In Consideration of Thanksgiving
The IDEA of Thanksgiving is a very appealing one. Family and friends gathered around a table giving thanks for the harvest. And no commercial overtones.
The history, however, is an abomination. Not the history most of us learned in school about the hungry pilgrims and helpful Indians. But the real history of a genocide.
Until I moved to Taos it was my favorite holiday. All about food, family, friendship, and gratitude, and only food to shop for. I didn't really believe much of what I was taught in school and stopped considering history in regards to this holiday long ago. But once in Taos and publishing a regional magazine, all that changed.
Taos is home to the Taos Pueblo, a community which has inhabited this one piece of land for at least a thousand years. Anyone who lives here MUST reframe certain things taken for granted in most of the rest of America. One of those things is the meaning of Thanksgiving as an American holiday. Because the story you know and live as an indigenous person is very different from what white children were taught and are still being taught in school.
It is the story of an attempted genocide. I say attempted because, in the end, it failed. We know that only because the First Peoples are still here, as a living nation, not as a museum exhibit. Their opinion of this holiday matters.
I still want to have a shared autumn feast to begin the holidays and to celebrate the harvest. I am sure there must be something we could do to change the basic nature of this feast, and to split it apart from the bloody history. For me, once I am back among people again, it will entail careful selection of food and guests, appreciation for the gift of bounty from the earth, and a complete shut-down of commercial pursuits, for this one day if nothing else. I just won't call it "Thanksgiving", no matter how innocuous that name sounds to my white ears.