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.
What can Thanksgiving mean for Indigenous people, except to serve as a reminder of all that has been taken? Land. Children. Language. Story. What turns this taking into giving, which is to say, what can thanks possibly have to do with what has only ever been stolen?
Perhaps the shift from “taking” to “giving” has happened with such insistence in the American psyche so as to have accrued that warm feeling of common sense. Is it not common sense to say that Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday?
Lenape scholar Joanne Barker writes the following about the so-called first Thanksgiving of 1637:
John Winthrop, governor of an English colony in what is now Massachusetts, held a feast in honor of a volunteer militia who had returned from their massacre of 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Nation. The federal holiday was established in 1863. By then, the mythic narrative had become the national truth: Pilgrims (Americans) gave thanks for surviving, thanks to the “Indians” who fed them and taught them how to grow corn.
The massacre of 700 Pequot Indians is almost never mentioned in American history, let alone at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Why is this?
Let me hazard a theory: Without the Pequot massacre there would be no United States. This foundational violence is required for US national identity to coalesce into what it is today. Not to coalesce around the remembrance of that genocide, but rather, its oblivion. The United States needs to forget. Such forgetting is integral to the American psyche. And in this sense, the genocide of Indigenous peoples is a fact that must be forgotten.
You cannot give thanks for what is stolen.
When compared to other foundational myths, the Pequot Massacre is a more accurate “event” to describe the origins of the United States. More accurate than Christopher Columbus’s “discovery,” or the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, because the Pequot massacre reveals the violence of settler colonialism. It does not convey a sense of peaceful exchange, but the brutal reality of genocide. The Pequot massacre serves as an example of settler colonialism because of the national disavowal of that violence.