Talking Turkey-Why I Hate Thanksgiving

I hate Thanksgiving. Absolutely, abundantly, aggressively hate it. For a lot of good reasons.

Every November, from Kindergarten through sixth grade, my class made Pilgrim hats and Indian headbands out of construction paper. These were our only costumes for the Thanksgiving Pageant, a clumsy drama about the historic superstars of early America. We were just short, rumpled, and largely incoherent actors who forgot our lines and couldn’t take stage directions. In addition, for incomprehensible reasons and despite having pale freckled skin and curly red hair, I was always an Indian, never a Pilgrim. Evidently, my teachers saw no irony in the fact that I was the only Lakota with Irish parents.

I lived in the Midwest, so the fourth Thursday in November was always a stale and sullen day. Slouching between the rich, glorious colors of autumn and the soft white stillness of winter, Thanksgiving arrived with leafless trees, dirty leftover snow, and a sky that drooped in cold wet variations of grey. It was a dirge of depressing sensations, a day of brooding boredom in which the only reasonable activity was suicide.

To the delight of so many, but loathsome to me, Thanksgiving is a holiday centered entirely around food, a garish meal with components I find horrifically distasteful. I’m not sure who invented marshmallows melted on sweet potatoes, but most likely it was someone with a lot of cavities who lived in a trailer park. I think pumpkins are adorable, but the stringy goop inside them should never show up in a pie crust. My mother’s gravy, based on a recipe handed down from her great grandmother, had the consistency of cottage cheese, the color of diluted sewage, and tasted like warm, slightly salted sludge. I don’t like dark meat and I don’t like white meat, and I certainly don’t like any meat that has a part called gizzards. Instead of this yearly abomination of brawny carbohydrates, I would love a Thanksgiving dinner that is a simple blend of elegant flavors. Like chocolate syrup on crushed potato chips or a ham and Heath Bar sandwich.

In my childhood home, Thanksgiving was always celebrated with cherished family traditions like yelling, resentment, complaining, and an accelerating frenzy of panic. My mother, an otherwise rational person, deteriorated by Thanksgiving morning into a screeching lunatic with a meat thermometer, trying to sauté almond slivers, wrestling with potato mush, and in the end defeated by croutons. Half an hour before dinner was served, she concluded that her four children were useless, lazy leeches who knew nothing about folding linen napkins, were incapable of polishing silver, and didn’t really care where the dessert fork went. For one day every year, she wasn’t thankful for any of us and wished there was such a thing as retroactive infertility.

Those are the small reasons I don’t like Thanksgiving. The big reasons are why I hate it.

Thanksgiving is based on the quaint and beloved story of brave, struggling Pilgrims and the generous Indians who shared a feast with them in the autumn of 1621. It is a story that has endured for 400 years, and from it two very different histories have emerged. For most citizens of the United States it is a source of pleasure and pride, honoring the humble beginning of endless bountiful land that became a great nation. But for another group of Americans it is a source of grief and rage, the beginning of random cruelties that became routine slaughters. The Thanksgiving story is largely myth, filled with revised details, half-truths, omitted facts and brazen lies. It is a fable of forgetting, for it does not include the tragedies that occurred before the harvest meal, or the unspeakable horrors that came afterwards.

It is our national sham and our national shame.

A century before the Pilgrims went ashore onto a new continent, European explorers had made contact with various native tribes in eastern New England. When they landed on the coasts, they kidnapped men over 14 and took them home as slaves. They stole crops, fresh water, and whatever gold they found. But what they took wasn’t as disastrous as what they left behind — — diseases that were fatal to the natives, some of whom had lived in the same place for 10,000 years. By 1619, 85% of the indigenous population of the mid Atlantic coastline had died.

At the same time, but far south of New England, even worse brutalities occurred, and they were intentional.

