Julie the Girl Detective has a thoughtful post right below this one about the American Thanksgiving mythos, the enduring myth that Sarah Josepha Hale1 created in the pages of Godey’s Ladies Book.
You should read the whole thing, but this is the question I wanted to respond to:
I’m all for a harvest festival that allows me the time to see friends and family living 400 miles away, but why do we have to perpetuate such a pernicious falsehood? What justification is there for this?
I’d like to posit an answer: It’s because we’re guilty as sin, and we know it.
By “we,” of course, I’m referring to white Americans, the folks who came up with the myth that the Wôpanâak and the Pilgrims were fast friends, working together to build a nation. It flatters us to think that we were welcomed by the indigenous peoples of this land, makes us feel like it was okay that we took it from them, piece by bloody piece, inch by bloody inch, body by bloody body. After all, they invited us in — they were asking for it.
The genocide of native peoples is hardly a unique event in human history — there have been many genocides in our past, and there will be more in our future — but it’s our genocide. This isn’t the slaughter of the Armenians or the Holocaust. This is death we caused, through disease and war and deprivation. This is land we ethnically cleansed, from sea to shining sea. This land is not yours nor mine; it was theirs. I write this on Lakota land.
The first recorded Thanksgiving in American history was in Connecticut Colony in 1637, celebrating the end of the Pequot War, and the genocide of the Pequot tribe. Those few Pequot who survived that war were either sold into slavery or fled into diaspora. But we don’t celebrate that because we’re not proud of that history. Like slavery, it is an indelible stain on our nation’s soul, one that nothing can ever erase.
This is why we cling to the myth — because we don’t want to believe our great-great-great-grandparents were murderers of a kind with the Nazis or the Hutus. We want to believe that our forbearers were good people, people who were kind to those with different skin and different languages than theirs. We want to believe that our ancestors were generous people, people who shared their bounty with others. We want to believe that our nation really was founded to be the shining city on a hill that Mather said it was.
But our nation was not founded by demigods. It was founded by people just as prone to prejudice and hate as we are today — only without the intervening four hundred years of wisdom we have gained just to get to the point where most of us believe genocide is evil — with the occasional exception.
We do ourselves no favors by clinging to the myth; believing our forebearers were good people who just happened to take over a mysteriously empty North America allows us to continue to hate immigrants, allows us to ignore the death toll in Iraq, allows us to continue believing that People Like Us are somehow superior to Other People. Better to accept that our ancestors, like all peoples’ ancestors, were flawed, and capable of the same kinds of evil that we ourselves would be capable of if not for one hundred years of concerted efforts by goo-goo liberals to drive home the point that genocide is evil. Accepting that would allow us to recognize the hatred in ourselves, and to work to eliminate it. But that’s hard, and uncomfortable. Much easier to simply hold to the fiction that there was a time, long ago, when Native Americans and American colonists sat down and broke bread together over a hearty meal, thankful for the bounty and for each other’s company. It’s a nice story, and unlike the genocide that followed the Puritan colonization, it never happened. And that makes all the difference.
- Along with Thanksgiving, she is also the creator of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” [↩]
” Better to accept that our ancestors, like all peoples’ ancestors, were flawed, and capable of the same kinds of evil that we ourselves would be capable of if not for one hundred years of concerted efforts by goo-goo liberals to drive home the point that genocide is evil. Accepting that would allow us to recognize the hatred in ourselves, and to work to eliminate it. But that’s hard, and uncomfortable. ”
would you be so kind as to define who you mean by “hatred in ourselves”.
ourselves as in the ruling class or the virulent racists or the schmuck down the street?
are you comfortable smearing entire classes of people in this way?
what you appear to be saying here is that lacking the benevolent intervention of “goo goo liberals”, whatever you mean by that nonsense, whites as a class would continue to commit genocide.
that appears to be quite the claim.
European immigrants to North American – especially immigrants from Great Britain – were noteworthy in their covetousness of land. In part this reflects a contrast with immigrants to South and Central America. North American immigrants displaced the native populations and built a replica “New England” that had no role for the natives. In contrast, South and Central American immigrants built highly innovative societies and incorporated natives into these societies as serfs/slaves.
Europeans long referred to North America as “virgin land.” See, for example, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950). In contrast, Francis Jennings referred to North America as “widowed land.” That is, European immigrants to North America found a land heavily depopulated by warfare, displacement and diseases sweeping up from South and Central America where European immigration had begun almost a century earlier. See The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and Cant of Conquest (1976).
Thus, as I understand it, much of the damage associated with European settlement in North America was underway before Europeans settled in North America. (Ok, setting aside Viking settlements.)
what you appear to be saying here is that lacking the benevolent intervention of “goo goo liberals”, whatever you mean by that nonsense, whites as a class would continue to commit genocide.
that appears to be quite the claim.
Go visit Bosnia, and tell me that whites as a class are incapable of genocide. Go find a Holocaust survivor, and ask them if whites can perpetrate genocide.
No, white people are not the only race capable of committing genocide, but we are capable of it — indeed, the depressing surfeit of genocidal acts in our species’ history shows conclusively that absent moral pressure, we are more than happy to slaughter the “other.” And if you think that’s disappeared from our species just because we’re smarter now, witness the lack of concern about civilian deaths in Iraq, and tell me that there are not still plenty of caucasians in this country who would more than willingly take up the task of clearing and eradicating, if that opportunity presented itself.
” Go visit Bosnia, and tell me that whites as a class are incapable of genocide. ”
In reference to the Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995 the presiding judge Theodor Meron:
“ By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. “
The killing was from Bosnia Serb forces. I gather you would categorize these as whites as a class or a contingent.
In 1994 there was civil strife in Rwanda between Hutu militia and an ethnic group called the tutsis resulting in the death of 1 million persons. There is a excellent account of the genocide by Paul Rusesabagina “An Ordinary Man” published in 2006.
Am I justified by saying that blacks as a class were responsible for these 1 million deaths or would I be denounced as a vile racist pig for saying so?
? I didn’t think he was saying that some whites are incapable of genocide, but rather that he was raising the point of focus; i.e. “whites” are capable of genocide. Humans as a class are still capable of genocide. It doesn’t seem that skin color has much to do with that tendency.
(I distinguish the tendency from the capability. People with bigger guns are better at killing than are people with no guns. As it happens, whites tend–and have tended for many centuries now–to have relatively better weaponry than their opponents. But that’s a technological issue, not a racial one.)
My Cherokee stepfather made sure to educate me about Thanksgiving when I was a (white) child, but he wasn’t educated and didn’t know any history or the actual facts. He just knew the standard Thanksgiving story WASN’T factual.
So, he told me: the Native people sat down with the white people, and got sick from all the new germs they brought to the New World. And that’s why there are so few Cherokee and other Indians. (he called himself Indian) Not true, but you know, close enough.
I dutifully repeated this throughout my school years and got screamed at for it; a couple of times I was threatened with bodily harm. But I was surprised at how many white kids listened, thoughtfully. This is undoubtedly the guilt you speak of.
I repeated this so many times (to my own daughter, too) that I think I actually believed there was some common meal at one point.
But I know that I didn’t grow up thinking that white settlers were benign; I saw them as contagious and dangerous, and I think that made a real difference in my world-view.
Yup.
Also:
How telling is it that even those of us whose families immigrated here long after the puritans – almost all branches of mine arrived in the 20th century – cling to that myth, too? Just knowing that the land is stolen is too much. We know that no reparation we could make would be enough.
Hey, reminds me of another country my culture has ties to.