Turkey Day was how I thought of Thanksgiving when I was young. The odor of the bird roasting, helping prepare the homemade dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and yams. Our family was spread out over most of the West, so the scene is just my parents and myself. It was the next day that I really waited for—turkey sandwiches, really pretty simple: bread, mayonnaise, and meat. And that’s the part I hung on to over the years, and will again this year, although now the bread will be sourdough, the Turkey from a deli, a slice of red onion, and lingonberries rather than cranberries. Over the years I have celebrated Thanksgiving with friends, at community dinners sponsored by various groups, and find it a day for memories of those gone from my life.
In many of our minds Thanksgiving is a Norman Rockwell scene, from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. “Freedom from Want” was published in the March 6, 1943 issue, one of four covers of the “Four Freedoms” derived from FDR’s State of the Union Address, delivered on January 6, 1941. They are: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. During WWII the four paintings were made into posters with the head “Why We Are Fighting,” becoming iconic images for the home front. The concept of the Four Freedoms became the personal mission undertaken by Eleanor Roosevelt regarding the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly Resolution 217A. The “Four Freedoms” were explicitly incorporated into the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed the highest aspiration of the common people,....Lincoln declared the first official Thanksgiving Day in 1863 on Thursday November 26th. In 1941 FDR formally made the fourth Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day. The Thanksgiving Day Parade was started by Macy’s department store in New York City in 1924, and spread to other cities where Macy’s has done business over the years. A friend of mine has always watched the parade with family, and makes trays of “Sticky Buns” that friends stop by to share. The parade for many years marked the start of the Xmas season, with “Black Friday” sales the day after Turkey Day. This year people started lining up at some Walmart stores as early as the Monday before, but may find themselves encountering OUR Walmart, a group of Walmart employees who are organizing a Black Friday walkout.
Let’s serve up a little side dish of crow. The mythology of the “First Thanksgiving” is that Pilgrims and Indians sat down together to celebrate the frost successful harvest of 1621. The reality is that without the local knowledge of the natives, Plymouth Plantation would have gone the way of Jamestown. Longfellow’s favorite Pilgrim Father, Miles Standish, was among the first to demonstrate his gratitude with the Wessagusset Massacre in 1623. Later “thanks” got by native Americans included the Trail of Tears for the Cherokee (1838), Wounded Knee for the Lakota (1890), and Pine Ridge for the Oglala Sioux (1973). Starting in 1879, a policy was instituted of forcibly removing children, placing them in Indian Schools usually far from their families, and prohibiting the “students” from speaking their native tongue or maintaining any connection with their culture. More than 100,000 children are estimated to have attended an Indian School. Today Native Americans, whether on a reservation or “urbanized,” have the lowest income, shortest life spans, and highest alcoholism rates of any group in the United States.
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Copyright © 2012 by Tom Lowe
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ReplyDeleteTom, excellent recap and reminder of the reality of how white settlers used brutality instead of appreciation to thank those who helped them. If Native Americans had known then what they know now, they most likely would have established a completely different immigration policy. White Americans would not be arguing about how to deal with immigrants today because there might not be any white Americans.
ReplyDeleteSome 500 years before Columbus, the Vikings gave up settling Vinland - what we now know as Eastern Canada - mainly because the native people were so hostile and warlike. If Native Americans had likewise pursued a "kill on sight" policy of dealing with immigrants, just think how different North America might be today.
All the best to the Walmart protesters. It is great to know there are at least a few activists out there still trying to draw attention to social issues instead of just the usual "slacktivists" who think about it but do nothing. It will always be a black eye for American democracy that people thought little, and did even less, for the Native Americans.
I didn't know that Native Americans had independently invented gunpowder.
DeleteMy family and I am sure my ancestors would call your reservations and rancherias, concentration camps. On fallow ground, lack of water, electricity, etc.. Our people were driven to land of rocks and dirt, but when gold or oil was found, they wanted their rocks and dirt back. We are supposed to be sovern nations, but when the casinos started making money, the states wanted their share, no negotation as a sovern nation, just a demand. Thanksgiving, we give thanks we are still alive!
DeleteSharon, point of view does make a difference, doesn't it? I try to get at that a bit in this coming Thursday's "Thor's Day" article on religion: the concept that "enemies" can (or can choose to) put aside their enmity if they can come to find a perspective (a common ground on which to stand) to look at things together. Of course, in practice, that's mighty, mighty utopian (unrealistic, humans being as they are, power being what it is, etc.).
DeleteThankful to be alive yet awhile longer, until we're not. Then c'est fini.
Ken, you are of course correct about the gunpowder, but maybe if they had employed bows, arrows and spears while they had the advantage of numbers, they could have wiped out the colonists and held out until more enlightened visitors arrived. If the Brits, Spaniards and French continually sent out shiploads of people who never came back, don't you think they might have put off the quest quite a while?
ReplyDeleteSharon, what do you think: Should the Native Americans have bought time by driving the colonists back to the sea like the northern tribes did the Vikings, or was the outcome inevitable?