I probably should have known that our days of celebrating Thanksgiving were numbered when my son’s first construction paper turkey came home from kindergarten.
“But why do we make happy turkeys?” He wanted to know. “They all get eaten. It’s not a happy day for the turkey.” We are vegetarians so the turkey was definitely not the center of the holiday for us. We enjoyed giant plates of side dishes while we fielded difficult questions from our son.
When the happy-turned-conflicted turkeys gave way to paper pilgrim hats and worksheets about “The Story of Thanksgiving” we realized we had our work cut out for us. Determined to decolonize the holiday for our son we told him the truth. No, it wasn’t as simple as Native Americans and Pilgrims sharing a feast. No, the Pilgrims and the Native Americans were not friends. We introduced words like exploitation, colonization and massacre. Our son listened carefully and asked “Why does everyone lie about it then?” We talked about systemic racism and how teachers often teach what they were taught and how those stories become really powerful over time. We told him that often the real, true stories are a lot harder to tell, but the truth is important.
And then we did something that I remain embarrassed about to this day. We told our son that in our family we focus on Thanksgiving being about gratitude and family, not about the whitewashed story of the first Thanksgiving. We made that seem Ok for him, probably because we wanted it to be Ok for us. I think we even felt like we’d done the ‘right’ thing, as if there is some kind of moral superiority in naming that something causes harm, even while you continue to participate in it.
At our Thanksgiving dinners we made sure to go around the table and say what we were grateful for. We always talked about the truth of the holiday and each time something felt off, because the truth is that once you know the real story of Thanksgiving you also know that the word “Happy” does not belong in front of it, right? There is not a parade large enough to make genocide a cause for celebration. But for years we continued do what we’d done before because it was tradition, it was what was expected of us.
In those years things shifted in some significant ways. Our daughter reached an age where she began to ask more questions and at one point she asked “Why is Thanksgiving even a holiday then?” I stumbled through explanations about people trying to take the good parts of a complicated thing and hold onto memories and traditions. I remember grappling with my own role in that story, I wanted to hold onto what was familiar and nostalgic and at the same time I wanted my kids to know that no tradition or memory is worth celebrating the harm of others. I wanted them to know that it’s toxic to choose happy lies over difficult truths.
Both of my children have grown up participating in activism, showing up with us in all kinds of ways for all kinds of issues. We’ve taught them by example and by experience that when something is unjust you name it and expose it, and then you do everything you can to stop or reduce the harm caused by the injustice. Over time it became more and more clear that celebrating Thanksgiving, no matter how we justified it with self-congratulatory hard conversations or sugar-coated it with expressions of gratitude, was out of alignment with everything else we were teaching them.
Around that time I became involved in a local issue directly related to the rights of Indigenous people, an effort to change our high school mascot from “Indians” to something not racist and dehumanizing.
What began as a simple, reasonable request turned into a very public, heated and ugly conflict. Suddenly the conversation we’d been having about what has been taken from Native American people and how systemic racism has harmed them was playing out right front of us, making it more clear than ever that the harm is ongoing, the ‘history’ of colonization is still being written.
As I began to search for what to do next I found this video, of young Indigenous women describing how they experience Thanksgiving.
Realizing that my participation in the holiday had an impact on Indigenous people that was so visceral and current made me ashamed. I had run out of ways to make it seem Ok to have a feast and celebration of a day that commemorates the massacre of Native people.
When I told the kids I wanted to talk to them about Thanksgiving they earnestly explained that they knew we were not celebrating the massacre and genocide of Indigenous people, we were just celebrating family and gratitude on a day that happens to also commemorate massacres of indigenous people. Hearing those words, my words, from their mouths was so uncomfortable. I try to parent from a place of truth and raise people who see through bullshit and do the right thing, and frankly I’d fallen short of my own standards. I hadn’t decolonized the holiday for them, I’d re-colonized it in a way I could feel better about without giving anything up. That’s what white people are so good at, right? We rebrand our privilege to keep ourselves comfortable.
I apologized to my children for sending them the message that it is Ok to celebrate what is a day of mourning for so many. I told them that I’d thought I could make it right by naming the problem but I’d forgotten that naming the problem helps no one without meaningful action. I asked them how they would feel about watching a whole country celebrate an event that had deeply hurt their family. Would the kinds of justifications I’d fed them with their pie and sweet potatoes ease any of their righteous anger and deep sadness? No they would not. We made a decision as a family and we let Thanksgiving go.
Now we spend Thanksgiving day listening to the voices of those impacted. Some years we’ve attended the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth and stood listening to Indigenous people speak about their experiences, their activism, what the day means to them.
When we don’t go to Plymouth we stay home and read or watch films, to learn. We research Indigenous-lead organizations and donate the money we would have spent on a celebration meal to them. One year our kids wrote a letter to send with our donation.
Instead of making paper turkeys and pilgrim hats our children can tell you that the land we live on was Pocumtuck land first and then Mohican land before English Settlers stole it.They take pride in knowing and speaking the truth and as one of them once said “If you can’t feel good about the turkey and you can’t feel good about the story then why do people keep doing it?”
I have enough memories of what Thanksgiving was like before I knew so many of the uncomfortable truths to know why people keep doing it. Sometimes I miss what it felt like when all my stories added up to a day filled with food, friends and family, but nostalgia is not enough to make me comfortable with the messages I was sending my children. They keep me honest. The truth is that I just couldn’t look them in the eye anymore and tell them that when harm is done and lies are told we gather and celebrate those lies at the expense of the truth of people who are still grieving and still suffering. Why? Because it’s tradition? Because it’s what’s expected of us? Because we’ve found a way to call it something more palpable? I don’t ever want my children to override their true inherent sense of right and wrong with justifications about expectations and traditions. I want them exercise gratitude every day and extricate that word from any association with a holiday that causes pain or harm for others.
I believe that it matters to challenge the stories and traditions that feed systemic racism because these old lies we are celebrating lay the foundation for very real, ongoing harm like labeling Native people as mascots or suppressing their votes or refusing them health care today. I am well aware that one family letting go of Thanksgiving does not right the wrongs of history, but I see it as a small step toward harm reduction.
