Thanksgiving /Thankstaking
Thoughts on a holiday
I gave a talk up in Hudson last Friday about Thanksgiving. The main argument is that the Pequot Massacre of 1637 represents a more accurate origin to US Thanksgiving than the apocryphal meeting of Pilgrims and Indians that has been enshrined over the years by presidential proclamations and fictional representations, but especially in art.
It starts like this:
I take a pen from the corner of my desk and write the word “Thanksgiving” on the back of an envelope. Thanksgiving. I hyphenate it, place the word in quotation marks, rearrange it: Giving Thanks. Thanks-Giving. I grab the pen tighter. My knuckle burns as I strike the word giving, and write taking in my best cursive, the way they taught me in grade school.
You cannot give thanks for what is stolen.
The talk went well, and I want to thank Heather Bruegl for inviting me. I pitched it to Hyperallergic as a long-form essay, and they loved it. The piece just dropped HERE.
(Facsimile reproduction of the Pequot Massacre of 1637)
The only thing I want to add is that during the Q&A in Hudson, someone asked me: “Should I be celebrating Thanksgiving, or should we try to get it abolished,” and I thought about it for a while. For me, it isn’t about abolishing Thanksgiving, really, its about asking yourself why you celebrate, and what you are celebrating. It is not up to me to tell people what to do, but to ask questions about what remains common-sense in the culture; to ask instead: What happens when you do not ask yourself why you celebrate this holiday?
This led me to think about the difference between asking questions and proscribing answers. I don’t have the answer. I have a set of relationships that guide me, and a set of questions that I am trying to pose. Those questions are more important, in my view, than providing someone with a set response to Thanksgiving, because at the end of the day, Indigenous praxis, decolonial praxis, is not about having the answers, but about going through the process of figuring out how to live in good relations.
That is my hope for me, and you, this Thanksgiving/Thankstaking/National Day of Mourning.
