Thanksgiving- Feast or Fast?

Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration for Native Americans, as Robert Jensen
points out in the article below. Jensen is a journalism professor at the University
of Texas at Austin. The article was posted by The Alternative Press Review on
November 21, 2005.

Give Thanks No More; It’s Time for a National Day of Atonement

By Robert Jensen

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the
replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting
with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective
collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they
have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning
in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock,
Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the
Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday
impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most
Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical
hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United
States.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal brutality
on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant
to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the
genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It’s now
routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United
States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently
benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be
twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving
at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a
story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from
England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians,
they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in
1621 following the Pilgrims' first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true

Read More