Unthanksgiving

Editor’s Note: This segment is rendered as the author wrote it in real time, on Thanksgiving Day of 2020.

This will probably not be a popular chapter in this narrative.

Fair warning.

Nonetheless, ahead we forge.

Change only comes with reckonings, and the willingness to adopt ownership.

My gal and I are solo this holiday. We can’t see family due to the ongoing surge of Covid. The boys can’t come up from San Diego. We can’t go down there. We can’t even see a sister who lives a couple blocks away. We can’t do any of this, because we’re still among the folks who believe the three biggest catalysts for Covid’s spread are large gatherings, cross-pollinating households, and eating within proximity of others. On top of that, this is our first Thanksgiving without the two elder doggies in our lives, after 15 years of otherwise. It is a lonely day.

Nonetheless, my girl is whipping up a holiday dinner with all the fixin’s.

I’m grateful.

Many Americans believe this to be a day of gratitude. We’re very sentimental about it, because this is one of the holidays born in childhood roots. By and large, our collective memories of Thanksgiving and Christmas are among the most formative flashpoint events in our memory banks. No less so for me.

However. This is yet another whiteboy tradition which must end.

I have to stop celebrating this day.

Yes, I pose this even as I’m about to wolf down some season-specific vittles.

I’ve known the folly of this harvest festival event for some time, not just in this year of unrest, or within my personal journey coming to terms with the depths of American racism.

For many Indigenous peoples, this day is of course a day of mourning, a federally marked holiday that forces them to recall their ancestral genocides.

There’s no reason whatsoever why we have to mark an annual family-football-feast tradition in the context of Anglo-imperial expansion, other than our continued yoke to sentiment.

We choose to hold onto an antiquated holiday because of our glorification of that long-storied lesson regaling the establishment of the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts and the meeting in 1621 of the Mayflower settlers with the local Wampanoag tribe.

In the shorthand version of events, Euros and Natives came together as temporary allies and sat down to break bread. Naturally, revisionist history has been alt-chronicled to the point of unrecognizable pageantry. In actual history, it wasn’t the first time that colonial settlers marked a giving of thanks with an Indigenous tribe in the ‘New World.’

Nearly sixty years previous, Spanish settlers and Seloy tribe members ate together in Florida in 1565. Some historians posit the true origin of Thanksgiving may have occurred in 1637, when Massachusetts colony governor John Winthrop declared a celebratory day to honor colonial soldiers who had slain hundreds of Pequot tribe members, including women and children. Even if the Plymouth event held relatively true to the ascribed date and the participants therein, the devil lies in the details.

The chief elder of the Wampanoag tribe was an ally to the newly arrived English colonists at Plymouth, because he initially set up an exclusive trade pact with them and backed them with his own warriors against the French and other sources of competition like rival Narragansett and Massachusetts tribes. As you might guess, the alliance didn’t hold, as the Protestant whiteboys did what they usually ended up doing, and started dictating how their Native allies should cede their ways of life when those same colonials began taking more territory as more of them arrived from Europe.

Disease brought overseas had already reduced the local population throughout the New England region drastically from 1616 to 1619. By the time the Wampanoag chief’s son inherited leadership, relations had broken down and conflict began anew when several tribe members were executed by colonists for the murder of a white Christian missionary. The tribe reacted accordingly, and the ‘New England Confederation of Colonies’ declared war on the tribe in 1675. Carnage soon followed as colonists ping-ponged between Indigenous alliances, stoking old inter-tribal grudges and creating new ones.

Ultimately, after an extended conflict that took the lives of a third of the English colonists and half of the entire Native American population of the New England region, the son of the man who’d broken bread with the original Plymouth colony was beheaded, dismembered, and his head was put on a spike and displayed in the town of Plymouth for the next twenty-five years.

This is the truer history of our annual harvest festival gathering.

Fun stuff, isn’t it.

Pass the yams, please.

West coast tribal folks and allies mark an alt-holiday called ‘Unthanksgiving.’

On the east coast, Native Americans have gathered in Plymouth every year since 1970 for The National Day of Mourning.

There’s a memorial plaque there. It reads as follows:

Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.

I can’t chronicle much more than I have outside of these basic history lessons. As usual, I am but an ally. The existentialism of the history in question is the prerogative of Indigenous historians and scholars, not mine nor any other whiteboy.

I can, however, talk about how many Americans, both whiteboy and BIPOC, even when we’re informed of the true origins of traditions born out of blood, don’t understand why we can’t honor something we believe has transformed into something else, something we think no longer needs to be permanently tied to those dark roots. I get it. All too well. I’m entrenched in my memories of Thanksgiving and its touchstone significance in hallmarking family and communion, good will and cheer, food and safety, hearth and home.

