Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday as long as I could remember. We would go to my grandma and grandpa’s house and see our cousins and aunts and uncles. My cousins, brother, and I would eat until we could no longer move, and lay in the upstairs hallway watching crystals in the window refract bits of light into rainbows across the walls. Giggling at nothing and playing our favorite games like “roadkill in aisle 5”. As a child I was truly thankful for that day, for all that I had. Thankful for the generosity of the “Indians” to the pilgrims. For teaching them to survive.
As time has gone on, and my history classes have delved deeper into what we now celebrate as a time of peace and thanks. I have learned the hellish history of what the colonists have done. About the trail of tears. About assimilation. About the genocide of the Native Americans. The natives saw nature as something that belonged to no one, something that they worked with to survive. The colonists saw it as something that they could take as their own. I now see it as a celebration of the murder of innocent people for the gains of others. The thankfulness for the deceit and betrayal that the natives went through.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the gathering of my family; seeing those I love. Just getting together to eat an oversized meal and lay on the couch and complain about how full we are. But I feel like we need to disconnect it from its’ original origins. Being thankful for what happened to the Native Americans seems wrong, but just having a day for celebrating all we have, and all we appreciate is a good thing. As Americans, we need to stop glamorizing and overlooking the pain, misery, and distress we have caused others just because we have benefitted from it.
Hi Elise, I was a part of the writing to wake up class and was reading the blog today to awaken the feelings/life/shared vulnerability I felt during the class. I came across your Thanksgiving post and felt compelled to rummage through my old poems and found one I wrote last year when I was in the same spirit of being frustrated with Thanksgiving..Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteA Thanksgiving poem not from America
May we Give Thanks
May we give thanks for our eyes,
Enabling eyesight to see beyond our skin-identities,
To see in all shades,
our kin humanity.
Beyond colors of faded flesh,
Where brown and white blend,
our spirituality lies.
May our kin purpose rise,
Beyond our tainted vision and beyond all living lands.
May we stand in our humble homes,
Sacred places where our floors are made of mahogany or of stones,
May we gather to give thanks for our arms and our fingers,
To relinquish inhuman arms,
ceasing human bloodshed
in places where death lingers.
May we instead shed the layers
We have built as barriers
To love.
May our hands break these artificial walls we have built,
Falsely guarding us from foreign love.
May we claim love as our oath,
Brothers and sister both.
May we give thanks for our voice,
To give volume to our song,
That sings a melody where all our dialects belong.
May we give thanks for our bodies,
our instruments of expression
to act out against senseless suppression.
May we wrap our human arms around our one Earth;
Hugging her,
May we embrace her just enough to feel her compassionate beat
but may we know when to loosen our gentle grip,
so at her harvest,
all may be able to take a seat,
to take a sip
from her blessed bounty.
May the feast we are fed,
Come to us from the intangible love we consume
Rather than the tangible that merely satisfies us,
May we know where our real nourishment comes from,
From the love that simply, yet eternally sustains us.
When the tangible disintegrates,
Let our intangible love sprout its fate
May we each sow our own seeds of love,
That will bloom beyond our brief being,
May we give thanks for this abundance
And may we live from its everlasting sustenance.