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Thanksgiving: A Native American View
Jacqueline Keeler, Pacific News Service
November 21, 1997
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.
This may surprise those people who wonder what
Native Americans think of
this official U.S. celebration of the survival of
early arrivals in a European
invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30
million native people.
Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims.
When I was six, my
mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister
and me not to sing "Land
of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful."
Our people, she said, had
been here much longer and taken much better care of
the land. We were to
sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.
I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I
sang softly. It was enough
for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had
learned something very
important. As a child of a Native American family,
you are part of a very
select group of survivors, and I learned that my
family possessed some
"inside" knowledge of what really happened when
those poor, tired masses
came to our homes.
When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were
poor and hungry -- half
of them died within a few months from disease and
hunger. When Squanto, a
Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful
state. He spoke English,
having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them.
Their English crops had
failed. The native people fed them through the
winter and taught them how to
grow their food.
These were not merely "friendly Indians." They had
already experienced
European slave traders raiding their villages for a
hundred years or so, and
they were wary -- but it was their way to give
freely to those who had
nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that
you can give without
holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the
Dakota, my father's
people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not
Dakota and alive?" It was
believed that by giving there would be enough for
all -- the exact opposite of
the system we live in now, which is based on
selling, not giving.
To the Pilgrims, and most English and European
peoples, the Wampanoags
were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto
not as an equal but as an
instrument of their God to help his chosen people,
themselves.
Since that initial sharing, Native American food
has spread around the world.
Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were
originally cultivated by
Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what
they ate in Europe
before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes?
Meat and potatoes without
potatoes? And at the "first Thanksgiving" the
Wampanoags provided most of
the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims
the right to the land at
Plymouth, the real reason for the first
Thanksgiving.
What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20
years European disease and
treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most
diseases then came from
animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox
from cows led to
smallpox, one of the great killers of our people,
spread through gifts of
blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate
that diseases accounted
for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native
American communities.
By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was
giving thanks to his God for
destroying the heathen savages to make way "for a
better growth," meaning
his people.
In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil
person always keeps his or her
heart in a secret place separate from the body. The
hero must find that secret
place and destroy the heart in order to stop the
evil.
I see, in the "First Thanksgiving" story, a hidden
Pilgrim heart. The story of
that heart is the real tale than needs to be told.
What did it hold? Bigotry,
hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the
evil that it caused in the
350 years since. Genocide, environmental
devastation, poverty, world wars,
racism.
Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of
evil? I believe it must be
each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this
Thursday and I cook my native
food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and
how my ancestors survived the
evil it caused.
Because if we can survive, with our ability to
share and to give intact, then the
evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving
day in the land of the
Wampanoag will have come full circle.
And the healing can begin.
Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and
the Yankton
Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child
Resource Center in
Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds
of Change, an
American Indian journal.
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