An Appreciation of Abundance
Full bookshelves and stocked pantries! Musings on the recent holiday and some recommended reads
Have you ever felt overjoyed at the mere fact of having cupboards? Or stood grinning and gawking in front of a completely ordinary refrigerator, astonished at all the goods you just placed within?
Many of us take such objects for granted, but anyone who has experienced economic insecurity obviously knows otherwise. Housing instability, even in the more hopeful guise of ‘the traveler’s life,’ can also disrupt easy access to food. There’s no saving money by buying in bulk when you’ve no dedicated place to keep things or maintain only uncertain access to kitchens. And there’s always that moment you land at your destination on a Sunday evening after all the restaurants and shops are closed, and dinner is a snack bar or a leftover bag of chips from the train.
This fall, having finally landed in a place of my own after several itinerant years, you’ll find me often gawking in front of the fridge. Look at all that! So much! So many options! Every time I open one of the kitchen cupboards I get a little dizzy at the sheer volume and variety. Pasta! Rice and all kinds of grains! Lentils and all manner of legumes! Oils and vinegars and sauces! And flour for baking and…
It’s been a project, this stocking up. Just as I was beginning to feel a little sheepish about the sheer quantities, I got sick and stuck at home for two weeks, making a good-sized dent in my stores, and remembering there was a purpose to it all.
Mostly I have just been feeling grateful, and lucky. There’s a lot of happiness when I step into the kitchen in my little studio, a sense of feeling provisioned and nourished. The last few years of travel mean I take ‘having things on hand’ for granted a little less.
I opted to build upon this renewed base of appreciation for Thanksgiving this year, and crafted an ample yet reasonable supper reflecting the naturally abundant provisions from where I live. Tuesday I biked home from the farmers market with stuffed bags: squash and yams and persimmons, luscious dark greens, fennel and mushrooms, and more. They all found their way to the table, where salmon served as the centerpiece, broiled and flanked by hefty matsutake.
You may remember that last year I took a different approach: I wrote then about my decision to fast for the day. The point was to mark the fact that the holiday remains a day of mourning for many, but also a way to reflect on our relationship to abundance:
But that’s the question: how to draw the distinction between just enough—and maybe enough to share—and too much? When are we being judiciously prepared, and when are we hoarding? It’s not that having is a bad thing, but it can also get in the way of receiving the unexpected; being open to receive is what connects us to others, allows us to be bound up in one another’s generosity, allows for relationship. When is feasting a true giving of thanks and a celebration of abundance, and when is it reflexive indulgence, done without listening to our bodies, both individual and collective?
Thursday’s dinner this year was a different way of answering that question. It felt more like a genuine embrace of abundance and a connection to what this small region of the earth can offer, to the bounty coming out of these particular lands and communities.
(A P.S. to this little celebration of having enough: if you have the means and haven’t yet had the opportunity to support a project making sure folks get fed this winter, it’s always a great time. Close to me there’s Rogue Food Unites as well as the Oregon Food Bank. When I was growing up my family often relied on food banks; these places matter to people you know, even if they don’t talk about needing them.)
In 2021 we also wrote about an approach to Thanksgiving I termed “disowning without disconnecting.” The focus then was on those who may need to navigate difficult family events. We asked then:
[Does] it help to shift away from thinking of needing to either a) reject the family gathering as a whole, or b) make some clear stand on the ‘right’ position to hold about the event, and instead to c) consider how you can help you and your family connect to the reality and variety of Indigenous experiences?
I still opted out of any more communal or public gathering on Thursday, but in wondering how to apply the above learning for myself, I decided an obvious enough use for the day was further learning as a way to ‘connect to the reality and variety of Indigenous experiences.’ Here’s a little bit of where I wandered throughout the day:
First off, I re-read Chapter 2 of Charles C. Mann’s 1491, which narrates a fuller account of the Wampanoag-Puritan interactions at Patuxet (Plymouth) from which our more common, and fanciful, stories about the first Thanksgiving are derived.
Mann’s book foreshadows a good many arguments made in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, including the idea that a fair number of the political concepts commonly associated with enlightenment-era Europe might be better attributed to various tribes and Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island. Graeber and Wengrow ask, What happens if we try to trace a source for all these sudden questions about rights and equality raised by Rousseau and others? And what if much of the rhetoric taken up in the American Revolution came not from its settlers but directly from the original Americans? While I read The Dawn of Everything last year, it was a fun exercise to try and cross-reference it with some of Mann’s book, which I hadn’t done before.
Both these books are trying to make corrections in the historical and anthropological record, making visible the fuller history of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and their contributions to world events. Taking that another step further is this year’s National Book Award winner for non-fiction, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, by lauded Yale historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone). There’s much of U.S. history that has been written without any attention whatsoever to critical roles played by tribes or federal policy towards Indigenous communities, for events in which these are incredibly relevant; there’s lots about our conception of the Civil War, for instance, that shifts or deepens when these pieces receive due attention.
I’d hoped to listen to the audio version while cooking and out walking on Thursday, but it turns out that’s still in production, with a release date in early 2024. So instead I listened to a few interviews and talks Blackhawk has given since the book’s release. An event with the Massachusetts Historical Society features a good overview of the book’s project, and the audience questions prove interesting, leading to some advice on how to approach teaching some of the material in K-12 contexts, and prompting some thought of how we might all get involved in shifting the narrative as we get closer to the year 2026 (in which celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the events in 1776 can serve either as a moment for truth-telling and healing or as another recapitulation of harm and self-infatuation with white-washed U.S. history). Here’s the video for the event (you can skip the first four minutes unless you have a real interest in the MHS):
Blackhawk also chatted with Lakota historian and activist Nick Estes on The Red Nation Podcast in a conversation that offers a different set of insights into the book, as the two talk about the changes in the professional field of history that have opened space for this kind of work and what it means to navigate the world of academia as Native scholars.
Bringing things a little more local: I’m still in the process of learning about the peoples whose ancestral homelands encompass the valley where I now live, close to what we think of as the Oregon-California border. While it’s easy to find information on the Klamath Tribes, who play an important role in the region, there’s less easily available on the Takelma, Shasta, and Latgawa peoples of the Rogue Valley. Thursday I dipped into We Are the Land: A History of Native California — whose authors take a similar approach to Blackhawk, but more narrowly focused on California — yet found that the Shasta receive only the briefest mention. I’ve lots more to do yet to truly know about where I am — on whose lands I am an uninvited guest — but that is a project not just for the day of Thanksgiving, but for every day and always.
We Are the Land is still a useful read, though, especially in the way it tells the story of California’s colonization that really de-centers the European experience. And it literally starts with Creation and ends in the current day, with various Land Back efforts.
One last book to mention — which I’m re-reading as I plan to write more about it soon — is Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance. I have yet to read anything that goes to such lengths to truly understand their own family’s role in the displacement and dispossession of their Native neighbors. Especially if you happen to come from a land-owning family, and this time of year raises questions about how to responsibly address that legacy, this book will offer an example and guide for one possible approach. Readers from the Plains states and Minnesota will also find this particularly relevant with its detailed history of both legal policies and cultural practices that encouraged dispossession in those places.
That’s where I ended things this past Thursday. I hope sharing these wanderings of my own learning journeys remain useful for you all. Always happy to receive recommendations from readers on new directions to travel: drop something in the comments or send email to unsettling@substack.com.
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Until next time,
Meg