Thanksgiving Scorekeeping

For the bleeding heart, American Thanksgiving stirs complicated feelings. This is because our national history is a complicated mess of luck, geography, good intentions, and horrible, horrible evil. Institutionalized slavery will haunt us for many more generations. Scanning further back in our timeline, that whole attempted genocide thing isn’t exactly a comfort.

Our Tradition

Does this sound familiar?

…Native Americans were noble savages. Bullshit, they were fractured tribes that made war with one another. The Wampanoag were kind to the Puritans when they really needed it. Their reward was eventual decimation. That was the inevitability of westward expansion and Indian raids. Yeah, but before that, the Arawak were peaceful and Columbus destroyed them.

And on, and on. It’s a yearly ritual of score-keeping to stave off the shame. We can mix and match an argument of our own to sooth the conscience. There’s plenty of building blocks. Channel a bit too much Howard Zinn, then white people practically invented war. Channel a bit too much Stephen LeBlanc, and we shrug.

Native Americans definitely waged war long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But scientists such as Pinker, Keeley and LeBlanc have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.

The Arawak and Wampanoag were kind to us—and by us I mean people of European descent. We showed our thanks by sickening, subjugating and slaughtering them. And we have the gall to call them more savage than us. (Horgan)

Let's stuff our faces and dull the pain.

Our mythos identifies the players: native folk decimated by disease and desperate foreign settlers. It’s nourished by a gesture of kindness in a climate of anxiety.

My problem is that our interminable arguments pose false dichotomies: both are right. There’s enough savagery to go around. But still, attempted genocide. I’ll let you know when that stops being a source of shame. When I breathe in the highlights of early American history, I get a lungful of blood.

And though I hate its brittle roots, as a holiday, it’s wonderful. It’s about treasuring family, appreciating life, sharing memories – all that jazz. And we do all this while managing our pain from family, life, and our past. Maybe there’s something appropriate about it after all.