Thanksgiving 2024: Different ways the festival is observed around ...

The celebration of gratitude, good food and great spirits is here. It’s the season of festivities and the holiday season doesn’t get kicked off without the Thanksgiving feast. Unless the dinner table isn’t laden with the glorious turkey, mashed potato, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and mulled wine and the air isn’t filled with joy and laughter – it’s no celebration at all!

However, there is an alternative side of the history of Thanksgiving as well. Read on to know more.

Thanksgiving has its origins in the traditions of the Pilgrims and Puritans, who brought their Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving to New England in the 1620s and 1630s. The modern Thanksgiving holiday in the United States has its roots in the 1621 harvest feast. While not explicitly considered a "celebration of genocide," many argue that Thanksgiving is a problematic holiday because it glosses over the brutal history of colonization and the devastating impact it had on Native American populations, essentially presenting a sanitized version of events that ignores the atrocities committed against them, which some view as a form of historical erasure that can be seen as disrespectful to Native Americans.

Historical context:

The traditional Thanksgiving narrative depicts a peaceful feast between Pilgrims and Native Americans, but the reality is that European colonization led to widespread displacement, disease, and violence against indigenous communities.

For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed. Organized by the United American Indians of New England in 1970, the fourth Thursday in November (Thanksgiving) is recognized as the National Day of Mourning for Native Americans and their allies.

Many people gather at Cole's Hill in Plymouth for an organized rally and day of mourning on Thanksgiving. Here’s what they have to say about this choice to mourn:

“Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”

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What really happened?

In 1621, when English Puritan settlers arrived at 2,000-person village of Patuxet, which is now known as Plymouth, Mass., the Wampanoag had been active farmers throughout the land. Consequently, the English arrived to well-maintained fields primed for the cultivation of squash, beans and maize. In March of 1621, after robbing homes and graves in Patuxet, settlers encountered a sachem, or local leader of the Wampanoag confederacy, who, in turn, called for head Wampanoag sachem Massasoit to Patuxet. Massassoit obliged, and accompanied by an English-speaking former slave named Tisquantum — known to most schoolchildren as Squanto. After negotiating a formal treaty with the colonists to ease “the shifting balance of power in the Indigenous world,” the Wampanoag imparted their agricultural knowledge to settlers so that they could survive through the fall harvest. The English’s harvest celebration, to which Indigenous locals were hesitantly invited, is what inspired contemporary conceptions of Thanksgiving — although Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the phrase “thanks giving” was never recorded in colonial diaries at the time.

What proceeded 50 years later was the bloodiest war ever fought in what is now the United States, King Philip’s War. Sparked by Puritan land grabs and the execution of three Wampanoag men by settlers, King Philip’s War — named after the English nickname for the Wampanoag leader Metacom — killed as much as 40% of the Wampanoag nation and led to the enslavement of many Indigenous men. It is clear that the supposed exchange of gratitude from the settlers was nothing more than a pretext to establish the roots of their colonial project. This colonial project was predetermined and would be achieved through whatever violent means necessary.

These scars were caused by precisely the same historical events that Thanksgiving purports to celebrate. However, while one has portrayed peaceful relations between the English settlers of Plymouth and the Wampanoag nation culminated in “the first Thanksgiving,” the other commemorates a broader, more authentic history of settlement, war making, extermination and other tactics of genocide. This history of massive violence is inherent to the modern holiday of Thanksgiving.

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Criticisms:

Critics argue that celebrating Thanksgiving without acknowledging this history perpetuates a harmful myth and disregards the suffering of Native Americans.

University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen wrote on the AlterNet website, by 1637, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop “was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children” – a bloody pattern that would “repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated”.

The work of historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, serves up plenty of additional food for thought on this matter. In a 2015 paper on the indisputable genocide of Native Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz explained point blank that settler colonialism in general “requires a genocidal policy” and that “Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”

In his book, ‘A People’s History of the United States’, late historian Howard Zinn outlined other mechanisms of capitalist dispossession. An 1814 “treaty” with the Creek nation, for example, functioned by “splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholding, bribing some with land, leaving others out – introducing the competition and conniving that marked the spirit of Western capitalism.”

Celebrating Thanksgiving:

While almost the whole of West buckles up to celebrate their ‘turkey day’, some prominent celebrities have stepped back from indulging in celebrations keeping the history and contexts in mind. Many celebrities have made their thoughts about Thanksgiving quite clear, with some explaining why they don’t celebrate the occasions and others who have denounced it.

Cher has a long history of being an outspoken public figure throughout her career. She has always kept up with that tradition of hers. In 2013, after a fan asked her to clarify whether or not she celebrated Thanksgiving, Cher explained that she saw the day as an opportunity to eat dinner with her family, but wasn’t down for the celebration “of a great crime.” When asked to “elaborate” on why she considered the holiday to be a crime, she replied, “Stealing Land,from a ppl,Who believed,Owning LAND Was LIke Owning SKY! We gave them Blankets laced w/Smallpox.”

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Global star Angelina Jolie doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, given its contentious history. Back in 2016, a friend of Jolie had told PopEater that the actor was “grossed out” by the American holiday and that she had in intention of honouring it; and that, she in fact “hated the holiday and wanted no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans.”

Shailene Woodley, the ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ famed actress, has been quite vocal about the holiday and why she previously opted not to celebrate it. In 2016, the Divergent star joined Dakota Access Pipeline protesters and criticised the “false narratives” that children in America are taught about the holiday. She said during an interview with TYT Politics, “From the time we’re little kids, we cut out cardboard paper pictures of pilgrims and feasts and turkeys, and yet none of our children know the truth about not only what happened to Native Americans when Westerners decided to colonise this country, but what is still happening to Native Americans.”

Jon Stewart of ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ notably made fun of Thanksgiving on his program, where in 2014, he jokingly addressed the history of the holiday and how he’d be remembering it. He quipped, “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighbourhood to my house, we had an enormous feast and then I killed them and took their land.”

Recently, English actress and well-known activist Jameela Jamil posted on Instagram, how instead of celebrating Thanksgiving, she does a ‘Hanksgiving’ where she watches Tom Hanks movies and eats curry with her friends. Jameela, who is known for advocating for health of women over unthinkable beauty standards and diet culture of glamour industry, shared the post with a quirky caption, writing, “Please eat today. Don't let the diet demon adverts on sale get you and make you feel guilty for enjoying the MASSIVE privilege of enjoying food that you're lucky to have, with loved ones who you're lucky to still have here when so many are losing theirs right in front of our eyes.”

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