Can Thanksgiving Day be rehabilitated? Can it be repurposed from its colonial roots? It is not a stretch to say that the propaganda that surrounded Thanksgiving as a holiday in the United States was laden with a sense of colonizers' entitlement, white washing of genocide, and manifest destiny. But in recent years that has changed in the minds of many, to the point where there is a very public questioning of the holiday itself.
But part of rehabilitating Thanksgiving might be simply asking ourselves what it has become, in practice. For most Americans, the holiday is a long weekend, to gather with family and friends and celebrate--pardon the alliteration but it is about feasting with friends and family, in a spirit of gratitude--whether to God or to others.
Subtly religious roots, the idea of giving thanks to God for the blessings he has bestowed upon us, has a certain tarnish to it when one considers that this was intimately connected with a sense of entitlement. White power and privilege, over perceived inferior races with darker complexions. Whether from Spain, Portugal, England or France, the lighter-skinned conquerors of the Americas seemed to never question that they had an absolute right to disrupt, displace, and utterly annihilate the indigenous cultures encountered in the so-called New World. Wave upon wave of arrivals came, including cargo ships from Africa with dark-hued human beings chained and stacked like lumber. There seemed to be no bottom to the depravity these so-called Christians could commit, and no misery that they were not willing to impose upon their fellow human beings. Entitlement unlike the world had ever seen. Civilizations pushed aside. Lands devastated. Even the earth itself turned upside down in the quest for raw materials.
Religious bureaucracies were, by many accounts, the largest beneficiaries of the wealth that was extracted from the Americas, by the blood of African chattel slaves, which in Central and South America was combined with the involuntary toil of millions of Indigenous peoples, worked to death, as decades stretched on to centuries.
We now know it was all a big lie: That the Native Americans were somehow primitive or had no culture, or civil institutions. How the myths were told for centuries up and down the western hemisphere, of how the Europeans brought religion and civility to these "savages," these "red skins" and "brown skins". But villages were sacked, and further south, cities, temples, and libraries were destroyed. Gold and silver extracted. Tens of thousands, maybe much more, of scrolls set on fire. Political and religious leaders were tortured and executed. And yes, this genocide was certainly aided and abetted by the diseases and epidemics which the White Man, at first inadvertently, brought, for which the native populations had no natural immunity. But make no mistake: The Europeans never came in peace.
I am just old enough to remember the days in elementary school where we would reenact the mythical first Thanksgiving, half the class dressed as Pilgrims and the other half as Native Americans. The awkward pause as a child would invariably ask the teacher, "What happened to all the Indians?" "They died out," the teacher would quickly stammer. Next subject?
Gratitude.
Gratitude is certainly a virtue. But can we speak of being grateful? Sure, why not? Grateful for friends, and families, and wellbeing. And sure, faith can be part of that. Thanking whatever gods or goddesses or higher powers we worship for all that we have and all that we hope to preserve. But let us say another kind of prayer as well. Let us pray that our generation does not repeat the kind of errors that generations past made, in thinking they were better than other human beings. Rather, let us strive every day to be a little bit kinder, a tad more forgiving, less angry, and more self-reflective. May we never justify hatred, or bigotry, or violence, nor commit the worst blasphemy imaginable, that of dressing up our prejudices with piety, telling ourselves that God somehow wills it.
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