Thanksgiving is a tradition, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. At some point, we will need to face the fact that the holiday isn’t just off base and out of touch, but it may be doing more harm than it does good…
— from an article by Joseph Kertis in the Baltimore Post-Examiner, November 17, 2021.
My family won’t be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow. The reasons are complicated. I’m okay with it, though. Times change, and sometimes we’re along for the ride.
I share an old Victorian house in downtown Pagosa with my daughter Ursala Hudson, my son-in-law Chris Haas, and my granddaughters Amelie, age 11, and Simone, age 7. I asked Simone to explain why our family would not be celebrating Thanksgiving this year.
“Well, Mamma said she doesn’t think so, because it’s, like, something for the Black people or something? Or it represents, like, bad White people? Or it represents the Earth that it used to be?
“But I don’t know. She just said, it’s stupid. And she said we shouldn’t do it, because she doesn’t think so.”
A concise, if slightly rambling, explanation.
Ursala’s explanation was a bit more comprehensive.
“About three years ago, I started questioning what the holiday… what its purpose was, in my life… and therefore, I had to question what its purpose was for our society. And I started thinking back to what we are told ‘Thanksgiving’ is. What the story is, behind Thanksgiving. I remembered that, all my life, I pictured a really amicable holiday — a lovely holiday, where there is a positive sentiment between indigenous people and non-indigenous people. And how sharing a meal amongst friends, and activities at school, would promote that idea. Of peace, between cultures.”
I ought to give a little context to Ursala’s comments. Ursala is the youngest of my three children, and her father (me) was descended from Europeans — English, Scottish, German. Her mother, Clarissa Rizal, was born in Alaska, descended from Filipino, Tlingit Indian, and German grandparents, but she identified most strongly as Alaskan Native.
Ursala likewise identifies closely with her Native American heritage, and with the history of an oppressed minority. But as recently as three years ago, she still saw Thanksgiving as symbolizing the ability of different culture to co-exist peacefully, side-by-side.
“Which is kind of ironic, because Thanksgiving is notorious for familial arguments. And that’s kind of funny.
“So three years ago, when we were at the table, I said, ‘Let’s talk about what really happened, back then.’ Because there’s this romantic story, where the Indians helped the white men survive… and that they had a lovely dinner together.”
“While that may have happened, that completely ignores everything else that was going on between the two cultures around that time. And by focusing on that romantic event, that one time during Thanksgiving, it doesn’t allow space for the real story.
“And, when do we tell the real story?”
I think she means, “the rest of the story” rather than “the real story”. I have no doubt that the meeting of cultures in North America had “real” peaceful, romantic moments. But much of the story involves “real” bloodshed, violence, and oppression.
“There were people looking for a new world, a new future, a new place where they could procreate and where their race could thrive — and there were other people, already here, who were in the way of that.”
In the sense of European immigrant families looking to homestead and build a life, and also in the sense of businessmen and capitalists looking to profit from new-found riches.
“So the indigenous people needed to be moved out of the way. Or exterminated… Either they were killed, or they had to ‘assimilate’…
“And a lot of times, their cultural practices involved a really strong connection to the land, which didn’t allow for things like mass extermination of animals, and logging, and laying railroad tracks, and blowing up hillsides…
“Not only was there a violent story going on — going on back in the time when we’re taught about the Mayflower — but it continued to go on, and it continues to go on, subversively, today. It’s pretty wild, when you think back to the first Thanksgiving, we’re taught about the Mayflower, and all of us know about the Mayflower. But do we know the name of one tribe that was there? We don’t know that. It’s not included in American History.
“Why does American History start with the Mayflower?
“So when you celebrate this romanticized relationship, it’s leaving out the most important parts, and erasing all those tribes, from our history.”
Speaking as a news reporter who has documented events in Pagosa Springs for the past two decades, I understand a little bit about “history”. I understand that the stories that the historians and journalists write down and preserve, reflect only a minuscule part of what ‘really’ happened in a town or region or nation. We select a few details from among millions of individual events — details that seem, to us, somehow important — and that becomes the “history” of a place.
Eventually, those stories become part of a mythology — a mythology that future generations assume to be the “real story”.
Eventually, the “real story” might even become a holiday.
Here’s another take on the first Thanksgiving, by journalist Richard Greener.
The first Thanksgiving Day did occur in the year 1637, but it was nothing like our Thanksgiving today. On that day, the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a “Thanksgiving” to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians — men, women and children — all murdered.
For the past 50 years, a National Day of Mourning has been held on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the fourth Thursday in November. The hill overlooks Plymouth Rock in the Plymouth waterfront area. The ceremony includes a march through Plymouth’s historic district, and speeches on Cole’s Hill. The event organizers plan to stream the event live, on YouTube, starting at 12 noon Eastern Time.
“Although we very much welcome our non-Native supporters to stand with us, it is a day when only Indigenous people speak about our history and the struggles that are taking place throughout the Americas. Speakers will be by invitation only.”
There will be no potluck social this year, due to COVID-19.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.