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By
Jacqueline Keeler
“I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving”
This may surprise those people 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.
Thanksgiving to 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 Dakota, my father's people, they
say, when asked to give, 'Are we not Dakota 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, 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 stories told by the Dakota 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 than 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
Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child Resource
Center in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds of
Change, an American Indian journal.
11/11/06 |
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