The only Native American writer I know gave permission for a
literary journal to republish thoughts about Thanksgiving that she
had first corralled a few years ago, and reading them was an
illuminating experience.
Terra Trevor reminded me why American Indians are not
necessarily as
sanguine about Thanksgiving celebrations as I am. She also got
me hoping that a few words of my own might ease the burden
sometimes imposed by our cultural touchstones.
For people in the circles through which Terra moves with
easy grace, it is not the giving of thanks that rankles, but the
lingering myth of pilgrims in the New World having celebrated the
First Thanksgiving with Wampanoag Indians near
Plymouth Rock in the autumn of 1621. Although that multi-day
festival is almost always taught as a shining example of
cross-cultural cooperation, its common position at the head of any
chronology of thankful actions also implies that Chief Massasoit
and his people learned gratitude from a motley band of separatists
who fled Europe over differences with the Church of
England.
Framed that way, with a metaphorical trophy up for grabs,
any attention paid to Puritan “first comers” seems arrogant,
because people have been giving thanks as far back as ancestral
memory goes, and not just for good harvests. Remember the story of
Jesus healing ten lepers, only one of whom returns to thank him, at
which point Jesus asks “Were not all ten made whole?” It was a
rebuke to those who fail to acknowledge blessings, and it dates
back about 2,000 years. We should not then be surprised if
activists today take little comfort in knowing that the Wampanoag
were part of the most famous thanksgiving in America, because those
same activists have been striving to correct the misimpression that
American Indians learned gratitude from strangers wearing buckled
shoes.
Marketing professionals might cite clumsy branding for
aggravating tensions here. Poor labeling is not a problem unique to
“The First Thanksgiving,” but that event has more of an image
problem than the equally mislabeled “Dark Ages” between the fall of
Rome and the rise of the so-called “Enlightenment.”
Observing that our civic calendar braids Native American
Heritage Month with Thanksgiving, my friend wrote ruefully about
children who “remember the Indians” by making construction paper
headdresses in colors utterly alien to real eagle feathers or the
regalia for which those feathers are sometimes used. It was an
anecdote drawn from personal experience, when her then
seven-year-old son recognized the absurdity of pink and purple in
the headdresses that his friends were making. At that age, Terra
wrote, it was not his job to carry the weight of something
simultaneously funny and sad, and so she shouldered the burden for
him. Thoughts written years later suggest that she still carries
that weight.
Easing her burden requires a lever and emotional distance
enough to stand near the load rather than under it. With respect to
the evocative memory around which Terra built an essay, for
example, you do not have to be Native American to recognize the
unlikelihood of finding eagle feathers in DayGlo colors. On the
other hand, it requires rare seriousness to pursue realism in art
projects for young children. Pink and purple headdresses made by
second graders are not true to life, but neither are they conscious
attempts to trivialize ceremonial regalia.
The harvest celebration of 1621 gets good press because
the Puritans were greatly relieved at surviving their first year in
the Americas with Wampanoag help, but the lingering impact of that
event owes little to subsequent conflicts between
colonists and Indian tribes. Collective memory simply acknowledges
that when history whistles a tune, oral tradition dances with the
written record — and who better to acknowledge that reality than
citizens of a nation with founding documents? While the
Wampanoag had been celebrating before they ever met Europeans, it
was the pilgrims who kept written records of their
activities.
It might also help to remind ourselves that modern
celebrations of Thanksgiving draw as much from official Thanksgiving
proclamations
by Presidents George Washington (1789) and Abraham Lincoln (1863)
as they do from hand-shaped turkeys and other juvenile renderings
of pilgrim life in the New World. Importantly, President Lincoln
counseled gratitude even while steering the nation through a
devastating war. The Judeo-Christian foundations of his moral
reasoning — like Washington’s before him — were accepted by large
majorities of Americans in all walks of life, whether slave or
free.
Composer Roger
Miller understood that. Years after “King of the Road” put him
on the musical map, Miller brought The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn to Broadway in the musical Big
River, with critics everywhere marveling at his fidelity to
the novel by Mark Twain and his apparent grasp of our national
soul. One of the most memorable songs in a show full of them was a
hymn of thanksgiving sung by slaves. For me that song
ranks as the most effective of several possible rebuttals to anyone
convinced that our national day of thanks should instead be a day
of mourning and repentance.
The lyrics of “How Blest We Are” are worth reprinting in
full:
How blest we are
as children of a God so good and true
to understand His moving hand
and love for me and you!
How blest we are as children of
a God whose love is real
enough to touch each one of us,
is part of Him I feel.
I honor thee,
I honor thee
to whom my love is vowed;
How blessed be
forever we
are bound to him as
now.
Anyone who has ever heard that anthem knows that it
speaks of and to a truth that validates thanksgiving everywhere.
The lyrics wrap a mysterious kernel of forgiveness and forbearance
in a blanket of gratitude that knows nothing of Pilgrims or
Indians, but can heal misunderstandings between their descendents
if we take it to heart, and not just at the time of year when
leaves crunch underfoot, geese scissor overhead, and cooler
temperatures leech some of the blue from the daytime
sky.
