Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving?

 

 Chase Iron Eyes

 In 1620, English sailors arrived on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Harbor. A year later, the English celebrated their first Thanksgiving—alone, until a Wam­panoag defense party arrived, wanting to know why gunshots were being fired.

Our cherished national myth is that Thanksgiving originated with Natives welcoming friends who were fleeing religious persecution and then celebrating the harvest together. But the Wampanoags were not there to welcome or celebrate with foreigners. They had a mutual-defense pact with the Pilgrims and likely arrived out of duty. Yet over time, a young America branded this interaction as a “cohosted” Thanksgiving. George Washington celebrated Thanksgiving in 1789, and John Adams and James Madison followed suit. Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, trying to unite Americans during their Civil War. Aliens in a foreign land need to invent new myths and identities to provide themselves with a sense of people, purpose, and place.

There is another, more illustrative Thanksgiving story not often shared in the mainstream. During this other early Thanksgiving, in 1637, European settlers gave thanks after their men returned safe from a raid on the Pequot, an Indigenous tribe living in present-day Connecticut, which led to the massacre of between 400 and 700 women, children, and men and the enslavement of those who survived. In this story, there is no mutual thanks; there is no giving. There is only consumption and taking.

You want to give thanks? Give thanks to Native nations who granted settlers some form of legitimacy—by entering into treaties recognizing them—to be in our homelands. Those treaties recognized that Americans are now under our spiritual custody and have rights to pass through our country. As soon as Americans were able to impose their will on Indigenous nations, the treaties were violated. Some Indigenous nations do not have treaties, and legally this means their nations should be intact. Those of us who have treaties have defensible legal claims to lands that are now occupied by private American settlers under US law. The United States is still not able to deliver clear title to the lands because they were illegally and unilaterally annexed by the United States. We know it was not the fault of American settlers who bought the stolen land. But in order to promote reconciliation, we want private landowners to support the transfer of federal and state lands back to the tribal nations that have valid claims to them. Give thanks by honoring the treaties, by giving land back.

Give thanks by protecting the lands and waters that sustain us, instead of compelling law enforcement to protect the property- and capital-owning class, even when the owner class has “legal permits” to destroy a river or poison a land.

Give thanks to the Native nations who created the world that we inherit today. Learn that 60 percent of all food consumed to this day was discovered, bioengineered, and/or cultivated by Indigenous cultures in the Americas, including corn, beans, squash, and tomatoes. Indigenous people developed many of the agri/horticultural practices, including raised-bed farming, still in use in the United States. “American” democracy itself was derived from observations of the Iroquois confederacy. The interstate highways and trail systems trace Indigenous trade routes. Anesthetics, rubber, sunglasses, kayaks, canoes, plant medicines, oral contraceptives, and paleo, organic, and non-GMO lifestyles derive from Indigenous practices. Thank Indigenous people for teaching humanity that food and water are medicine. Thank Indigenous people for defending your natural birthrights, human rights, constitutional and other conceivable rights from corporate encroachment.

In those early years of colonial settlement, Indigenous families, saviors of the interlopers, nursed them back to health, only to be slaughtered by them and subjected to decimation by biological warfare. To this day, the Doctrine of Discovery—the foundation of federal law permitting settlers to take possession of land they “discovered”—imposes a set of Christian-based “laws” and institutional thinking that confines Indian existence “legally,” politically, and economically. The reservation system, “blood quantum,” and the invention of the federally recognized tribes will lead to our extinction as nations, as distinct political entities. Thanksgiving is a lie in the same way Manifest Destiny is a lie: This continent was not a pristine, empty land that had yet to be put to “profitable” use in the ways “civilized” extractive alien economies defined it.

November is already Native American Heritage Month. Thanksgiving could be something better: a day to appreciate the truth of American history and Native Americans’ contributions to our lives. Let’s tell a different story by dropping the lie of Thanksgiving and begin a Truthsgiving.

NATION