October 10, 2024: Contested Holidays: Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning

[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to a special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]

On two ways we can be thankful while mourning.

Gotta go four for four with asking you to read other pieces at the start of this week’s posts: two years ago I wrote for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on Wamsutta James and his lifelong efforts to reframe Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. Once again I’ll ask you to check out that prior piece if you would, and then come on back for some further thoughts on how we can put these two contrasting commemorations in conversation.

Welcome back! I don’t want to minimize any of the specifics of the National Day of Mourning, which I think was and remains a vital addition to our collective calendar. But I do believe there’s value in an occasion which presents us with an opportunity to be thankful, and would say that the combination of these two commemorations can add importantly to that perspective as well. For one thing, I’m hugely thankful for the activists who throughout our history have pushed us to better remember our hardest and most painful histories, a list that most definitely includes countless indigenous activists, from William Apess and Zitkala-Ša to the American Indian Movement and Wamsutta James and up to so many in our present moment. When I make the case, as I do frequently, that critical patriots embody the best of American ideals through their recognition of how we’ve far too often fallen short of them (and their concurrent desire to push us closer to them), it’s precisely folks like these about whom I’m thinking, and remembering James on Thanksgiving would thus commemorate our best as well as respect the legacy of his National Day of Mourning ideas.

That’s a collective point, and the more important of the two I’ll share here to be sure. But I have to add a more personal and I hope understandable complement: how thankful I am for the lifelong opportunity both to learn about such figures and communities and to do my part to help make them all more consistently and fully part of our collective memories and conversations. I don’t want to pretend for a second that any aspect of my work equals or even parallels that of activists like James—but the chance to help connect more of my fellow Americans to him and his voice and ideas and efforts and effects is not only not one I will ever take lightly, but also is genuinely one of the aspects of my work (in the classroom, in writing and scholarship of all kinds, and in any and every other way I can think of) for which I’m most thankful. I try to remember that as well as Wamsutta James and the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, and I hope you all will as well.

Last HolidayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?