By Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Community Engagement Manager
Map of Native American tribes designed by Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., showing their locations before first contact with Europeans.
We are currently approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, a season I’ve looked forward to for many years. If you grew up in the U.S. school system, there is a good chance that your kindergarten experience mirrored my own, with construction paper headdresses and pilgrim attire, stories of shared abundance and friendship between Native peoples and new European settlers. Even as a young adult, November brought apple pie, time with long-distance family, warm beverages, and pumpkins galore without the overwhelming consumerism that December often lends to. This year, however, feels different. Not because the holiday changed, but because gradually I have. I am now actively practicing recognizing tensions and calling out the complex implications of things that were once glazed and made glowing by sentiment and tradition. I have recognized that things that hold great personal warmth and nostalgia for me (a white, now middle-class, cis-woman) may still be traditions that are deeply problematic in nature and may be devastatingly painful for other groups of people whose voices I haven’t considered because I haven’t sought them out.
As a member of The Nashville Food Project team, I am very aware of how our organization benefits from the positive implications of the Thanksgiving holiday, as many non-profits and food organizations do with increased (desperately needed) donations and an uptick in volunteers. However, this is an incomplete picture without a way to easily acknowledge that our celebrations of thanks and prosperity take place on stolen, bloodstained land. The gifts and comfort that many of us know have not come without a devastating historical cost and one that has resulted in generations of destruction to the Native peoples of this now-colonized space. It is a truth that is so hard to swallow, but impossible to ignore if we truly desire to be a justice-seeking community.
Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (1850–1936), "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth," 1914.
If you are like me and grew up with a singular narrative of Thanksgiving that celebrated U.S abundance and refused to acknowledge the genocide of this soil’s first stewards, I encourage you to use today as a step forward. I’ll be here doing the same. Glennon Doyle Melton says, “Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways”. This is my messy attempt at being a better ancestor. Here are a few tools I am using to push back against my own white-washed understanding of the Thanksgiving narrative and more importantly, tools I have found to inspire and challenge my understanding of the current injustices that remaining tribes of Native people face.
1. Understand that this is no single “First Thanksgiving” narrative.
I’ve spent hours researching and the story depends a lot on who is telling it. There are many unknowns that popular culture has taken advantage of filling to paint a picture worthy of elementary school celebrations everywhere. The more I’ve learned, the more questions I have. I’m practicing sitting with this discomfort and uncertainty. And maybe the history of that actual day is less important than the nature of the relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples that followed.
2. Seek out indigenous voices.
Understand that indigenous people are still very much present. Their story did not begin with the arrival of European settlers and it did not end with the systematic desolation of over 90% of their people at the hands of colonizers. Read diverse thoughts of indigenous people on our modern Thanksgiving holiday HERE and HERE and learn about indigenous-led resistance movements and Native leadership HERE. This is just a starting point.
3. Discover who were the original stewards of the space you call home with this tool.
For most of us, we currently occupy land that was acquired through colonization. My little spot of the world where I am raising my baby, loving my partner, tending chickens and figuring out this life is part of what was once Cherokee Country . Members of this tribe still reside in Cherokee, North Carolina after losing the majority of their territory as the result of forced removal and relocation through the Trail of Tears. This new (to me) knowledge is helping me shift the way I see my responsibility to this space and to learn more about the injustices that its original occupants still face. It has me thinking about the other people who have raised babies, laughed, planted, hoped, cried and mourned on the soil where I now live. It reminds me of those who will do so when I am dust and has me asking what can I do now to create the kind of world I want for each of them.
There is much to be thankful for. But may our celebrations of thanks not be a tool to revel in our own distorted narratives. May they be an invitation to build a future that is truly worth celebrating.