[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]
As I’ve
done for most of the posts in this week’s series, I’m going to start by asking
you to check out two prior pieces of mine:
This Saturday
Evening Post Considering History column
on Wamsutta (Frank) James and the 1970 speech in which he proposed a National
Day of Mourning.
And this
blog post where I expanded on that column to further consider why and how
we could pair that Day of Mourning with Thanksgiving.
I said a
good bit of what I’d want to say today, on this especially fraught Thanksgiving
Day, in that blog post in particular. If we can’t find a way to do those multiple
things at once—to remember and mourn while we gather and express gratitude, to
truly engage with our worst while we still work for our best, to live with both
sadness and joy—I genuinely don’t know if we can endure as a nation, at least not
one with any community worth the name. And Wamsutta James felt the same, as we
see in the moving close of his
speech: “We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a
beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years
later, it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the
American Indian.” Bringing past and present together, James reminds us that a National
Day of Mourning can still be—indeed, if done right would still be—something
celebratory and optimistic. Here on the first Thanksgiving since the
loss of my father, I’m as personally as I am professionally grateful for
that vision of mourning, of the holiday, and of us all.
Last
thanks tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d
share?
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