs. What a great idea.
I also love this: “To be genuine about it does not demand that we boycott it because of the spin the capitalists and faux democratic overlords have imbued it with so they can profit. We can turn it on its head as we eat and laugh and mourn and love.” That’s my feeling exactly, but stated so beautifully. You should be a poet. : )
Off topic: I have done a lot of genealogy research, and if I were a professional genealogist and you told me the story of your “disappearing” line and the hut at the end of the strawberry fields and the cover story that your ancestors were Spanish (Spanish! I love it! Tragically lost members from some missionary expedition to California, perhaps?), I would definitely think that you were part Indian. All of those are classic signs of a family attempting to cover up its indigenous roots. If you wanted to, you might be able to find out more. It’s hard to verify a connection with government records, but there are places you can look:
1. Land records. If anyone in your great-grandmother’s family owned land, or if your grandfather inherited land from his family, it’s possible that the fact they were Indians is noted on the deed somewhere. That’s because “taxable Indians”–landowners–had to be counted in the US Census.
2. Obituaries. Early newspapers weren’t shy about mentioning Indian connections, especially in the Victorian times when it was thought to be “romantic.”
3. Census reports. These are trickier. From 1850 to 1870, no Indians were not to be counted as “human souls” in censuses unless they had a significant land holding. In 1880, some Indians were counted, but the criteria was they could not live with their tribes or bands or be “wandering” families. If they were “mingled with the white population,” working as servants or “living in huts on the outskirts of proper towns or settlements,” they were to be “regarded as part of the ordinary population.” (Nice, huh?) It wasn’t until 1890 that all Indians were supposed to be counted as citizens, and noted as “Indian” (without any tribal reference) in the census.
4. Reservation rolls. These go back to the early 1800s. Whenever a nation or band was removed from eastern lands and offered some land in the west in replacement (and Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were certainly among those western lands for many years), the “removal” was noted, the acceptors counted and listed, and the people who refused the land exchange were called out by name and description. There’s a Kickapoo reservation roll for 1862, and there might be additional ones, too.
5. Military records. The military was scrupulous about recording race–unles of course the person lied or didn’t know about an Indian connection; in that case, it would not be listed.
6. Online genealogy blogs or sites. Any day, somebody who’s already done the above work may post it all online somewhere. Do a search from time to time–you may be amazed by what you find.
7. Oral history. Moving out of White records and into Indian ones often is the most successful strategy. You aren’t very far removed from your Indian ancestors. If there are tribal communities near the area where your grandparents lived, they may well have some oral accounts of your family, and they will do whatever they can to help you.
One-eighth Indian blood is considered important by most tribes. As a benchmark, the Bureau of Indian Affairs requires someone to have 1/16th blood to qualify for a certificate of Indian blood, and you have twice that degree. Like you, I was definitely raised as a White and have all the privilege/baggage/difficulties that come with that. But please don’t consider your 1/8th ancestry insignificant. To your tribe, it definitely would not be.
Thanks for this Kate!
My father did a lot of genealogy work and always ended up at the same dead end, but then I am not sure how invested he would have been in looking into a Native lineage. I will keep these other avenues in mind and have more recently begun some preliminary research into tribal associations especially along the Wabash River valley and along the border of Illinois and Indiana and the parts of Ohio east of Columbus and south to Chillicothe… there’s also a Western Pennsylvania connection which, with the southern Ohio one, places us firmly in Shawnee territory. The problem lies in names I think… especially if there were adoptions involved.
I was on a train once coming back from taking my elderly father (now deceased) to stay with his cousin in San Francisco and has a long conversation with an African American woman whose specialty was genealogical research… she said it would be wise to do a matrilineal search as well, as many tribes, especially in the east, tracked family connections via the women.
Now to find the time to do this!
I remember being on The Polar Bear Express, a train in Northern Ontario that is the only way one can get to the James Bay communities of Moosonee and Moose Factory. By chance we were taking the trip at the same time as the Cree Indian festival honoring ancestors with a “return home” and the train was full of Cree people going to the ancestral homes speaking their language (which, along with the French Canadians, gave it a very international flavor).
I was sitting in the dining car (one of those old fashioned stainless steel and stool types) when a gentleman walked into the car who looked so much like my father I nearly fell off my stool. I immediately went to get Susan to show the gentleman to her. Interestingly enough Susan also has some undocumented connection to Native tribes through the French Canadian side of the family. I have other stories from this trip that turned into something of an unintended pilgrimage into my own ancestral connections, even beyond the gentleman who looked like my Dad. I am relatively sure that this kind of racial blending is much more common than many white people are willing to admit to. Especially if one has been on the continent for more than a few generations. When I moved up here it became a curiosity to us when people who had all the physical ear marks of Native blood would denigrate the Indian community. We hear “those dirty Indians” quite often, although less so in more recent years. Probably has more to do with the money the casino brings into the area than anything more altruistic.
Thanks again for a great conversation… and thanks Jeff for providing the forum!