Tomorrow, many people in the U.S. will gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, a sanitized version of a fictionalized account of an encounter between English settlers and the Wampanoag people already living on the land that was being “settled” that was the beginning of centuries of murder, abuse, and outright genocide. And while being thankful for what you have is good, celebrating it by dressing children up in construction-paper feathers and decorating with dried “maize” is a not-good, and in fact bad, way of doing it.
Tomorrow in Plymouth, Massachusetts — home of that first cross-cultural dinner party — a National Day of Mourning, organized by the United American Indians of New England, will draw attention to historical and current attitudes, treatments, and issues facing Native Americans.
The event has happened since the early 1970s, when Frank James, a Wampanoag leader, was barred from giving a speech that portrayed Europeans unfavorably at an event celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a meal with friends and family, and I would say especially for many of us where our families have survived genocide, it’s so important for us to be able to sit down with each other and be grateful that we have food and to enjoy spending time with each other,” said Mahtowin Munro, a co-leader of United American Indians of New England, the group that organizes the event, who has attended every year since the 1980s.
“The real underlying issue is the mythology; there’s a view that we’re this big melting pot country, or there’s a view that the Natives and the Pilgrims lived happily ever after and the Native people just evaporated into the woods or something to make way for the Pilgrims and all of the other aspects of the European invasion,” she continued. “All around the country, schools continue to dress up their children in little Pilgrim and Indian costumes and the Indians welcome the Pilgrims and they all sit down together and everybody says ‘Isn’t that cute, that’s so nice.’ That’s not at all what happened.”
(James was not only not allowed to given his original prepared speech but was, in fact, given a different, far fluffier speech to deliver; he declined to do so and thus was not allowed to speak.)
Following the event, many attendees will stay for a feast planned by the event organizers, and some will go home for Thanksgiving/day-of-giving-thanks dinner with their family.
Ramona Peters, a tribal historic preservation officer for the Mashpee Wampanoag, said that highlighting the horrific treatment of Native Americans won’t stop her tribe from having a celebration to give thanks — something it did long before the Pilgrims arrived and does multiple times each year, not just on the day recognized as Thanksgiving.
The celebration started on the weekend before the holiday, with some Wampanoag going to church dressed in regalia to pray and then to a traditional fire where members of the tribe can gather to give thanks for the season — an event that can last multiple days.
While Peters said that she’s angry at the way that Native Americans were treated, she’s proud that the United States has a holiday to give thanks.
“As far as actually extending friendliness, I don’t want to be embarrassed or ashamed of that as a Wampanoag person,” she said. “It’s part of our culture and we had been that way long before they arrived and we still are.”
Additionally: Oglala Lakota Tim Giago writes about the reality of Thanksgiving for many Native Americans in the Rapid City Journal. Adrienne Keene at Native Appropriations addresses the impact of reducing indigenous cultures into an “Indian” costume. And Julian Brave NoiseCat writes about issues facing Native Americans “beyond mascots and casinos.”