Robert Jensen: No Thanks for Thanksgiving!!

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self reflective collective fasting. In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model. Since 1970, they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas. Not only is the thought of such a change in this white supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits, which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States. That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable. But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin, the genocide of indigenous people, is of special importance today. It's now routine, even among conservative commentators, to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all of our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful. One vehicle for taming history are various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of US myth building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621, following the Pilgrims first winter. Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.