When Christopher Columbus made his second voyage to the New World in 1493, he arrived with 17 ships and 1200 men in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Pressured by Spain to find gold, he enslaved the entire local Arawak population. Then he sailed away, leaving his crew to manage the natives. They ordered all men over 14 to look for gold. Those who tried to escape were burned alive. Those who did not meet their quota had their hands chopped off. At one point there were 10,000 handless Arawak men. The native women, especially girls of 9 or 10, were used as sex slaves and girls who ran away had their legs cut off. When their dogs ran out of food, the Spaniards hacked up babies and fed their flesh to them. For entertainment, the conquerors poured boiling soap down the throats of the Arawaks and placed bets on who could cut an Arawak in half with one sword stroke. On one day alone, 3,000 men, women, and children were killed for sport. Two years after Columbus had arrived there, half the population was dead. Fifty years later they were all dead.

In 1937, to honor his exceptional courage and heroism, Congress officially declared October 9 as Christopher Columbus Day.

Butchery on this scale did not occur in the sparse new American settlements, at least not at first. The Pilgrims and the natives lived in mutual mistrust and tense harmony for about 20 years. But an influx of new settlers began, most of them Puritans, harsh and self-righteous, religious fanatics. They believed they were The Chosen People whose holy destiny was to establish God’s kingdom on earth, specifically in the New World. To them, the natives were agents of Satan, heathens who stood in the way of their divine right to expansion. They rejoiced that various plagues had decimated so many native villages and were certain that their duty to God was to exterminate the rest of them.

This cultural arrogance was shared by most of the inhabitants of early America. Cotton Mather called the natives “pernicious creatures.” John Eliot, a Puritan pastor, told his congregation that diseases fatal to the natives were God’s punishment for their sinful spiritual beliefs. George Washington referred to Indians as “beasts of prey.” Thomas Jefferson believed that “this unfortunate race have justified our extermination by their desertion and ferocious barbarities.”

Later Americans agreed with these venomous words and repeated them for hundreds of years.

Andrew Jackson said that native Americans had “neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habit, nor the desire for improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.” William Tecumseh Sherman advised that America act “with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Teddy Roosevelt said that “even the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.” Even Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, wrote in a Kansas newspaper that the Army should “finish the job by the total extermination of the remaining Indians.”

From America’s earliest days, ugly words became ugly actions.

In 1625, at a “peace conference” with Powhatan leaders, the English poisoned the wine, killing 200 of them.

In 1637, John Mason, in an attack endorsed by the local pastor, marched his soldiers into a Pequot village and gunned down or burned to death 700 women and children. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, delighted in the scene and wrote that

“It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and (the soldiers) gave their praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.”

In 1644, Captain John Underhill slaughtered 600 Lenape natives near Stamford, Connecticut.

In 1704 former Carolina Governor James Moore killed 1,000 Apalachee Indians in northern Florida and enslaved 3,000 survivors. His son, Col. James Moore, killed or enslaved 4,000 Tuscarora natives in North Carolina in 1713.

In 1763 General Jeffry Amherst suggested in a letter that an effective way to “extirpate this execrable race” was to have dogs attack them or give them smallpox-infected blankets.

From 1778–1815, US military forces burned 174 Indian villages to the ground.

In 1814, Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians, who had refused to cede 14 million acres of their land to the federal government. He supervised the mutilation of more than 800 corpses, slicing off their skin to tan and use as bridle reins.

By 1820, 20,000 Indians lived in slavery.

During the Gold Rush, the entire Yuki Indian population in California was exterminated.

In 1864, under the leadership of Kit Carson, 8,000 Navajos walked from their homeland in Arizona to a reservation in New Mexico and were kept prisoners there for 4 years.

Also in 1864, 750 members of the Colorado Cavalry attacked a Cheyenne village in Arapaho. The victims were scalped, women had their breasts and vaginas cut off, men had their testicles cut off, and toddlers were used for target practice.

Between 1850 and 1875, almost 20 million buffalo were killed, largely to deprive the Indian population of their main source of sustenance.

In 1880, the indigenous population of Texas, once the most dense in the U.S., had only 360 tribe members left.

These ongoing atrocities were not capricious. They were the direct result of hateful words and actions that coalesced into official policies of federal and state governments.

In the mid 1660’s, Massachusetts declared that it was lawful to rape Indian women and enslave children under 14.

