“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
(George Bernard Shaw)
Thanksgiving
Today is the day when many people in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. Like many of you, I will be sharing a collaborative meal and what should be some good connection time with some of my family.
I am thankful for that. I’ve had quite a few not so stellar holidays in my life. There was the Thanksgiving I spent alone in a dorm eating a leftover lobster tail that a floor mate brought home after her restaurant shift at 10pm. (Awesome lobster! Not such a great night.) There were Single Mother-Christmases I spent entirely alone, and some I spent with my dog. He was great company, but I mostly just cried.
Gatherings with my husband’s family are a lot of fun. I really appreciate them. They know how to laugh, and they are compassionate, socially aware people, and oooooLAWD some of these folk can COOK! These times are a precious gift that I do not take for granted. I am truly grateful.
Thanks, No Thanks
I will tell you though, I do not honor this day as “Thanksgiving.” This is a holiday that was fabricated by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War as a political push for “unity” in the midst of literally lethal division.
The Thanksgiving narrative pushed to promote the holiday was utter fiction. You can read more about it here, but the bottom line is this: After a more than a century of European invaders all but wiping out whole nations including the Wapanoag through disease and brutal violence, Wampanoag leader, Ousamequin attempted diplomacy with the English to resist the English effort to make the people of Turtle Island, (“America,”) either subjects of the British Crown, or dead.
Lies Do Not Become Us
In true “American” fashion, the unity that Lincoln was promoting ignores the true Colonizer-Think foundation upon which our country is laid: Those with means see something they want. They assume that those who do not think/speak/dress/believe the way they do are less human, and therefore should be subjugated to their will. (See “Doctrine of Discovery” for a fuller exploration of the ideologies that later shaped our country.)
Were you taught in school that the first Thanksgiving was an effort on behalf of the Wampanoag to resist annihilation? I certainly wasn’t.
As we know, the treatment of the inhabitants of this land did not improve following this and many other attempts at detente.
Lincoln’s Cover Up
Furthermore, this promotion of “unity” came on the heels of Lincoln’s US-Dakota War of 1862.
The Dakota were pushed off of their land by the US Government and sent into unyielding territory. More than 1600 Dakota, (mostly the very young and the very old, who are considered sacred amongst Native American people,) were forced into Fort Snelling. (Sounds a lot like a Concentration Camp, doesn’t it?)
There, some 300 Dakota people died by starvation, disease, (translation: exposure and lack of access to health care,) and otherwise impossible conditions. When the People had the nerve to fight back, the US Government brought 498 Dakota up on charges. In trials that sometimes lasted less than five minutes, with defendants denied the right to counsel, more than 300 Dakota men were sentenced to death. Lincoln commuted all but 38 of those sentences. On December 26, 1862, those 38 men were hanged in what remains the largest single execution in US History. (You can read the full story here.)
His decree codifying Thanksgiving as a US holiday came less than a year later. The unavoidable message in my mind is this: “Unity” in our country has historically meant compliance to one way of being and living, based on the dehumanization of those who are inconvenient to the wishes of the powerful. Oh, and by the way? We’re supposed to be grateful for that.
Stop Ruining My Holiday, Tiffany!
Why does this matter? Why can’t we just eat turkey and have fun? As noted above, I will be eating good food, (though not turkey – YUCK!) and gathering with family. But I will not be covering up the lies upon which this tradition began.
Ours is a story of tenacious survival.
Every single person who will gather in my home today is a descendant of Powhatan. Some members of this family were orphaned from our Native community by being declared “black,” then subjugated to enslavement. Some of us were orphaned from community when our ancestors passed for only “white” in order to survive. Every single one of us stands as a testimony to survival in spite of centuries of efforts to erase, destroy and deny us.
We are still here. “We are the arrows the Ancestors flew, long before they changed our hue.”
There’s my gratitude, right there.
Truth is Powerful
I invite each person reading this to carefully consider the history shared above. For the sake of a much healthier, much more sane and sustainable future, consider the shape, elements and ideologies of those historic events. Consider it from a human perspective. Put yourself in the Wampanoag’s moccasins, the English settlers boots, Lincoln’s shoes, the Dakota’s moccasins, the bare feet of the enslaved, the shoes-that-never-fit-right of the white passing, in the skins of those who abused and killed others, and that of those were who were abused and slain.
They are all us, and we are all them. All are one. All things affect all things.
If we continue to think of history as dry facts told by victors in promotion of a self-affirming story, we will continue to do the same things again and again and again. We will get the same results in different packages. If instead, we understand that history is the story of actual human beings from whom we all descend, we free ourselves to do something much healthier.
I am grateful for all of the healing that can come from facing truth with boldness and humility. I will be even more grateful if each of you consider how you can make those skeletons in your family history closet dance.