Giving anks in the Year of Standing Rock

Tents and tipis at Standing Rock | Photo: Leslieamsterdam, some rights reserved

In March, 1621 a man named Samoset, a leader of his Abenaki people, decided to extend an olive branch to the odd people who'd moved into an abandoned Wampanoag town. They were sick and starving. More than half of them had died in the previous six months, and the last time anyone from the neighborhood encountered the newcomers, they got shot at.

But Samoset set that aside. He disregarded the the diseases, kidnappings, and violence that newcomers just like these had brought to the land. He introduced himself in a few words of the newcomers' language, spent the night as their guest, and then came back with more help. With the technical and material aid provided by Samoset, Tisquantum, and other Native people, the Puritan colonists grew and harvested enough food to survive the next winter.

Three hundred ninety-five years later, Samoset's descendant Mary Beth Williams thinks her great-many-times grandfather might have made a mistake.

If he had just let them starve, says Williams, America might be very different.

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in a year in which Native peoples protests to preserve their land and culture have commanded the nations attention, it might seems a little strange that Thanksgiving holiday celebrants still mention Native people hardly at all. After all, the holiday is arguably founded on being grateful for the survival of a community that would have perished without Native peoples help.

And Native people have long been calling attention to the holidays whitewashing of history. In 1970, the United American Indians of New England declared the holiday a National Day of Mourning, a counter-holiday that has gained some traction among Native activists and their allies, though not to the degree to which Indigenous Peoples Day has spread as an alternative to Columbus Day.

This year of all years, it seems fitting to reexamine how we should look at the Thanksgiving holiday in the light of renewed and resurgent Native activism. As California sociologist Dan Brook put it in his essay Celebrating Genocide,

We do not have to feel guilty, but we do need to feel something. At the very least, we need to reflect on how and what we feel.

So I asked a few Native political and cultural activists of my acquaintance if they had any thoughts to share on the holiday.

I spoke by phone with Williams, an Abenaki attorney who serves as Chief of Staff in the Oregon State Legislature (and, by way of full disclosure, a friend of many years) as she waited in her car for an oddly appropriate flock of wild turkeys to stop blocking traffic on her way to her family's home in Eugene.

Commemorative plaque in Plymouth, Massachusetts | Photo: Gerald Azenaro, some rights reserved

Williams points out that Native people's material aid to the Pilgrims was almost immediately repaid by egregious insult. The Algonquian peoples of the northeast often built small death houses on loved ones' burial sites, and placed corn and other burial goods within the houses. The settlers raided the death houses for the food offerings they held, a serious cultural offense made even worse by the Pilgrims' occasional exhumation of the human remains below. That set off a sort of cultural shockwave across the northeast, as one tribe after another began abandoning death houses and placing the burial goods in the grave with the deceased to avoid what they viewed as shocking disrespect.

Archaeologists can pretty much date a burial site by whether any burial goods remain there, says Williams. If there are burial goods, that means the person's relatives buried them with the departed after Contact. If the burial goods are missing, that means it's a pre-Contact burial that was looted by settlers.

We saved their lives, notes Williams, and they turned around and repaid us like that.

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Settler-Native relations went downhill from there, and so it should surprise no one that Thanksgiving - the holiday that ostensibly commemorates the success of the Pilgrims' 1621 harvest - doesn't sit well with many present-day Native people.

Thanks-taking, Cahuilla/Apache horticulturist Nick Hummingbird gently corrects me when I reach him at his Hahamongna Native Plant Nursery in Pasadena. To Hummingbird, the mainstream celebration has less to do with giving thanks than it does with celebrating the spoils of five centuries of conquest.

People will be sitting down with their families and feeling grateful for everything they have, says Hummingbird, but they dont think about the people who had to give up everything so they could have all those things.

Hummingbird is especially struck by the juxtaposition of this particular Thanksgiving, and the buzz about the holiday offering a moment to heal a fractured nation, in the same month that Native activists and their supporters are being met with escalating violence at Standing Rock.

That confluence of history and current events has stripped Hummingbird of any interest in taking part in the holiday. Instead, he's taking the opportunity to reclaim a bit of the land his ancestors relied on, if only for an afternoon. To tell you the truth, I usually just avoid the whole thing and go hiking in the mountains, says Hummingbird. Everybody else stays home, and there's no one up there to bother me.

Happy Thanksgiving: Police fire water cannons at Standing Rock activists in sub-freezing temperatures. | Photo: Dark Sevier, some rights reserved

David Harper, traditional spokesman for the Mohav

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