Day of Atonement

Groups of native Americans have been trying for years to get mainstream attention to the real meaning of US Thanksgiving. In Canada, Thanksgiving seems to be truly a celebration of the harvest. But in the US, the mythology of "Indians and Pilgrims" that is taught to every schoolchild and still believed by most adults is a cover-up of what the day was originally about, a celebration of a massacre of Pequot women, children and men.

Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas, tells this history and urges that USians not just ought, but need, to transform Thanksgiving from the self-indulgent family-centered eating orgy into a day of atonement for the massacre that started the whole thing and all the centuries-long effort to get rid of the original inhabitants of this continent through murder, massacre, smallpox-infected blankets, stealing their land, breaking treaties and corraling the remainder of the tribes in reservations. The degradation of native people continues with severe poverty, unemployment, health issues and suicide rates.

I think that, while we're at it, we USians would also do well to atone for few other things: the nearly two million Viet Namese killed in that war, and the destruction of the land; the invasions of the Philippines, Gratemala, Grenada, Panama and, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq; the involvement in the overthrow of democratically elected governments including Iran, the Congo, Nicaragua, Chile; the support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians; and of course the endless supplying of arms to combatants all over the world and the support of brutal dictators as long as they are enforcing global capitalism and opening their economies to domination by US corporations.

And we should also apologize and seek absolution for accepting the values of consumerism and allowing them to be exported and enforced around the world, our gift to the rest of humanity, and for letting ourselves be persuaded that we deserve to live in comfort off the suffering of others and the destruction of the global environment. We ought to ask forgiveness for sitting complacently in the belly of the beast while it devours and digests not just the poor and powerless from around the globe, but the poor and powerless in our own nation, who have been washed away down the gullet of the beast every day, but very visibly during the recent hurricanes while the rest of us watched, some in horror, some not even registering shock,

I think Jensen has something there--atonement, humility and the seeking of forgiveness on the fourth Thursday in November. First, we have to get off our high horse and stop thinking that what we have is God's gift to us because we're so special, and instead realize that what we have is the spoils of a gigantically unfair system that has been rigged in our favor for a long time, and kept in that unfair unbalance by massive amounts of killing, destruction, oppression, injustice and the creation of tremendous, unquantifiable suffering.

Being thankful is right and important--but first we need to know what it is we really are thankful for.

Comments

[Linda Buzzell-Saltzman]

I agree that until we can see that first Thanksgiving from both sides of the encounter, we remain blind. When I was in Cape Cod recently I read that the pilgrims actually stole the Indians' corn at the first meeting with Native Americans. A sign of things to come...