Thanksgiving

I’m usually not one to quote Bible verses, but this Thanksgiving week, I’ve been haunted by Old Testament references to “the sins of the fathers” and their “visitation” upon the sons. In a time rife with celebrations of “blessings” and “gifts,” I, along with increasing numbers of white Americans, regard this season as a time of painful reflection. Who gets to be thankful for the way history has shined on them, and who does not, is a real issue. There is no escape from the iniquity committed by our forebears on indigenous peoples, any more than there is from the evils perpetrated against Africans and Black Americans during slavery and the post-Reconstruction period known as Jim Crow. Or from the resonances that continue to cause suffering among the descendants of people who were originally sinned against by people I’m descended from.

The vision of “the first Thanksgiving” that I was brought up with as a white child in the mid-20th century could have been created in Hollywood studios of that era. That story is the kind of halcyon narrative that we, like our parents, ate up: valiant, stout-hearted protoAmericans, newly arrived from the Old Country, share their first harvest bounty with their Indian friends. Not only does the tale emphasize the tenacity, resourcefulness, and generosity of our Puritan predecessors, but it also implies that they were welcomed as good neighbors by indigenous peoples, whose land Europeans would soon claim as their own. As David J. Silverman, history professor at George Washington University, points out in a read-worthy Smithsonian Magazine article, “The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.”

This myth is of course a lie, start to finish. It evades or misrepresents every aspect of the cultural and political circumstances in which “the first Thanksgiving” took place. The Wampanoag, a confederation of several tribes, formed their alliance with the newly arrived English as a strategy to stave off attack from other indigenous peoples in the region—none of whom, however, threatened them with genocide—with no prescience of what that alliance would cost them. The primary liaison between the English and the Wampanoag was Tisquantum, who spoke English only because he himself had been kidnapped and sold into slavery by an English explorer; nevertheless, he and his cohort taught the new arrivals how to survive by feeding and housing themselves on land that they found utterly alien. Already-gathering tensions grew as the English increasingly demanded that Native Americans cede exclusive land use (e.g., “property”) to them, adopt English culture, and accept English rule. Native Americans of course resisted their demands. These tensions eventually erupted into the extraordinarily lengthy and deadly American-Indian Wars, by the end of which pretty much all Native Americans had been either killed or dispossessed.

This history is hardly a story of plenitude, generosity, and cross-cultural harmony. Whatever generosity the English may have displayed when they were starving to death and grateful for help—well, it vanished in the wake of white expansion.

How does anyone celebrate such a history? How do we even make peace with it?

Many white Americans, I among them, can’t. Throughout childhood and adolescence, I had difficulty identifying with or accepting “my own people”—white Americans—because of the clannish (read: klannish) practices, hatreds, and utter lack of respect shown to Black people in my presence, as well as what I knew of slavery and Jim Crow (not nearly as much as I do now, but enough to horrify me). And having learned the fuller story since, how can I square our abominable history with the comforts of my own present—with the home and privilege that I possess in no small measure because I am descended from a people that practiced and institutionalized colonization, usurpation, and exploitation? The historical brutality of white people against pretty much everyone else is no longer a secret buried in cultural mythology.

In adolescence, I read with almost inexpressibly immense relief a poem by Max Ehrmann called Desiderata. Three lines became my mantra: “You are a child of the universe, / no less than the trees and the stars; / you have a right to be here.” For whatever reason, I had frequently felt as though I had no right to “be here,” wherever here was. And when I think of the history of my people, that feeling surfaces again.

I’m like a tree that has been planted on land where other trees were ripped from the ground to make way for me, or in places where I starve others of light, however inadvertently. How can I view myself as having a “right” to be where I am, when my rooting and flourishing was made possible only by the uprooting and deprivation of others? While my robust development was by no means guaranteed by my white skin, my chances of finding a place to prosper were better than they would have been otherwise. How can I live in good conscience with the comfort of my own existence? What can I do to justify my right to be where I am?

More questions follow: What good does my sense of guilt do? I’ve long believed that if guilt has a purpose, it’s to propel some sort of action that counters whatever has caused it. What can I do, besides do my best to make room so the sun shines and the rain nurtures the seeds left by the deracinated?

This last question, I suppose, has shaped my socialist leanings. (Note: Socialism isn’t communism. It’s not anti-democratic or unpatriotic. Clarification on what it is, and isn’t, can be found here.)

The sins of the fathers may not be visited upon their progeny by any thunderous deity, but we are still eating from the fields our forebears cleared, sowed, and reaped. Not everything they did was bad; they sought, established, and accomplished positive things too. But we shouldn’t walk in their shoes—or want to. Acknowledging the horrors in our history helps us better understand our past, but also our present, and pushes us to do better. Denying the evils in our history certainly has been, and still is, corrosive. At least we are humbled by our understanding. But acknowledgment and humility don’t seem entirely adequate. What is required of us? And how willing are we to cede whatever must be ceded to make our own existence “here” honorable?

I confess: I don’t know.