Yes, of course, culture changes as time passes, and yes, we can embrace those changes as a positive affirmation. You sit there and you think: Yeah, okay, I understand, we totally fucked over the Indigenous peoples back then, we were stupid, but that was then and this is now, and since we’re no longer killing them, why can’t we just move on and accept the transitioned, the morphed, the ‘evolved’ aspect of the occasion? Can’t we let of go of those atrocities that happened hundreds of years ago, and accept this holiday for what it is now, something that celebrates communion?

There are a number of responses to that, ones that whiteboys typically don’t like to hear for fear of tainting something holy to them. And it’s hardly limited to whiteboys. Many BIPOC folks have taken on the morphed holiday for themselves, including a great number of Indigenous families. That’s what happens when a ruling class bleeds down its culture through food pyramid ranks. Many Latinos, First Nation Peoples, Asians, and Blacks embrace the tradition, having filtered history enough to mark a present-day occasion not solely defined by its bloody origins.

It’s confusing, isn’t it?

Can we separate Thanksgiving’s sordid roots from its transformed, modern celebration of family and home?

Can’t we let sleeping dogs lie?

The problem is…that dog ain’t sleeping. It’s never taken a nap, not since whiteboys first step foot on this continent’s shores.

Native American racism is rampant across U.S. and Canadian territories to this day. Indigenous communities continue to protest their rights to protect their lands, their water, their ways of life, and their rights of self-determination. Whiteboys have been screwing over Native American peoples for time immemorial. The Canadian oil company responsible for the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history proposed a pipeline expansion that would carry a million barrels a day from Alberta to Wisconsin right through the Anishnaabe tribe’s established treaty territory. The state of New York sued the Shinnecock Nation in trying to block the construction of a monument that would bring desperately needed income to that tribe. Lakota territorial treaty violations continued as activists were arrested for setting up tipi encampments to house and shelter their area’s unhoused. Here in SoCal, the Kumeyaay Nation protested the desecration of sacred land and artifacts endangered by the construction of That Guy’s border wall. In federally unrecognized Secwepemc territory, Indigenous activists built small homes strategically placed along the Trans Mountain Pipeline route to block access and protect their lands. A thousand lawsuits lie bitter in courtrooms across the country, injunction after injunction, to stop, betray, or alter established treaty rights for Native American peoples.

Indigenous peoples never stopped having to deal with our whiteboy horseshit.

All these five hundred years later, they are wedged firm under our colonial thumbs. That was then, this is now, never applied to them. That was now, this is now, is how many Native Americans rightfully see it.

Our annual harvest festival we embrace as a morphed tradition, once bloody, now holy, is often their reminder they are still an oppressed people, and our DGAF complacency is just more of the same. You can’t expect a historically oppressed people to move on from atrocities in the past when they’re still happening to them in the present.

This is my last thanksgiving. I won’t be marking this holiday anymore. It’s too little too late at my age, I’m aware. I suppose spiritually speaking, every little bit and every small step helps. Enough individual minds, eventually, might add up to awakening. Of course, all families have the right to mark the occasion as they see fit, most of all Indigenous descendants, many of whom have decided to embrace the holiday as their own, focusing on the communal aspects of gathering rather than its original roots. And that’s perfectly fine, except for one thing. By joining that pageantry of the conquerors, it by proxy fortifies continued avoidance of acknowledgement and ownership from those same descendants of conquerors. In other words, it gives whiteboys more excuses to not own their ancestry and make modern adjustments to continued cultural repression.

That’s how I see it, anyway.

Lots of folks, including the Indigenous, disagree with me in viewing it through that lens.

I would never presume to tell people how to mark their family gatherings, or how to feel about them. I am simply saying that whiteboys have a long and sordid history with failure of ownership in reprehensible behavior. While the son is not necessarily guilty of the sins of the father, the son does have an obligation to affirm and admit his father’s guilt in doing a crime, and alter and adjust his own behavior accordingly, ideally with as much atonement as he can offer the victims of his father’s errors.

Are we more concerned with the marking of a past event inextricably wrapped up in our sentiments, or are we more interested in the feasting and the football and the big family dinners? It’s almost always the latter. Most Americans don’t concern themselves with history when it comes to holidays. 95% of us are simply invested in the present actuality of the occasion to gather and celebrate, including a greater portion of Indigenous families.

