Thanksgiving, again

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 150^th 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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Thoughts from the think tank

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself immersed in a virtual progressive think tank. Well, not exactly. In a think tank, you’re supposed to contribute something novel to the tank. Mostly, I’ve just been soaking up other people’s ideas and letting them swirl around in my brain. I guess that makes me a think tank lurker. This may seem like a bit of a rant. But there you have it: my lurking mind in overdrive.

Most recently, I spent several days at the national conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which, happily, met in Denver this year. My partner and I refer this group as “the radical sociologists.” My kind of people! I attended a bunch of sessions that renewed my hope that progressivism lives on in up-and-coming scholars and that academics can also be activists (and be proud of it … at least in this circle of like-minded academics). Among other topics, I dipped into discussions of the meaning of the concept of “social problems,” the subtle meanings conveyed by chat room conversations among butch- and femme-identified queer folks, the meaning of community recovery following a deadly mudslide in the Philippines, and changing meanings of “acceptance” of LGBTQ folks in religious settings (the last was our own work, presented by a couple of students we’ve been working with). A meaning-full several days, for sure.

The conference found me already in a reflective mood about things sociological, since I had spent considerable time over recent weeks hanging out with such topics here in Boulder. The focus of this year’s “One Book, One Boulder” program is Chief Niwot, also known as Chief Left Hand. The book, Chief Left Hand, is a biography of this Arapaho peace chief and the story of white people’s theft of Indian land in Colorado. In recent weeks, I attended two events in the “One Book, One Boulder” program series, and also visited the Boulder History Museum’s exhibit on the same topic. My first foray into this program a few weeks ago was the multi-media performance, “Rocks, Karma, Arrows.” I left that performance slightly stunned. I’ve known about how badly white “settlers” (a.k.a., invaders) treated the Indians living on the continent as we claimed (a.k.a., stole) more and more land and resources. But the explicit deception and cruelty of that period of history was sort of pinned to a bulletin board in my brain. During this performance, it was pulled down and examined in detail and with an immediacy I’ve rarely experienced.

Then, with that performance as a backdrop, I saw two segments of the film “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” This movie details how “race” became an identity category, which it hadn’t been one before we invented it (“constructed it,” as the scholars say). And then, how the stereotypes and degradations visited on non-white people were systematically shifted from one group to another as we (white folks) decided we wanted the land, the cheap labor, and/or the resources of yet another group. First, we wanted free labor from African slaves, so we created, step by step, a story that made them not just different in skin color but also deficient in mental and moral status. Using the wonders of newly emerging science, we even created (and I do mean created) biological proof of their inferiority. Then, the very same arguments were used to prove that other groups—Indians and women, Eastern European, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, among others—were inferior. Funny … these arguments were pulled out just when each of these groups had something whites wanted or risked taking something only white men had.

Maybe the most powerful point in this movie for me was this suggestion: White people could have just acknowledged that we wanted free labor from African slaves and their descendants (or land from the Indians and cheap labor from other groups) and that we had the power to demand it. But we had this problem: the Declaration of Independence says, “all men are created equal.” Now, obviously, this excludes women (one of the battles of the 20^th century), but it should include all these non-white men. So, the trick was to justify their unequal treatment. To do that, we created a story about these groups, one that made them less than fully human. That way, they were not really included in “all men,” so we weren't required to treat them as equals.

It’s an amazing paradox. If we didn’t have this wonderful doctrine, "... all men are created equal," we wouldn’t have had to invent these stories of inferiority to cover up our sins against the founding documents. 

But given our supposed allegiance to this doctrine, we had to somehow paper over two conflicting realities: (1) we believe in equality and (2) our actions are rife with inequality. We pulled this off by simply declaring some people less than fully human.

     

And now, we live with the awful legacy of that process: even when the overt racism/sexism/classism waned (e.g., after slaves were freed, when the Indians were granted sovereignty in their “own” lands, when women got the vote, when labor unions gained equal treatment), those old stories about sub-humanity remained. We could free the slaves, but we still “knew” that they were inherently inferior to white people. We could give women the vote, but we still “knew” that they were inferior to men. The task we’re left with now is to figure out how to erase those old stories when the culture is steeped in them, and we’ve all taken them in with the air we breathe since childhood.

After all this, a visit to the Chief Left Hand exhibit at the Boulder History Museum closed the circle. It reminded me of the deep Colorado connection to this story of race. The the ease with which we've denied the humanity of whole groups of humans—and of their leaders, even those who, like Left Hand, craved, worked for, pleaded for peace. We’re walking on the land we stole from them as if it were our own.

This immersion in the reminder that racism isn’t “long ago and far away” but right here, in my town, in my time—in my self—was unsettling. But it was also energizing, a reminder of my own work yet to be done. Folks who live near Boulder still have a chance to join in this remarkable learning process. The museum exhibit is still open, the book is still available, and more “One Boulder” events are coming up.

Check them out here and jump on in. This think tank can always use more folks who believe in community activism—or simply in personal growth.