It comes around
every year. Our annual thanks-giving day. And, as I’ve written here before—last year and the year before that—each year, I find it troubling. That’s true again this year, with my dis-ease heightened
by my recent immersion in the story of Sand Creek—also a topic of earlier posts here, and of an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times and an article in the current issue of Smithsonian.
For those of you
who haven’t been following this blog over the course of my recurrent musings
about Thanksgiving, here’s a short synopsis. When we were living in
Massachusetts several years ago, we attended the counter-thanksgiving ceremony
at Plymouth, MA, which was organized by descendants of the native peoples who
lived in that area when the Pilgrims arrived. Their take on that first fall
harvest feast and what it portended for the future was—predictably—very
different from the schoolroom stories I learned. If the European settlers
at that the feast could have looked into the future, they
may have seen the glorious future of a great nation. From the Indians’
perspective, though, that feast was followed by the devastation of their way of life, the
loss of their land, language, and culture—and the predictable consequences: poverty, disempowerment, and dysfunction in their fragmented and diminished
communities. And still, despite all this, they survive.
At some level, I
had known this, but I hadn’t given it much thought, joining in the annual
tradition of an autumn celebration dedicated to giving thanks and imagining that we celebrated the
bounty of the harvest, the cooperation of communities that might instead have
been hostile, and the launch of a new nation. Giving thanks is good, I
thought—why not have a day dedicated
to that activity? I never thought much about the fact that by choosing this day and wrapping the event in this legend, we were commemorating genocide.
I suspect this is
not unlike the experience of many people.
The first really serious challenge
to this complacency was the counter-thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth. Then
came the deeply experiential workshop we attended at the Quaker meetinghouse
last year, which I also described here,
when the brutal reality of the white march across the continent became crystal
clear to me. And then came my education about Sand Creek.
Over the course of
the past few weeks, following in the wake of our bus trip to Sand Creek,
I’ve spent time with the Sand Creek story in a range of venues. I’ve been
reading a book about Sand Creek, A Misplaced Massacre, which is written from a critical perspective that shines
revealing light on the complex governmental machinations and personal ambition
that fueled Sand Creek and other anti-Indian actions of the late 1800s. I’ve
also attended a spate of events that addressed this massacre. This year marks
the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre on November 29 and 30, 1864, so the Boulder History Museum has sponsored a series of
commemorative events. The first was a museum forum featuring an interview with former
Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who sponsored the legislation that
led to the designation of the Sand Creek Massacre Historical Site. Then came a video of
the play “Rocks, Karma, Arrows, Part II,” which examines Boulder’s legacy of
racism and exclusion (with particular focus on the Indians), followed by a
documentary about that play that included some really smart talking heads
offering pithy analyses of these historical events. And the last was a “history
on the screen” event that featured a talk by the man in charge of the Sand
Creek Massacre site, followed by a screening of “Little Big Man,” the 1975
movie starring Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Indians who witnesses
the growing efforts to eradicate and dispossess the Plains Indians--including Sand Creek.
Each of these
events has added a layer of nuance to the story and to my grasp of the chasm
between the legend I learned as a child of the origin and growth of this
country and the reality of the genocide that is this nation’s origin-al sin.
One of the messages I took away this time, a point made on at least two of
these occasions, was this: History is open-ended. History continues. This story
is still being written, but now, by us. The implicit challenge: what will we
write? How do we change the terrible trajectory of this tale so that the
experiences of the indigenous peoples of this continent don’t continue to be
silenced.
After attending the
Plymouth, MA counter-thanksgiving ceremony, we made a commitment that we wouldn’t
do Thanksgiving again without honoring this legacy—a commitment I reiterated
here two years ago. (Blogging about it on a regular basis seems to be one of the ways I do this.) This year, a perfect opportunity arose. When we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a
friend, we asked to include a piece that would honor the true meaning of the day, and she willingly agreed.
So yesterday, we began the afternoon gathering of friends with a ceremony that
recounted the real history of the relationship between European colonizers and indigenous
peoples and ended with reflections on commitments we all could make to moving
history forward in a more honest way. We included music—some of it raw and painful
(Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”) and some
chosen to create a calm space for meditation (pieces by American Indian
musicians Calvin J. Standing Bear and James Torres). Afterward, we
shared good, thoughtful, open conversation, a fine meal, and serious belly
laughs over a word game turned silly by our delight in the camaraderie—and maybe by the release of tension after a difficult, starkly realistic opening to this
complicated day.
As we were leaving,
one friend thanked us for the ceremony and offered an observation, taken from her work elsewhere, on the contrast between the intensity of the days beginning and the lightheartedness
of its end: “We can only work as deep as we can laugh.”
We can't act as though this part of history didn't occur or doesn't matter. But honoring it needn't leave us morose and perpetually somber, which helps nothing at all. History is open-ended. It's still happening. Only now, we’re responsible for where it goes. We need to act, act as if it matters. Because it does. And then, we can laugh as deep as we work.
© Janis
Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to
the post.
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