Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday — there’s just so much about it to like! It makes sense that we as Christians constantly give thanks for all the good things with which God has blessed us: family, friends, food and fellowship. In many ways, it’s nice to have a national holiday dedicated to the purpose of gathering together, giving thanks and eating good food — especially because Thanksgiving is not an explicitly religious festival and can be celebrated by people of different faiths and ethnicities.
Whether your Thanksgiving turkey is accompanied by sweet potatoes and marshmallows, or tamales and tortillas, or hummus and pita, gathering with people you care about to enjoy what you have is a rare and good feeling. In my family of origin, the Thanksgiving menu is guarded with a fierce adherence to tradition, and every family member has a particular dish they cherish most and without which the meal would seem incomplete. Every year’s Thanksgiving dinner also recalls all the others we have experienced together through the years and refreshes the memory of loved ones no longer with us.
But it was in the context of my family that I also came to understand that not every American approaches Thanksgiving with equal joy. In the Native American community, there is resistance to the way this otherwise worthwhile family holiday has been used to perpetuate an inaccurate and sentimentalized picture of the relations between America’s natives and the European settlers who arrived in America in growing numbers from the early 1600s onward. “Thanksgiving” is hardly the word American Indians would choose to describe their feelings toward that historical epoch.
My mother’s ancestors were among those Mayflower passengers who arrived in 1620 in what they came to call “New England,” and my 10th great-grandfather died in that first hard winter, leaving behind a widow and two young sons. I honor the memory of those brave and tenacious people who left behind all that was familiar in order to try to carve out a new life in a new land and to practice their faith in ways they found difficult in their homeland. And I am happy — least to some degree — that those “Pilgrims” are still remembered by modern Americans at Thanksgiving.
But my father’s Native American ancestors could have told the other side of the story — those for whom the arrival of European settlers represented a disaster of unimaginable scope. Hostility between settlers and natives was much more common than the kind of cooperation we like to remember at Thanksgiving, and in every case, the natives were ultimately the losers. My Osage ancestors were Plains Indians, and their first contact with Europeans came later, in the form of French-speaking trappers and missionaries, but the experience of all Native Americans has been the same: disease, displacement and dispossession were the legacy of what they have come to see as a white invasion of the continent that was their home.
November is Native American History Month, largely — I expect — to correct the imbalance that the propagation by schools and the press of the “First Thanksgiving” myth of happy Pilgrims and Indians eating together has created in the American historical consciousness. Harmony among people in a diverse population like the United States today is better served by simply trying to appreciate each other, giving thanks for what each culture and ethnicity has to offer — and maybe eating turkey together — than it is by creating an imaginary past. So why not invite someone different from yourself to your Thanksgiving dinner — maybe a new immigrant or someone from a different culture? A shared meal is a wonderful opportunity to learn about other people and give thanks for the diversity that makes America a unique place — and even Indians like turkey!
Many Native Americans I know have taken to calling Thanksgiving “Turkey Day” as a way of protesting the idea that Natives should want to give thanks for the successful colonization of their continent by Europeans — though admittedly without them we might never have had marshmallows to put on our sweet potatoes! The holiday has enough to commend it as a happy family observance without loading it with questionable history.
So when I give thanks at Thanksgiving, I always include all my ancestors — Pilgrims and Indians alike — among those I am thankful for. I am thankful for all that their lives and experiences have taught us about the complicated ongoing social experiment that is America. I am thankful for every sign of modesty and proportion in looking at our nation’s founding myths. And I ask God to help us all understand how challenging life still is for ethnic and racial minorities in this country — especially those first Americans, many of whom are caught in a perpetual cycle of poverty and low education — and to help us make this a land for which everyone can give thanks.
