Rethinking and Reshaping Thanksgiving
More options for "disowning without disconnecting," and pre-holiday learning events on land return
We’re less than two weeks out from the holiday guaranteed to stir angst and agitation for many, especially for those becoming more attuned to the misleading, whitewashing nature of the dominant Thanksgiving narratives. Last year we addressed the tricky act of staying in relationship with family members on this day, especially if opting out of a gathering feels difficult to do. Can one show up and reorient some of one’s (non-Indigenous) kin to experiences outside their own, without engaging in the kind of oppositional discourse we’ve come to take for granted? As I phrased it then, can we disown some of what is harmful about the day without simultaneously disconnecting from those who have yet to come to the same understanding of those harms?
In Disowning Without Disconnection I wrote:
Understanding connection as both the means and the ends at hand offers up a non-shaming approach to making cultural shifts around symbolically heavy shared practices like Thanksgiving. Rather than focusing on what we’re rejecting, we can focus on what experiences we’re making sure to stay in connection with. It is possible that one has the kind of family where not showing up for Thanksgiving would be such a major breach that it hinders your own ability to have further influence, to stay in relationship with them. This doesn’t describe my own family, but for those of you for whom it holds true, I wonder: 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 thought that this year it would make sense to stay with this question, and briefly suggest a few pathways one could go down in search of an answer. What might one try to stay in connection with?
Connecting with Indigenous Foodways
There are lots of opportunities to stay in connection with “the reality and variety of Indigenous experiences” on this continent. But possibly the most obvious, since this is a harvest festival, is to learn about the traditional foodways of the peoples and land where you reside.
As just one example: if you’re in the northern Great Lakes region, you may have heard of The Sioux Chef, the restaurant and broader project founded by Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota); Sherman’s book the The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen would be a great place to start learning.
The Sioux Chef is connected to the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis and the non-profit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems; their site highlights not only Native chefs but also Indigenous food vendors across North America, and is just one starting point for thinking about the longer history of the foods that have sustained human life here on Turtle Island.
On the West Coast, one of my favorite people to learn from on this topic is seedkeeper and farmer Rowen White (Mohawk from Awkwesasne, farming in the Sierra foothills). Her Instagram is a beautiful documentation of the day-in and day-out work of relating to the plants that nourish us. She also has a Patreon account where she shares her art and writing. She also did a lovely interview at For the Wild a couple years back: https://forthewild.world/listen/rowen-m-white-on-seed-rematriation-and-fertile-resistance-encore-291
Connecting with Land Stewards
One of the things that distinguishes the Thanksgiving meal for many—at least for many who are not involved in religious traditions with an emphasis on saying grace before meals—is the formal giving of thanks before eating. I shared in the spring about my own attempts to bring a more secular version of grace into regular use, with an emphasis on honoring our interdependence with the plants and animals who literally give their lives for ours, as well as the labor, both seen and unseen, that leads to food on our plates:
“For the many hands and many beings that have made this meal possible, we give thanks. May it nourish our bodies and spirits and connect us more fully to one another.”
For a harvest-oriented grace, one might linger there on the “many hands,” and name both the workers on farms and the Indigenous caretakers of the land where one happens to be.
Connecting with the Movement for Land Return
Thanking land stewards in a grace is one way of incorporating a land acknowledgment into the holiday without adding a separate formal statement into the day’s events. But no matter how one goes about it, land acknowledgments that don’t follow up with consideration of how to heal the harm of dispossession from land can easily devolve into ineffective symbolic gestures. That’s why at many public gatherings, following land acknowledgments with suggestions for action has become more common, and supporting efforts for land return is one quite clear action item.
If offering land return as the just response to land theft gets your cranky uncle insisting “well no one is going to do that,” it doesn’t hurt to have a few genuine counterexamples. My own experience is that the tone and direction of conversation with critics of land return both change when one can share the wide variety of people and institutions that are engaging with the practice, from timber companies to non-profit conservation groups to governments as well as individuals. Hearing stories of land return can also just help make the idea less abstract to someone hearing it for the first time. As we’ve said before, LandBack isn’t some future thing, it’s happening now; check out some of our archived posts covering specific land transfers.
There are also some great opportunities this week to hear first-hand from Indigenous organizers about active and successful land return efforts.
First, this Wednesday at 6pm PST, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is hosting a webinar Land Return / Return to Land, featuring three stories of land return in California. The event is free, donations accepted. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/land-return-return-to-land-tickets-444870227827
Sogorea Te’ is just one of the many groups participating in Rethinking Thanksgiving: From Land Acknowledgements to LANDBACK on Sunday, November 20th, at 1pm. They expect that webinar registration may fill up for this one, in which case the event will also be livestreamed on Facebook.
I’ll be listening in to both these webinars, and would love to know if any Unsettling readers also expect to join in! (Reach me at unsettling@substack.com and let me know.)
Later this week I’ll also share why I’m choosing to mark the holiday this year with what may seem like a less than obvious choice: fasting. Turns out there’s some interesting historical precedent to my decision. More on that in a few days.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg