My Thanksgiving Protest: History, Community, Gratitude

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My Thanksgiving Protest

Why would I stage a Thanksgiving protest? Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love food. Cooking is one of my favorite pastimes. Parties at my house are quite regular. Seems like a no brainer then, right? Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for me. At the same time, I am a woman who got her education in the study of minority cultures and literatures. I am an active resistor and agitator. I make a concerted effort, as a white woman of privilege, to listen to others’ experiences without justifications or explanations.

So I had some serious cognitive dissonance going on. I knew the Thanksgiving story I was fed as a child in school was a lie. Yet I continued to buy a Turkey, make stuffing, and put out a cornucopia, dried Indian corn and pumpkins in some sort of nod to Pilgrims and Indians. I finally came to terms with my own intentional disconnect this year, leading to my Thanksgiving protest. But it certainly was not planned. It all came together in a bizarre blend of outside and inside influences.

The Seed Is Planted

“Ugh,” My baby sister’s text reads. “I wish I could just stay home for Thanksgiving with my husband and eat tacos in my sweats.”  She sends me this message a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. It isn’t that she doesn’t love our family and her husband’s. It is just a lot of work to trek out to one household, eat, laugh, play with nieces and nephews, and then trek on over to another household to do the same, only to arrive home exhausted and drained from “family day.” I get it.

I don’t have that problem. I live hundreds of miles from my closest family members that don’t live with me, so I never worry about that. And I do love to cook. When she sent the message, I replied with a “haha. Poor thing,” and moved on. But the seed was planted.

“Why?” I wondered. “Why do we make such a fuss over this holiday? Why the turkey and mashed potatoes? Why the sweet potato pie?” And then all the falsehoods started bursting through my brain.

The Thanksgiving Story

The Pilgrims were indeed kind to the Native Americans. They did indeed get along when the Mayflower arrived. The Pilgrims needed the Wampanoags. Previous colonists had died, starved and frozen, unfamiliar with the territory and clueless as to how to survive. So the Pilgrims were kind in the way you are kind to people upon whom you depend. The Wampanoag tribes were generous, giving food and shelter, showing the Pilgrims how to plant and build fortifications. The story is as old as time. Kindness was mistaken for weakness.

Within a very short amount of time that early encounter led to King Philip’s War, which left thousands of butchered Native Americans, over land.

For no reason.

The hardest part of it all is that part.

For no reason.

There was plenty of land, there were plenty of resources, and there was abundant food. While you can argue that many Native Americans died because of small pox or other diseases they were exposed to by the colonists, not slaughtered, the Wampanoag tribes were murdered. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Rethinking Thanksgiving

A few days after my sister’s text, I saw an event in Berkeley, “Rethinking Thanksgiving,” all about teaching children about indigenous culture and celebrating new ways to think of the Thanksgiving celebration. This event got me thinking about doing some rethinking of my own.

I am a writer. I write about issues important to me, usually about empowerment and finding joy. Going ahead with a typical Thanksgiving after these two knocks in the head seemed neither empowering nor joyful. I wanted to write about Thanksgiving, and what we are celebrating, but I couldn’t do that while also cooking turkey and mashed potatoes.

“Hey all! Let’s not forget all the Indians our Pilgrim ancestors killed today! (munch munch munch, insert picture of fresh pumpkin pie).”

No, I couldn’t do it.

So that’s when I decided not to. This year, I took Thanksgiving off to rethink it, to see what it feels like to not go through the rituals I have mindlessly gone through for almost forty years.

History Divorced, Judgment Free

To be clear, I did not do this to say I will never celebrate Thanksgiving again, never make a turkey, never make sweet potatoes or Brussel sprouts on the third Thursday of November. I may or may not resume my traditions next year. This was never about judging people who celebrate or being ashamed to celebrate.

Yes, I am ashamed that it took me this long to get here, to a place of recognition and clarity, but that is highly personal.

I realize that most people do not celebrate Thanksgiving for the Pilgrims and the Indians. We spend time with family, we practice our gratitude, and we eat too much. We know that the ancestors of white people in this country killed off the Native Americans. Many of us just don’t know what the hell to do with that information.

Now, as an American culture, we all come together and discuss giving thanks, we talk a lot about being grateful, and how gratitude is the most important thing ever, and so on. We all have some version of a huge meal shared with our loved ones.

We have pretty much divorced the modern tradition with its false narrative origins.

Still, I wanted to experience a personal moment of silence, a rethinking, a reflection.

What I Did

Nothing. I did nothing I would normally have done for Thanksgiving. I didn’t buy any of the usual food stuff. I didn’t invite anyone over to eat my delicious food. I didn’t worry about it at all.

What I did do was read to my children from Native American literature. There is a great book, Crow and Hawk, that my daughter loves, about the importance of actually being a mother, as opposed to merely producing children. I also picked up one of my favorite Native American authors, Louise Erdrich, and got started on Love Medicine. My daughter and I also spent time over the last week discussing colonization and native/indigenous people.

I made ground beef tacos for dinner Thursday, and we sat down as a family and watched Mulan, which gave me the opportunity to talk to my daughter about building walls to keep people out, and how ineffective that is, how counterproductive it ends up being.

I also, for the first time in my life, unclenched in my kitchen.

Carlos brought home a free turkey from work and I gave him carte blanche to do with it as he would. Just not on Thursday. Then I invited all of my friends over at the last minute for a potluck.

“Bring food, bring wine, bring dessert, bring your kids. Let’s hang.”

And we did. We spend Saturday night after Thanksgiving laughing and loving each other. Our kids had a ball playing, and the grownups discussed everything from our youth to the state of our union. Youth – great! SOTU – not so great!

I didn’t cook or clean anything. I just looked into my friends’ eyes, listened to their voices, their stories, and shared my own. I played with my baby, and I laughed, a lot.

Sunday, the last day before getting back to work after five days off, I cleaned, I ran in the rain, I lay down, and my children crawled all over me. I rested.

What I Learned

I learned what many of you probably already know, and maybe are already putting into practice. Life is precious. Family and friends are invaluable. Laughter is healing.

American history is bloody; it is ugly; our (white people) ancestors have committed atrocities greater than any other culture on earth. We are the inheritors of that legacy, and we can choose what to do with it.

We cannot live in the past, but we must recognize it in order to move forward, if we hope to move forward well.

I learned that I can take this horrible tragedy that was committed, the first of many, and turn it into something beautiful, a celebration of life, a carrying on of traditions and values that are not my own but that resided here long before I came along. I can spend Thanksgiving week in deep appreciation of Native American culture, a celebration of life as a way to mourn death.

One thing that is common knowledge about Native American culture is that it was community based. Native Americans understood quite well what we Americans seem to have forgotten on so many levels: we need each other.

We cannot survive long without community. Every single person plays a part and deserves to be valued for that role. Every single life is sacred. Each member of the community is an integral part of the community.

Hence the potluck, a tradition I will continue. Everyone brought something, food, drink, sweet, plus their voices, their stories, their love. We build communities this way, through contributing, including, loving.

I learned that I can honor another culture by learning the lessons that culture has handed down through its inheritors.

To Be Grateful, But Not Too Grateful

Finally, I agree with the basic premise of gratitude. It is clear that when we are grateful for what we have, we are open to receiving more. When all we focus on is lack, all we can see is lack. Obviously, too, when you are grateful for a gift, a friend, a kind word, you are more likely to receive more, gifts, friends, kind words.

But I also think we must be careful not to get comfortable in our gratitude. Often, gratitude can devolved into a “just be lucky you have food,” which both allows people to hold us down, and allows us to hold ourselves down.

Of course I am grateful for all I have.

And I want more.

Our culture for some reason has insisted on this narrative of humility and gratitude while the very few rich get disgustingly richer and everyone else suffers.

“But be grateful you have more than that guy!”

I know this trap very well because I have fallen into it in the past. I am so grateful to have such a great job, a wonderful boss, my beautiful children, my adoring husband, my fabulous apartment, I am just so damn happy.

Meanwhile, my writing skills sit, wait, atrophy, dying on the vine. My dream of becoming a writer does the same, withering away, ready to blow in the wind.

My gratitude left me terrified to reach for more.

I had to say, “yes, I am ridiculously grateful for what I have. And I am ready for more.”

I had to stop allowing my gratitude to paralyze me.

Next Year

Who knows? Not me. I liked not cooking Thanksgiving dinner. The people in my house genuinely do not care about Thanksgiving food. We are happy to spend time together, to sit around four mornings in a row at breakfast before we begin long lazy days of walking in the grass barefoot and playing video games.

I may long for the food. I may travel to my sisters’ houses and get all stressed and exhausted with them. I may do exactly the same thing next year. Hell, I may build on this year.

It has only been a few days. I need time for reflection, time to think, and rethink.

After all, if I have learned nothing else from this Thanksgiving protest, I have learned to think more carefully about traditions before I celebrate them.