Thanksgiving A Loaded Holiday for Many Native-Americans
by Melanie Conklin
When Bobbi Webster, a member of the Oneida Nation, talks about being thankful, she mentions the strawberry harvest, tapping maple trees for syrup, the summer solstice and seasonal change. Feasting, family and giving thanks are the root of multiple thanksgiving celebrations spread throughout the year for the Oneida and other American Indians.
And on this fourth Thursday in November, Webster, like millions of Americans, will gather with her family for a feast, make her mother's recipes for chocolate cake and cranberries, talk about gratitude and celebrate Thanksgiving.
"This time of year we all celebrate Thanksgiving, but we have 13 ceremonies of thanksgiving ongoing throughout the year," Webster said. "Sometimes you have to take the best of the worlds around you, draw from all the cultures. Thanksgiving is a time we see what we have in common."
But because of the roots of today's holiday in the early encounters between European settlers and native populations, there's a multiplicity of viewpoints among American Indians about Thanksgiving.
"Some see it with hostility. Some celebrate it with guilt, while others see it as an opportunity to educate and get in touch with our Americana," said Patty Loew, a historian, journalist and member of the Bad River Ojibwe.
She's in the latter camp. If you entered her kitchen, she said, "you would probably mistake me for any other American celebrating a day of food, friends and family." Her family table includes red cabbage from her German ancestors and Korean kimchee from her brother who loves spicy foods.
But Loew understands why some American Indians choose to fast or protest the holiday because it is rooted in a mythical image of the 'first' Thanksgiving feast in 1621 as a "hands across the waters, friendly, wonderful experience." Squanto, she noted, learned English as a slave. And by the time Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, tribes were already decimated by diseases likely brought by earlier European settlers.
So she uses Thanksgiving, and November's National American Indian Heritage Month, as a chance to correct that image and replace it with a deeper understanding of native culture.
"In mainstream America, sometimes we just give thanks for our football teams and the extra notch on our belts," Loew said. "But this one time of year is a real chance for me to share the native spirit and talk about thanksgiving in a broad, spiritual way."
Loew cited an Iroquois thanksgiving prayer as embodying Indian sentiment on thanks. It gives thanks to the waters, birds, plants, moon, people, teachers, the creator and more, beginning:
"Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people."
Prayers of thanks to the creator are said every day of the year, said Anne Thundercloud, public relations officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation.
"We're a very spiritual people who are always giving thanks," Thundercloud said. "The concept of setting aside one day for giving thanks doesn't fit. We think of every day as Thanksgiving." She added that her family, and many Ho-Chunk, have adopted today's Thanksgiving holiday as well, drawn to another chance to gather for a feast with family. And the celebration continues Friday, which is Ho-Chunk Day, celebrated in Black River Falls with a large community event.
* * *
And while I stood there
I saw more than I can tell,
and I understood more than I saw;
for I was seeing in a sacred manner
the shapes of things in spirit,
and the shape of all shapes as they must
live together like one being.
Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks
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