2020-11-23, Thanksgiving

I've been asked about Thanksgiving a lot these past few weeks. A lot. I lost count in the upper-30s, but I think I'm just shy of 50 now. Always white people, and their questions range in respectfulness, but all came with a lot of presumptions about what my answer should cover.

Even with that many prompts, I've found it really hard to give anyone an answer. And so I'm drafting this letter. I spent two days thinking about what I'd say here, but I haven't really thought of much. I talked it over with my partner, and they had some good things to say. But me? I'm still not sure.

I guess I can look at the trends in the questions, since I got so many of them. I didn't write them all down, unfortunately, but upon remembering, I think there is a trend to ask: "How can I focus on Indigenous issues this Thanksgiving?" And I have a lot of problems with that. Thanksgiving is not an Indigenous holiday. Lots of nations have holidays around this time of year, and there are two wider holidays, a Day of Mourning recognized by lots of tribes that occurs on the same day as Thanksgiving, and an Unthanksgiving, which occurs at the same time on Alcatraz Island, in celebration of that occupation. (On that note, the visitor logbook from that occupation has been digitized and is online. This is not the place to speak at length at that, but it has made for a very celebratory timbre the past few days, since its release. Many people I know are looking through it, looking for the names of their relatives.)

And I encourage y'all to learn more about those. But... not right now. Trying to learn about Indigenous issues right now seems a bit like cramming for a test, only there's no test, just an uncomfortable guilt. Write it down though, maybe come around mid-January? (Hey, be ambitious: consider creating a curriculum to educate yourself on Indigenous issues.)

Oh, and that's the last time I'm saying "Indigenous issues" because that is a ridiculous euphemism for "Native history," which is most of the questions were really looking to get information on. Please, please, settler-folk, be careful in your language: when you attempt to speak of a thing, center that thing. Only center your relationship to the thing if it's your relationship you're speaking of. That is to say, "Indigenous issues," casts the existence of a society as it for white people: a problem. I understand the intention is usually to acknowledge those problems as existing, but that's accomplished by, well, directly acknowledging them.

"Native history" isn't too much better. It... is ridiculous to frame Thanksgiving as a part of Native culture, and it is ridiculous to frame Native culture as historic; playing into a long myth of the “disappearing Indian.” I am a living Native person with a pulse about to live through Thanksgiving. That’s not “history.” (I'm doing my best to be polite and respectful toward the intention of the people asking questions, and not as a matter of etiquette: I /do/ respect the people asking questions for asking them, even if I find a lot of fault with the actual expressed question. At least they're engaging with these topics.)

So: don't focus on Indigenous issues or Native history this Thanksgiving. Don't focus on contemporary Native events either, not /because/ of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a settler holiday, centered on settler history. If you are the organizer of a community's holidays, like a family patriarch or matriarch, and you do not feel comfortable centering the intentional violent extermination of Native Americans, I encourage you to not recognize Thanksgiving, at all. If you aren't tightly associated with a community, I give you the same advice.

Which will probably feel uncomfortable. And I'm not going to focus on "that discomfort is nothing compared to the violence wrought on Natives." I'm going to focus on the future and say, a lot is going to change as we go through it. Regardless of the choices we make, the world is always changing, and the collapsing climate has expanded that window of change signficantly. There is a wide variety of discomfort available in this future, and much of it will be unavoidable. My advice is to develop a palette as discerning of discomfort as of fancy coffee. Some discomforts are just bad, like lumpy couches. But others are useful, like stretching in physical therapy, or moving away from colonial fantasies.

If you are motivated to participate in a Thanksgiving celebration because of membership in a community that requires you participate: participate. Please don't hijack your community's ceremonies to try and end them.

But then work to get the community to move away from Thanksgiving by the next year. You have nearly a year make your case and get the change to happen. If you don't feel ready to make your case, well, you've got plenty of time to learn more. Learn how different Native folk tell the story of Thanksgiving.

So, in short: stop celebrating Thanksgiving.

A lot of questions came from people that already have, and they wanted to know what they should do, instead. I was bothered by this because I'm pretty clear that I think there is a linear (and circular, of course, but linear for settler-folk) task-list to follow to fix their shit, and it's 1) Land back, 2) Water back, 3) Medicine back, 4) Ceremony back.

I think there's a lot of settler-folk who jump straight to #4, and to me it seems to come from folk who don't have a sense of ceremony, they have a sense of guilt. Ceremony becomes an enactment of Indulgence: by recognizing the existence of, ahem, "Indigenous issues," through some constructed set of actions, they can relieve their sense of guilt, quite viscerally.

There's also an irony here, in that these settler-folk, well-intentioned though they are, are asking how to construct something that many Native folk got as gift, and would never consider "creating" the way these settler-folk are.

I... hate writing this, because I keep saying "I'll get to talking to how to indigenize, concrete advice, next newsletter, I promise!" but circumstance keeps demanding I center encouraging white folk to, in the words of an inspirational friend, "deorbit whiteness." I don't like saying "Don't celebrate it, don't talk about it, don't celebrate anything." That feels like I'm just being a big bummer.

But... the people asking about it? That's really the only advice I have. What to do instead? Decenter your whiteness. What does that look like? That's what my other letters are for.