Inverting National History: Thanksgiving and American Indians
By Harriet Coombs, Third Year History Student
Today in the US millions are celebrating Thanksgiving, the national holiday where thanks is given for the blessings of the past year. Though the festival has its historical roots in religious and cultural traditions, it is now widely celebrated as a secular holiday as well. As many Americans grapple with the ongoing Coronavirus situation, Thanksgiving plans have been altered in favour of safer, less risky alternatives. On what would usually be the busiest travel week of the year, in the wake of several state-wide ‘stay-at-home’ orders, families nationwide are preparing for unorthodox holiday celebrations.
Thanksgiving traditions typically go back by many generations, and so calls for scaled-back versions of celebrations have been met with a reasonable degree of resistance. As lines at Covid-19 test centres in New York City wrapped around the block, President-elect Joe Biden made the plea for people to stay at home where possible: ‘Life is going to return to normal. I promise you. This will happen. This will not last forever’.
The extent to which restrictions on travel this holiday season have been met with defiance demonstrates the centrality of Thanksgiving in the national psyche of the United States. Both a product and a supporting actor of the metanarrative of the country, Thanksgiving celebrations serve to reinforce the overarching interpretation that the first Americans arrived as Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620 and set up their own ‘Garden of Eden’ in the United States. Fleeing from religious persecution and looking for a fresh start in a new land, the original passengers of the Mayflower would colonise the United States and earn a symbolic place in history as having given birth to the promised land of America.
This narrative subsumes in its entirety the existence of the pre-Columbian era- the period which incorporates the entire history of indigenous American cultures before the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492. In reality, the Pilgrims themselves were settling what was Wampanoag land and had been for 10,000 years before they arrived. It would be a member of the Wampanoag tribe named Tisquantum that would teach the passengers of the Mayflower how to plant corn, as well as where to fish.
The controversy around Thanksgiving does not stop with the white-washing of American history. Thanksgiving has a contentious history that stretches beyond the first feast held in 1621 after the Pilgrim’s first harvest in the New World. Having never been exposed to European diseases, Native American populations were decimated by epidemics like smallpox by up to 90%. Tensions between Native Americans and European settlers continued for the next three centuries in the form of the American Indian Wars and climaxed in 1812 when major Indian coalitions fought against the United States Army and lost. An estimated 30,000 Indians were killed in the years 1789-1891. This includes the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee where federal forces killed and mutilated men, women, and children. At bottom, Thanksgiving is the celebration of the conquest and subsequent deterioration of Native America by white colonists.
Unorthodox Thanksgiving celebrations are not unique to 2020. In the year 1970, American Indians countered the national story of the United States with their own: ‘The National Day of Mourning’. Organised as part of the momentous period of ‘Red Power’ activism, participants in the National Day of Mourning sought to honour their Native ancestors and draw attention to the genocide and continued suffering of American Indian peoples.
The Thanksgiving celebration of 1970 was the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim’s landing at Plymouth Rock. In commemorating the occasion, the tourist board in the town of Plymouth erected a reconstruction of the ship, naming it Mayflower II, and docking it in a local wharf. The flagship protest group of the Red Power movement, AIM, would learn of this and plan a Thanksgiving protest. AIM activists occupied the Mayflower replica, climbing the mast and pulling the flags down to half-mast, an international sign of distress at sea. Director of AIM, Russel Means would powerfully invert the familiar metanarrative of America’s national history, declaring ‘Listen to us, white men, Plymouth rock is red. Red with our blood!’
The enactment by means of a powerful counter-narrative that blended humour, irony, and rage to attract media attention was not an isolated event. Rather, it was linked to a string of protests that took place from 1969 with the same ideological core of critical counter-narratives. In 1976, American Indian activists would build on the 1970 ‘National Day of Mourning’ with the ‘National Year of Mourning’, a parallel to the year of celebrations the government were planning to commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States. Activists would follow the Bicentennial Wagon Train, a replica Train that was retracing America’s history from West to East to recount how the country had developed democracy and international prestige. American Indian activists would present an alternative counter-narrative, explaining how their experience had been omitted from national history. American Indian writer Vine Deloria would powerfully point out that ‘it would be ludicrous to expect activists to be willing to celebrate the bicentennial year of a nation with which many of them consider themselves at war.’
In a year where racial injustice has come to the national forefront and when the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected minority groups around the world, people are looking more closely at whether it’s time to revaluate the meaning of Thanksgiving.
The National Day of Mourning 2020 too will take a different shape this year. Though some will gather at Coles Hill Plymouth to make speeches, most of the event will be pre-recorded. The speakers will highlight the struggles of indigenous people worldwide and ask non-Native people to educate themselves and their families on the real history of Thanksgiving.
This year’s Thanksgiving celebrations will take an unorthodox form for all those celebrating across the United States. As many people around the world start to wake up to the realities of racial inequality, it is time to shed light on the realities of the Thanksgiving story and reconsider the national narrative of the first white colonists as we know it.
Koshu Kunii on Unsplash