Thanksgiving Post: American Holidays and Dark Pasts

There’s been a trend in America in the last few decades of revisiting cherished holidays and revealing them for the horror stories they are.

Columbus Day and Thanksgiving are the two that come to mind immediately:

• Columbus Day is held to be celebrating a man who heralded the mass destruction of the indigenous population of the continents that would be called the Americas, and also Columbus himself was a terrible person.

• Thanksgiving is held to be celebrating events during a time period wherein the indigenous population of North America was decimated.

While analyzing the broader trend in certain subcultures of reframing every part of American history as horrible and awful is beyond the scope of this (short) post, I’d at least like to talk about Thanksgiving a little.

I’ll let Wikipedia cover the basics:

Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.^[2] Outside the United States, it is sometimes called American Thanksgiving to distinguish it from the Canadian holiday of the same name and related celebrations in other regions. The modern national celebration dates to 1863 and has been linked to the Pilgrims 1621 harvest festival since the late 19th century. As the name implies, the theme of the holiday generally revolves around giving thanks with the centerpiece of most celebrations being a Thanksgiving dinner.^[3][4]

And the controversy:

Much like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving is observed by some as a "National Day of Mourning", in acknowledgment of the genocide of Native Americans during the European colonization.^{[140][141][142]} Thanksgiving has long carried a distinct resonance for many Native Americans, who see the holiday as an embellished story of "Pilgrims and Natives looking past their differences" to break bread.^[143] Some Native Americans hold "Unthanksgiving Day" celebrations in which they mourn the deaths of their ancestors, fast, dance, and pray.^[144] This tradition has been taking place since 1975.^[145] Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England, a protest group led by Frank "Wamsutta" James (Aquinnah Wampanoag, 1923−2001), has accused the United States of fabricating the Thanksgiving story and of whitewashing genocide and injustice against Native Americans, and it has led a National Day of Mourning protest on Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the name of social equality and political prisoners.^[146][147]

It isn’t exactly disputed that the indigenous people were mostly destroyed by the European colonization, and a single shared meal doesn’t weigh much on the balance of that scale.

So should we change Thanksgiving into something else, the way people are attempting to transform Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Should we just get rid of the holiday altogether?

Or should we do what we’re doing now, which is continue to celebrate it with friends and family while awkwardly acknowledging the whole thing is built on a very shoddy edifice?

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Holidays are an essential part of culture.¹ Every culture has them, and humans have celebrated together since at least the advent of agriculture. Thanksgiving itself has something of the spirit of a harvest festival, and that cultural echo remains even though very few people nowadays actually harvest anything in their day-to-day lives.

Many holidays share this feature: they’re reminders of an age gone by, not a direct reference to the current world. Independence days the world over are celebrations of a country became independent - but how many people of that country are truly passionate about that independence now? How many people really care about Halloween as a pagan ritual dealing with the thinning of the boundaries between this world and the next, as opposed to an excuse to eat candy and party?

The founding myth of Thanksgiving, like many American holidays, is shaped on sketchy (read: somewhat horrifying) historical grounds not because America is uniquely bad or immoral or evil, but because history is almost uniformly bad and immoral and evil.

History, like the night, is dark and full of terrors, and so makes for an extremely poor moral foundation for any holiday. I celebrate Passover, but don’t use the normal Jewish Haggadah because, among other reasons, it celebrates the slaying of a bunch of Egyptian babies. Not exactly a cause I endorse.

While it’s important to understand history, and so avoid repeating it, I don’t believe we gain anything from flagellating ourselves with the horrors of the past. A holiday that functions as a reason to gather with those we love and share a meal is not some evil in need of being expunged, even if the historical and cultural trappings spring from a shameful place. We are not guilty of the sins of those long dead, for all that we are still affected by their actions.

Holidays, like all facets of a culture, evolve past their beginnings; they are what they have become, and need not remain beholden to their past.

So relax and enjoy the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

1. Citation needed.