It appears that the traditional holiday of Thanksgiving is upon us; the festive occasion is calendared for the fourth Thursday of each November. The celebratory occasion features family and friends assembling for the traditional celebratory meal of turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and harvest vegetables.
On this occasion, we perennially find ourselves inclined to disturbingly ruminate on the nationwide acceptance of the holiday’s “Hallmark Card Company”-style,” convenient, comforting, contextual, but cognitively dissonant version of its historical etiology and significance.
One does not afford the American Nation’s convenient concept of a quasi-religious duty of “Manifest Destiny,” to expand to the Pacific, to the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors, for their murderous quest for gold and wealth in South America, to the Belgians, for their rubber-rich travesties in the Congo, to other countries like England and France, for their ubiquitous colonization of foreign indigenous peoples. What is the conceivable magic that sanitizes our Nation’s expansion at the cost of the indigenous North American peoples?
Those who care to study history will undoubtedly be aware of the tragic history of the indigenous, “First Americans,” who, under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, were wrongfully evicted from their traditional tribal homes in fertile Southwest America ( “The Indian Removal Act” of 1830) to “more suitable” “injun” lands in the arid infertile lands of Oklahoma (‘Trail of Tears,”)
There is a clear and disturbing cognitive dissonance between a nation that has practiced a history of repression against its conquered national predecessors and the exaltation of the fictional portrayal of “The First Thanksgiving.” It is undeniable that our great and traditionally moral and empathic Nation has had its shameful moments. These should not be removed from our textbooks or curricula by sophomoric critics, but certainly not celebrated, or indeed, replicated; nor should they be whitewashed in the interest of moral advancement or discomfort; they are teachable. history
Americans have much for which to be recognizably thankful and celebratory on Thanksgiving Day, without coloring its (otherwise commendable) history.
-p.
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