Give Thanks No More; It’s Time for a National Day of Atonement (CommonDreams.org)
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
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Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
posted by russell at
5:53 PM
2 Comments:
i agree the beginnings of what thanksgiving was and the crap they taught us in elementary school was very wrong. however, today, society has gotten a lot better at accepting all cultures and i firmly believe the celebration of thanksgiving is very much what it should be. giving thanks for what we have. yes, we are still very far away from where we should be when it comes to acceptance (not tolerance...i hate that word) but it is better. i don't sit around in a pilgrim hat or an indian feather because that is not it. it's feeling grateful for what we have. plus, i get three days off from school. there's my two cents.
iabnvbp!!!
By
there are some who call me.....Tim??, at 1:41 PM
I agree that the holiday has evolved and I enjoy spending time with family and eating the traditional food, and I think these things are esp. important in our society of fast food and decreasing community. You're right that just because something starts out for a bad purpose doesn't mean it has to be bad forever (think of the Biblical image of beating swords into plow shears). But I also think it's important to recall the real history of the day and I'm bothered by indigenous invisibility as people eat turkey and shop.
By
russell, at 8:24 PM
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