Thanksgiving: A Native American View
Jacqueline Keeler
 
I am a Native American, and I celebrate Thanksgiving.
That often surprises those 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.

But to me, Thanksgiving 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 Lakota, my father's
people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not
Lakota 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, Cotton 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 his Annals of Christ in America, Mather wrote
further, "I do, with all conscience of truth,...report
the wonderful displays of His infinite power,
wherewith His divine providence hath irradiated an
Indian wilderness."

In general, the Pilgrims justified their conquest by
appealing to the Bible, Psalm 2:8: "Ask of me, and I
shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance,
and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy
possession."

In stories told by the Lakota 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 that 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 Lakota Sioux works with the American
Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California.
Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American
Indian journal.