In 1668, Colonial laws gave settlers permission to “kill savages on sight at will.”

In 1814, the U.S. wrote a treaty requiring the Creek Indians to forfeit 21 million acres of their ancestral home.

In 1838, the Indian Removal Act forced 16,000 Native Americans to march 1,200 miles from their ancestral homes in the South to dry, barren lands west of the Mississippi. Along the way, 4,000 Indians died and their journey became known as the Trail of Tears.

In 1873, a California law made it legal to force Indian children to work for a white person until the age of 18.

In 1880, the Civilization Regulations were established by Congress, outlining crimes for which only Indians were punished. It became illegal for Native Americans to practice their religion, banning both “medicine men” and certain traditional ceremonies. Indians were also forbidden to leave their reservations.

In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that an Indian is, by definition, “an alien and a dependent.”

In 1887, the Dawes Act mandated that Indian children, as young as 5 years old, be removed from their families and sent to boarding schools to “civilize” them, ensuring successful assimilation into white culture. This practice continued until 1960.

In 1890, Congress established the Oklahoma Territory, taking land that had been given to Native Americans, and making it available to white settlers. This act broke a 60-year pledge to preserve the area for the Cherokees in perpetuity.

In 1900, Congress passed a bill permitting the U.S. to change any treaty previously made with Native Americans.

In 1903, Congress authorized a bill allowing the federal government to seize any assets on an Indian reservation.

In 1907, the U.S. government began involuntary sterilization of Indian women.

In 1914, California passed a law making all Indian children available for adoption.

By 1925, the U.S. had entered into 800 treaties with American Indians. Of these, 430 were never ratified, and the remaining 370 were all broken.

During the 20th Century and into the 21st Century, enormous natural resources like oil, uranium, coal, copper, iron, and gold were discovered on Indian reservations. These assets should have made native Americans one of the wealthiest groups in the United States. But the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, negotiated most of the contracts with corporations eager to exploit these valuable commodities, depriving Indians of most of the profits. And the proliferation of Native American-owned Casinos has made only a small portion of them rich.

Today, desperate to find jobs, 87% of American Indians have left their reservations and live in cities. But even there, the standard of living isn’t much better than it is for those who remain on the reservations. Despite a vast potential for wealth, American Indians still have

the lowest household median income in the U.S.

the highest percentage of the population living in poverty in the U.S.,

the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S.,

an unemployment rate two times higher than the rest of the U.S.,

the lowest high school graduation rate in the U.S.,

an alcoholism rate seven times higher than the rest of the U.S.,

a teen suicide rate three times higher than the rest of the U.S.,

a childhood death rate three times higher than the rest of the U.S.,

instances of rape two times higher than the rest of the U.S.,

and the lowest male life expectancy rate in the U.S.,

to name just a few discrepancies between Native Americans and everyone else in the United States.

America has accumulated enormous and horrific numbers and they infest our history.

In the 400 years since the Mayflower landed on the shores of New England, Native Americans have been forcibly removed from 98% of their ancestral lands. Exact numbers are impossible to discern, but most estimates suggest that about 13 million natives lived in North America when Europeans first arrived. In 1900, there were 450,000 left. Joseph Stalin killed somewhere between 8 and 14 million of his own people. In the Great Leap Forward, led by Mao Zedong from 1958 to 1962, as many as 45 million people may have been killed. No one knows how many American Indians died from disease and murder in 500 years of foreign invasion and occupation, but 65 million is considered by most experts to be a reasonable number.

That makes the colonization of the Americas the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.

Thanksgiving celebrates the feast of our modest beginning. But it is also a dark mirror that remembers our early moments, when the people who had lived on lands for eons of time before we took it as our own, were first noticed and included. And then unheeded, disregarded, deceived, dismissed, dominated, vilified, humiliated, betrayed, relocated, besieged, attacked, tortured, burned, disfigured, beheaded, murdered, and annihilated, with urgency and malice, without mercy and without ceasing, for centuries.

That is why on Thanksgiving Day I have only one, and always the same, mumble of gratitude. I am thankful that my ancestors were never the civilized dinner guests of uncivilized Pilgrims.