Thanksgiving: Reassessing What You Think You Might Know
November 12, 2020
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It’s that time of year again. As the season turns, so does our attention to Native Americans. It’s Native American Heritage Month, and ironically, of course, the month we celebrate Thanksgiving. Or maybe it isn’t irony but something else. It’s that we celebrate the holiday while trying to acknowledge the history of a people often remembered wrong. So the celebratory spirit feels wrong, because we still aren’t willing to acknowledge what actually happened. Kids in schools dress up as Indians and Pilgrims as if it were a nice meal and a peaceable time generally, even after the fact.
Plenty of Native people still celebrate the holiday, too. Everyone has the time off, and no one is against gratitude. It’s complicated. And I would never condemn a Native person or family for having a meal together. The problem is deep and systemic. I don’t have any good answers about what to do instead or whether people should continue to celebrate the holiday. Thinking about what actually happened is a good start. Talking about it, even if the meal still happens, is a good beginning. But what actually happened, and according to whom, further complicates things.
It’s hard to know exactly how to feel about months of the year singled out to celebrate any people or culture or history anyway. It’s sort of like being a Native American author or writer. White men get to be writers. White people and history according to them get the rest of the attention when it’s not one of the months. And here I am, worried again about sounding mad or angry or bitter — about what exactly? A celebration of my people?
It’s just that we recently watched Native people getting shot with rubber bullets while praying to keep clean water and not have a pipeline get put into the ground. And, of course, we have a president in office whose favorite president in history was the worst for Native Americans, Andrew Jackson.
Not that I want to complain. It has been a good couple of years for Native people in the arts, including me. In addition to my novel, “There There,” we also had Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir “Heart Berries,” Tommy Pico’s poetry collection “Junk,” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s memoir-in-poems “This Wound Is a World” and Brandon Hobson’s novel “Where the Dead Sit Talking.”
Those of us who try to express ourselves in the arts with the hope of helping other people understand us — and to possibly make some kind of change in the world — have to celebrate when we are being paid attention to.
In that spirit, I’d like to draw your attention to some works from over the years that I think are important, highly accessible — and just very good.
The following books I loved and were formative for me.
Winter in the Blood James Welch
Tommy OrangeAuthor
Tommy Orange is the author of There There, a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. One of The New York Times' top books of 2018 and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There shows us violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.