I loved the Oakland Peace Center, the organizations, the people in the building, the staff, the board, and the many people and foundations that invested in the vision. I even enjoyed the fundraising, because it was an excuse to be in touch with amazing people and brag about what we were up to.
What I did not love was how to do messaging around this holiday. After learning about how the Green Corn Festival Massacre in 1637 was the first time the original colonizers celebrated a day of “Thanksgiving,” I personally lost my taste for the holiday. I understood how much it meant to friends and family and how little they connected the day with the Pilgrims and Indians myths. In fact, I have loved seeing the meme that’s been making the rounds on Facebook about what Thanksgiving means to Black Americans (it ends with how little it has to do with Pilgrims for them).
Fundraising conventional wisdom says you have to send a Thanksgiving message. And yet, a lot of the Oakland Peace Center partners (and board members, and, ok, also me) called it among ourselves “Thangs-taken,” the term used at the annual Indigenous voices event at La Peña Cultural Center this time of year.
So each year I would hedge and say something about honoring the Indigenous heritage of the land and expressing gratitude to the whole OPC community. (Actually, I think my last couple of years I had board members do the Thanksgiving message.)
I’m thinking about my ambivalence, my trying to avoid the conflict over this, because in the last few years I’ve heard a very specific way of people trying to preserve the romance of Thanksgiving, and the consistency of the message leaves me sad, but also a little motivated.
I have heard from colleagues that during anti-racism workshops, after sermons, after presentations, even during casual conversations about the complex and painful history of Thanksgiving, there has been a consistent retort:
“But really, Thanksgiving was formally instituted by Abraham Lincoln to bring the country back together in the face of the civil war.”
After the eighteenth time I heard this, I looked up and read Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation. And there’s one line in it that immediately told me the folks using this as their justification for preserving Thanksgiving had not bothered to read it. Here’s the line they missed from his 1863 statement: Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln had ordered the largest mass hanging of Indigenous people in US history following the Dakota uprising in Minnesota. The Railway Act he passed devastated Indian territory. He was not naive to the impact of the axe, the enlarged borders, or the settlements on Indigenous people.
It’s not right-wing avowed racists I’ve heard trying to reclaim Thanksgiving via the Abraham Lincoln narrative. I don’t know who started this alternate story, but I know it’s compelling to people who know our nation’s origins are saturated in Indian blood, but don’t want to give up a treasured family ritual.
So this year I’m spending a little more time re-immersing myself in some materials about the Indigenous National Day of Mourning that began in Plymouth in 1970. If you haven’t heard about it before (or haven’t thought of it for a while), this video might be a helpful introduction/re-introduction. I shared it with the OPC staff a few years ago during a team meeting we had, during the beginning of the meeting when we always did something related to a land acknowledgement.
I’m with my mom this year and doing the traditional meal the way we used to do: with a house full of Bengalis (plus my Candian American high school bestie and her daughter). Since all of us have histories of colonization in our blood, before we dive in, I’m hoping we’ll take a moment to honor the people on whose land we gather and commit ourselves to deeper solidarity with them and with the land itself as part of how we deal with the past honestly in order to create a better tomorrow. I hope you’ll find some way to do the same if you’re with family or friends tomorrow.
And if you’re doing what some of our Indigenous family invite us to do, which is just not participate in Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for your witness and hope you have a beautiful, meaningful long holiday weekend.
with gratitude,
Sandhya