I found it nearly impossible to wish people "Happy Thanksgiving" this year. This wasn't because I don't believe in giving thanks for the blessings in one's life (tho' I've always experienced Thanksgiving as a bit of a "
God bless the child that's got his own" day), but rather because the mythical episode conjured up this particular holiday makes it seem a thanksgiving for very particular and unearned blessings and privileges: the blessings of European victory in the settler colonization of Turtle Island, and the privilege of supposing oneself and one's nation innocent. The stories now
circulating about what was really happening between
the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims in the 1620s, as well as about how this holiday was created and reshaped in the 19th and 20th centuries, change the game. Comity, such as it was, soon gave way to conquest. So what can one do? To a student I was corresponding with about a recommendation I wrote "happy let's-not-take-settler-colonialism-for-granted day," but that's barely even a gesture. How not to take it for granted, as a settler colonial? With
Kyle White in mind I feel I must at least acknowledge that my ancestors' dream was the displacement and death of the people they found on this land; the conquest was
neither incidental nor regretted. The nightmare wrought for Native America (not all of it intentional but no less devastating for that) looked to the settlers like a paradise. Thanksgiving feels to me like joining them in thanking God for that paradise - and do I not, in fact, benefit from it every day? I can't really imagine myself without it, let alone going "back where I came from." To atone for my forebears' blindness and to honor the survival of the worlds they nearly destroyed, I have to learn to do what they couldn't imagine: let this land's people (like
Robin Wall Kimmerer) teach me how to become
indigenous to this place.
(The images evoking childhood Thanksgiving, as well - unwittingly - as the fleeting conjuring and erasing of American Indians from white American consciousness, from here)
