Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. As a child, it was simple – a happy day of family and feasting. I would awake at dawn to help my mother stuff the turkey that would roast all day in the oven, and while she prepared all the rest of the meal, the younger of my brothers and I would head downtown with my nextdoor neighbor to delight in the Christmas displays in the department store windows. Our home would be filled – my older siblings returned from college and their adult lives, with a roommate, or girlfriend, and in later years, spouses and children. We would stuff ourselves with turkey, stuffing, and cranberry jelly, mashed potatoes and gravy, black cherry jello, squash with mini marshmallows, and as my mother would always say, “corn for the Indians.” That would be the only mention of Native Americans on this day celebrating what has become a romanticized version of a harvest feast, shared by a few of the Waumpanoag people and the English settlers who owed their survival to the Waumpanoag’s generosity.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I would learn the true history of the colonizers and the ensuing genocide of Native peoples as settlers plowed, lumbered, and marched their way across the continent. Genocide – the intentional act of killing and destroying a group of people, whether based on ethnicity or race or religion, carried out here through infection with deadly disease; slaughter of buffalo herds; abduction and abuse of children in boarding schools; removal from homelands; land theft; rape, murder, execution, and war.
The history is clear, and yet, as a nation we have yet to acknowledge it. Indeed, we deny it. Years ago, Tina Olson and Rebecca St. George, then of Mending the Sacred Hoop,* told me how, under the second Bush administration, they were prohibited from using the word “genocide” in the trainings or materials they used in their work with the tribes. The Office of Violence Against Women froze their funding for a time because the language they used was not “celebratory” enough. Tina actually had to travel to DC to apologize, and was told that MSH could say only positive things about the Bush administration. She wondered aloud about “how proud they must be, for all those people to sit around and have this tiny little Native woman say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Certainly, if anyone needs to apologize, it is the United States government.
In a conversation with Krista Tippett, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative**, lamented the fact that the United States has yet even to acknowledge its history of racial terror and the genocide of the indigenous population of this continent, let alone begin a process of apology and atonement. We have such resistance in this country to telling the truth of our history, as witnessed in the torrent of outrage toward these efforts (misnamed and misunderstood as Critical Race Theory – a jurisprudential lens through which to analyze case law) suddenly at the center of school board elections across the country. Perhaps settlers have been so instilled with the myth of American exceptionalism that we can’t see the errors of our ways -- or refuse to.
In her groundbreaking work, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Joy DeGruy Leary offers another compelling explanation for this resistance. She explains that when our negative actions and thoughts towards others are different from our sense of ourselves, we experience discomfort -- cognitive dissonance. Because most of us think of ourselves as good and decent people, when we act in ways that are hurtful or harmful, we try to resolve this discomfort. One way we do this is to own up to our actions and work to address the harm. Or, we try to justify the negative act by thinking it was deserved. As Leary observed of the nation’s founders, “chattel slavery and genocide of the Native American population were so un-Christian the only way they could make their actions acceptable, and so resolve the dissonance, was to relegate their victims to the level of sub-human” (54-55). Or, we can live in denial. Unable to accept a concept of ourselves as a nation that would commit genocide, we simply deny its existence.
However, it is only the first strategy that offers a path toward healing, and this begins with acknowledging the truth. Stevenson spoke of how, in the faith tradition in which he grew up, “You can’t come into the church and say, ‘Oh, I want salvation and redemption and all the good stuff, but I don’t want to admit to anything bad. I don’t want to have to talk about anything bad that I’ve done.’ The preachers will tell you, it doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to first repent, and you’ve got to confess. And they try to make you understand that the repentance and confession isn’t something you should fear, but something you should embrace, because what it does is open up the possibility of redemption and salvation.”
The closest I’ve come to witnessing this acknowledgment was a few years ago when I visited Plymouth, Massachusetts, the place where the first of the Bartletts came to this continent in 1624. Once a point of familial pride, now it was a place to own my past. In Plymouth, I found this plaque marking Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning - “a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture.”
Acknowledgement, apology, atonement are important beginnings, as are land acknowledgements and indigenizing place names. More than this, we can support efforts to end the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, speak out against violation of treaty rights and the continued assaults on Native lands and peoples such as the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota, fund efforts to return land to indigenous people, support Native food sovereignty.*** For me, such acts are not so much about redemption as they are about respect and right relationship. They are acts of friendship, small steps toward reciprocity.
I cannot begin to reciprocate in full measure to the indigenous peoples on whose land I live, from whose continued efforts to protect the land and water we all benefit, from whom I have learned so much -- particularly about thanks giving. For the indigenous people of this land, thanks giving is not something that happens on the fourth Friday of November, but rather is a daily practice of generosity and gratitude. Perhaps my first understanding of this was years ago at a Women’s Studies conference. There, Rayna Green, the curator of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian, spoke of how those things to which we in academia accord value– the degrees, awards, grants, and publications -- have little meaning in Indian Country. What matters is how much one gives. Personally, I have been so touched by the spontaneous and heartfelt generosity of indigenous people. With gratitude, I look around my home at the many gifts I have been given over the years – a braided rag trivet, an artist-signed Mending the Sacred Hoop poster, Anishinaabe constellation charts, a handmade basket, a book of poetry, a double dream catcher made for us as wedding gift. But even more meaningful are the gifts of time and wisdom and story, of feasting and friendship that have graced my life.
For all these and more I say “miigwech.” Miigwech, meaning “thank you,” was the first word of Anishinaabemowin that I learned, probably because it is said so often – miigwech to the earth, to the Creator, to all those gathered. Every prayer, every talk, every gathering, every encounter begins and ends and is woven throughout with thanks. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, reflecting on how Native cultures around the world are “rooted in cultures of gratitude” (106), shared the Onandaga Thanksgiving Address – the Words That Come Before All Else. The day begins by sending thanks to all the relatives -- the earth, the waters, fish, plants, birds, berries, trees, winds, thunder, the moon and stars, and the Creator. It is a daily reminder that the highest value is gratitude, and that we have everything we need.
Practiced daily, thanks giving need not be complicated -- just a simple appreciation of all the gifts of the earth, of life. Practiced daily, every day is a holy day.
* Mending the Sacred Hoop, Duluth, Minnesota, is the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) Training and Technical Assistance Provider on domestic abuse to tribes throughout Indian Country.
** The Equal Justice Initiative is dedicated to providing legal counsel to those who have been wrongly convicted, as well as others who have been denied a fair trial. They recently opened the Legacy Museum which shares the history of the slave trade, racial terrorism, Jim Crow, and the prison system, as well as the National Memorial for Peace and Justice dedicated to truth-telling and reflection on the history of lynchings in this country.
*** Some ways to contribute to these causes:
The Indian Land Tenure Foundation: ILTF
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA | (mmiwusa.org)
Understanding the Issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (nativehope.org)
Mending The Sacred Hoop | Domestic Violence Prevention | Duluth, MN (mshoop.org)
American Indian Community Housing Organization: AICHO - Home
Line 3 Rapid Response — The Center for Protest Law and Litigation
Honor The Earth (honorearth.org)
Notes
Green, Rayna. “American Indian Women: Diverse Leadership for Social Change.” Plenary. National Women’s Studies Association Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN, 1988.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013.
Leary, Joy DeGruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005.
Olson, Tina. Personal Interview. January 2, 2008.
St. George, Rebecca. Personal Interview. January 2, 2008.
Tippett, Krista, host. Stevenson, Bryan, guest. “Finding the Courage for What’s Redemptive.” On Being. November 4, 2021, Original Air Date, December 3, 2020. The On Being Project.