Why not move the big, annual, family gathering day to another month, call it something else, and start fresh, ensuring it doesn’t coincide with noted dates of the onset of imperial conquest or significant events concerning BIPOC genocides? Why are we so connected to the date and the title? Some of the issue is commercial. Big corporations know Thanksgiving brings on the end of year holiday season, with its 30-day proximity to Christmas and its extended weekend of Black Friday-Cyber Monday consumerism. In the private sector, it’ll be hard to change the calendaring times and places of our annual lexicon, with our school schedules, the winter season, and our long established cultures of Americana.

As much as I enjoy turkey and stuffing and Pillsbury crescent rolls, I certainly don’t have to consume that particular meal on a particular day in November. Nobody does. It could be any random day of any year. We don’t have to give up the sentiment of the annual breaking of bread with our extended loved ones. But how hard is it to re-frame it and move it around, make it something new, keeping all the food and communion, tossing out the bathwater of colonialism? It’s really not that hard, structurally speaking. Emotionally and culturally, it’ll be harder, sure. Sentiment to tradition. Again, that bastard heavy monkey keeps its claws firmly embedded atop our backs.

But yes, we could change up a protracted holiday season, we could break up the triumvirate of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We could re-title the occasion to something with a little more respect and a lot more inclusiveness. While we figure it all out, we could join our Indigenous brothers and sisters in marking their heritage with their as-yet-unheralded holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and at least try to relay to them some semblance of contriteness, sorrow, and humility for our shared past and our ancestors’ crimes against theirs.

Most important of all, we can stop perpetuating the same shit right here in the present, and let them do what they want on their promised treaty lands without interference or imposition.

Higher consciousness comes at a price, sometimes at the expense of familiarity.

Try to envision how others might feel, in seeing your traditions as continued oppression, mired in centuries of implicit bias. If you can’t, you’re probably prioritizing your sentiment, or perhaps you’re still figuring out whether the truths under the whitewash are genuine, and you’re wondering if they’re exaggerated by folks who have what you see as subversive, anti-American agenda. Ask yourself, in the process of your determinations, whether that suspicion of ulterior motives is more warranted of the historically oppressed, or the historically franchised.

Food for thought.

Blood and cranberry sauce.

Think about it.

Think carefully about it.

Editor’s Note: I spoke to a friend later that week, after I penned this segment, after I marked my last Thanksgiving. She is a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe up in Nevada. She shared the following with me.

“As children, we never realized the extent of separation between races until we ended up at a government-sponsored boarding school near Carson City. Our grandparents were taken to a government boarding school too, back in their day.  To get there, they had to ride on the top of the trains. They weren’t allowed inside the train cars. There were signs posted on the doorway entries of the train cars that proclaimed, “No Blacks, no dogs, no Indians.” 

In those times, only a generation ago, my grandparents were considered lower than dogs. They weren’t allowed to speak their Native language.  They were beaten and abused for doing so. Our school was known as “the Indian school.” One of its courses involved an overview of North American tribes, where we shared generation stories that had been passed down to us, about our wars with incoming Europeans from the east, how the Army came through our settlements while the warriors were gone, how they raped the women and killed the elders, threw babies sleeping in their cradle-boards into fires, burned them alive, how the rest of the tribe was marched against their will in the middle of winter to Washington, losing half the survivors to disease, exposure, and starvation, leaving loved ones behind in the same spots where they collapsed. All tribes have these generational stories. 

We still experience good old boy mentality even now. Many of our local townsfolk call Nevada ‘the Mississippi of the West.’ My sister and I often walk into white-owned stores and clerks see us and look away, while the next person – a white person – will get a pleasant greeting. They follow us around the store, from a distance.  Sometimes we stare at them until they leave us alone. We let them know. We see them, seeing us. Sometimes they accuse us of not having paid for our merchandise once we’re out the door, even in front of our children.

Our grandparents always said, “White people don’t know any better.” Obviously, that still holds true today. Our families still wait longer to be seated in restaurants than white patrons. Waiters are slower to take our order.  Our children are taunted and bullied by white children.  They come home and tell us about the first time they heard the term ‘redskin.’ They ask why our traditional dance regalia is used as costumes by non-Natives for Halloween or fashion shows. Then we have to explain cultural misappropriation, and why war bonnets are worn by those who are not entitled to wear one, or why white folks stare at us as they pass by on the state highway running through our reservation as if we’re some kind of Old West scenery, or why white Christian missionaries still seeking converts come to our tribal lands and tell our children they’re trying to help ‘you poor Indians who can’t help yourselves.’

It’s tiring. It gets old, just letting it go, letting white people be white. Whoever thinks racism is less of a deal than it used to be, just isn’t a minority living in today’s world.”

*Compiled from November 26, 2020