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Now
A few days ago my 4th grade daughter
came home with a 20 question "Thanksgiving Quiz" very
disappointed at her failing grade. We looked it over and noticed
not one question about Indians, a topic she knows well. But I
quickly noticed that there were two questions about football.
"How many football games are played between Thursday and
Sunday? And "What pro football team always plays on Thanksgiving?"
At a loss, she had kept both blank and was marked wrong.
There are, in fact, two Thanksgivings
in rough torn opposition, I told her. There is first the U.S.
imperial tradition in which American Indian history is swept
under the banquet table so that the feasts of turkey, football
and shopping can be thoroughly enjoyed. All three are tied, fittingly,
to accumulation and war. This year brings news that K-Mart and
other top retailers opened on Thanksgiving Day itself. Meanwhile
Walmart, Target and other top retailers are going for the "holiday
jugular" in their competition for consumers, encouraging
folks to preview websites on Thanksgiving Day to prepare for
the Black Friday siege.
The other Thanksgiving is being
born in the Indian resurgence of the last forty years, culminating
in some dramatic leaps in the 21st century. In 2004 the ($100
million) National Museum of the American Indian opened along
Smithsonian row just across from the Capital, Their main message
is not "we seek justice, " but "we are still here."
The Museum should be required for all visitors to DC.
We also discussed the fact
that President Bush pardoned two turkeys this Thanksgiving season,
sparing their lives. This had also been mentioned in school.
Then we talked about the power of pardons and how it relates
to Thanksgiving. I pointed out that the President didn't pardon
Leonard Peltier, the American Indian political prisoner unjustly
jailed for 30 years now.
Thanksgiving is a fitting day
to pardon Peltier since American Indians are - or should be -what
Thanksgiving is largely about. In the celebrated European tale
the Wampanoag Indians rescued the starving Pilgrims with their
friendship and bounty leading up to a glorious feast in 1621.
We learn that the Pilgrims gave hearty thanks to the Indians
at this very First Thanksgiving in North American history. To
commemorate the ritual our children are encouraged to wear paper
brown bag costumes and feathers in school plays celebrating this
poignant affair of brotherhood.
But, like the substitution
of football for American Indians, there is no mention in the
official tale-become-myth that just 16 years later the Pilgrims
returned the gesture by massacring hundreds of Pequot Indian
men, women and children at Mystic, Connecticut. John Winthrop,
the Massachusetts Governor, announced a thanksgiving in celebration
of the slaughter.
Like the Pequot massacre, Peltier is unmentionable.
America prefers Tonto-esqu
"good Indians" located in the far off past where Indian
rebellion can be ideologically managed. Real Indians with real
culture and real grievances are generally taboo.
The Smithsonian Museum counters
this though several creative multimedia exhibits and artistic
displays, illustrating how hundreds of thousands of American
Indians are actively reclaiming their identities. One of my favorites
is "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities" which
shows how residents of eight Native communities - from the Campo
Band of Kumeyaay Indians (California, USA), to the Pamunkey Tribe
(Virginia, USA) - live in the 21st century. Visitors hear their
stories and come to understand the difficult choices American
Indians make daily in order to survive economically, preserve
their languages and traditional arts.
But the Smithsonian messages
are remarkably modest as anthropologist Jack Weatherford underscores
in his important book, "Indian Givers: How the Indians of
the Americas Transformed the world." Weatherford goes far
beyond common sense to demonstrate that indeed, "the Indians
gave us three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation." These
crops range from potatoes (associated with dramatic power shifts
after its adoption in Europe), the peanut, squash, beans (string,
butter, lima, navy etc.) and chocolate. In the dominant consciousness
corn is usually relegated to a few ears of disfigured, multi-colored
"Indian Corn" not the raging agricultural empires of
Archer Daniels Midland, a transnational that has not given anything
back to the Indians.
A visit to the Smithsonian
museum this summer revealed some severe cognitive dissonance
with this kind of knowledge. I overheard a lunchtime conversation
from a visiting family in which the children said they wanted
to eat at the Indian museum which hosts a spectacular cafeteria
with 100% American Indian foods. An elderly man in the group,
probably the father, announced, "No way am I eating here,
I want to eat real Amercian food!" and then led the group
outside to Union station where they, no doubt, ate Indian food.
