not trying to spoil the holiday

[pastwatcher]

For me Thanksgiving is necessarily divorced from the pilgrim stories: it is a day to be with my family, possibly to give thanks. But not so for everyone.

"Myth #11: Thanksgiving is a happy time.

Fact: For many Indian people, "Thanksgiving" is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, "Thanksgiving" is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."

I imagine every American reading this post knows much about how the pilgrim story is a problematic myth. But this is a well-written short article with a good amount of research behind it, so I (as someone usually bad at history) find its accounts easy to remember. Also, I love sources that give us access to knowledge from oral traditions that I likely could not look up.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

Personally, I've seen more complaints about Thanksgiving from whites trying to be good liberals than from actual Indians--though to be fair, there are a lot more whites around. The Indians who I know (all two of them) actually *like* Thanksgiving, simply as a time to gather with family and be thankful. Of course, they are both of mixed ancestry, so they literally wouldn't exist if not for colonialism, which I suppose may be a different experience from being 100%.

I'm not very fond of Thanksgiving myself--a harvest festival in late November? Wha?--and the whole Pilgrim thing is just weird, being a total fabrication, and we live in a society of such abundance that a day given over to gluttony and sloth really just feels like every other damn day of the year, so I find it really hard to get into the spirit, but if someone else derives happiness and maybe some thankfulness from it, I don't begrudge them that.

[pastwatcher]

But did you like the article?

(It's probably true that there are way more non-Native complaints, because there are a lot of white people here, and because Thanksgiving is a time when non-Native Americans are reminded about Native Americans, and because tribes have many immediate and urgent priorities. Though that article is from a self-described "Native American/American Indian advocacy and education organization" and one of the two co-authors claims a specific tribe. I've never asked the Indians I know about Thanksgiving.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

It's a nice article. I read a really fascinating piece in FB the other day (I follow an Indian culture community there) about the history of non-native settlement in the US; among interesting bits, the first non-native settlement in what became the US was founded by escaped slaves, and the area which the Pilgrims settled had been massively depopulated (like, 90%) by a recent plague (probably brought by previous explorers.) The article implied that the things they took weren't so much stolen as abandoned when everybody died.

I'll try to dig it up for you.

I'd prefer to do away with the Pilgrim myth, personally, since it's A. a lie, and B. Whitewashes genocide.