Weatherford shows how the U.S.
Constitution borrowed heavily from the Iroquois Great Law of
Peace, with 500 year old established ideas and practices related
to the federal system, the separation of powers, how to accept
new member states, the importance of letting one person speak
at a time (unlike the British) and impeachment. In many ways
the Great
Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee.
is superior to the U.S. Constitution.
There is a provision for example, endorsed by Franklin, where
warriors had a say in electing the chiefs who put them to war.
Weatherford calls his chapter "The Founding Indian Fathers,"
the sort of courageous language that the Smithsonian curators
have not broached, sitting as they do a stones throw from world
power.
Weatherford also has much to say about Zapatistas and others
who "gave the world generation after generation of revolutionary
inspiration." The ongoing rebellions in Chiapas continue
this example.
Today 2.4 million U.S. citizens
claim Indian heritage as of the 2000 census, up significantly
from 1990. There is a dramatic growth of Indian Law programs,
Indians Studies programs, a regeneration of Tribal Colleges,
and an all out effort in the fight for sovereignty.
In public education some teachers
are increasingly action confronting the distortions. The AP's
Ana Beatriz Cholo reports that when San Francisco teacher Bill
Morgan enters his third grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat
made of construction paper he begins snatching up pencils, backpacks
and glue sticks from his pupils, telling them that the items
now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The
kids protest and want their things back.
There is resistance from some
quarters. "It's an uphill battle," he said.
Make no mistake, the pressure of neoliberal capital is incessant.
A terrific 2005 award winning film "Homeland: Four Portraits
of Native Action," captures this dialectic well. It documents
one of the least known but most important human rights stories
today: nearly all 317 American Indian Reservations in the US
face environmental threats from the Bush administration -- toxic
waste, strip mining, oil drilling and nuclear contamination.
The film profiles four instances of how First nations are fighting
back, and sometimes winning, if only until the next wave of right
wing battles. The film is beautiful to look at showing spectacular
backdrops from Alaska to Maine to Montana to New Mexico, at the
same time it is a call to action showing how grassroots organizing
and environmental lawyers can help in the fight. Winona LaDuke
gives important insights in the work.
There is a historic thread
leading from Peltier to the Homeland film to the new Smithsonian
museum. Peltier stood with the American Indian Movement when
AIM and similar groups helped reassert Indian pride using many
of the strategies and tactics of the Black Panthers. They took
over Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
to draw attention to their plight. Peltier is part of the movement
that the popular t-shirt announces is "Defending the Homeland
since 1492."
The essence of the struggle
is that the Europeans and U.S. colonized these lands through
genocide, slaughter and deception. It was, theoretically speaking,
part of the primitive accumulation of capital in which the Europeans
played the part of the primitives. In Algeria the indigenous
people kicked out the French and in Southeast Asia the Vietnamese
turned back the French and Americans. But where does the U.S.
government go if the Native Americans (dwellers here for at least
10,000 years) remove them from its soil? The issue raises too
many uncomfortable questions. And thanks to the Indian resurgence,
these questions are increasingly being asked.
But they are not often asked
on Thanksgiving where it is most appropriate. The dominant Thanksgiving
is instead a prolonged ritual enactment that works to help reassure
Americans that our country was founded on good will and cooperation
between two equal peoples. It's a fetishized (false) harmony
that suppresses much of the essential truths about Indians and
about capitalist culture, in general. In this version the ritual
also works as a relief valve, a celebration of the ideal of family
togetherness in a world of job insecurity, suffering and broken
families.
In Native American culture,
every day is Thanksgiving and in fact, harvest celebrations (i.e.
thanksgivings) go back thousands of years. But with European
colonization many of them, like the Creek's Green Corn Festival
were forced to go underground. This is all part of the hidden
history of thanksgiving.
The truth is, the two alternate
narratives are not reconcilable.
Do we pay homage to good dead Indians or honestly reckon with
the redress of grievances of millions of native peoples before
our own eyes?
Do we thank the Indians for helping out a few puritans or thank
them for helping to give us our culture at large?
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