The Giving of Thanks
This used to be my favorite holiday. As a child who always bristled at and bucked against her Catholic upbringing, I really appreciated the coziest of the secular holidays. I enjoyed the shared preparation, the days of good smells coming from the kitchen, the abundance — and the absence of church-related guilt and discomfort. (Public schooling in the 80s and 90s offered a single story accompanied by construction paper headdresses, hats, and turkeys, so I was unaware of just how much unease the day ought to have stimulated in my fairness-focused and justice-seeking soul.) I was also charmed by the idea of people without shared language or history coming together over a good meal. It's a beautiful image. If only it had been true.
If I'm absolutely honest with myself, this long weekend still is a treasured time. It offers much-needed space to enjoy several of my favorite things: creative cooking for others (with at least some foods we grew from seeds we keep), a luxurious stretch of slow days filled with reading, snuggling, game-playing, leftover remixing, and giving voice to our gratitude. It’s a time when folks feel comfortable accepting invitations to your open house and fewer schedule conflicts get in the way. Work emails quiet for once. It’s not what the holiday stands for or pretends to be about that I love. Rather, I savor what this collection of days allow us a break from. But I hesitate to shorthand that by saying: I still love this holiday. Doing so feels insensitive, bypassing, and out of touch. In fact, I'm not even sure how the hell I'm supposed to refer to today.
Let’s look at the options:
Thanksgiving
Well, sure. It’s a classic. But that doesn't signal that I'm aware of and horrified by the bloody history that all the pilgrims-propaganda is designed to cover up.
Indigenous People's Day
Didn't we celebrate that in lieu of another awful holiday last month? And why do we seem only to acknowledge and uplift our indigenous kin as a way of balancing out the bad mojo of celebrating genocidaires?
Harvest Dinner
It's a little late for that here in Northern Vermont and while some of our preserved harvest will certainly show up on my table, that seems out of sync and a little too convenient. (Especially considering that my husband just returned with a hefty haul of groceries.)
Black Friday Weekend
Oh, hell no. Let's not replace colonial fantasy with consumerist orgy. (And, yes, truly, I've heard those words uttered without irony).
The November Holiday
Technically true and appealingly neutral. But also a pretty clear sign that we're skirting something substantial.
Here is where I land (for now): It’s “Thanksgiving” because I inhabit it as a day to give thanks, to center and steep in gratitude.
It’s “Thanksgiving” because in the United States especially, we desperately need to defend time and space for the active, shared practice of visible and verbalized gratitude.
It’s “Thanksgiving” because I am thankful for now knowing about the taking that we pervert and try to hide under a story of giving. Because I am so, so grateful for the presence and generosity of descendant-survivors of colonial violence who share stories and songs that remind us that humans existed before modernity. Here, I mean both indigenous kin on this continent and elsewhere. Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island are, as Rowen White (Mohawk) says, “living already in a post-apocalyptic reality.” Their ”blood memory tells [of] other ways to live on this earth in an economy of abundance that doesn't destroy that which we love and are intimately and actively in a mutually reciprocal relationship with.” Their lives are proof that we had — and could once again have — cultures that aren’t contorted by colonialism and capitalism. This reminds me, a diasporic person struggling to unearth the cultures of my ancestors who fled the same forces, that it is always worth resisting the violent, calamitous manifestations of these cultures of death and destruction. At present, that means going hard for a ceasefire and end to the occupation of Palestine. It also means not ignoring the extractive violence and displacement in Congo, in Sudan, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in the Nagorno-Karabakh, in Ukraine. Likewise, it means not turning away from the oil-rigged land grab threatening the sovereignty of Guyana. Really, it means knowing that this list — any list of atrocities — is necessarily incomplete. So, it also requires us to stay open and willing to perceive the vastness of human suffering and to demand radical action, the kind that address root causes.
It's also “Thanksgiving” because that word in English is how we translate the prayer and invocation of the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen — also known as the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address — the lengthy, intentional ritual recitation of the peoples of the Six Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora).
The Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen is sometimes referred to as a prayer, but while I'm fussing over language, even that reverent word fails to capture what I understand to be the role of these "words that come before all else." Writing about the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address in her consciousness-shifting book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) describes it as “far more than a pledge, a prayer or a poem alone... [it is] at heart an invocation of gratitude . . . a material, scientific inventory of the natural world.” Importantly, it invokes the “ancient order of protocols” which “sets gratitude as the highest priority.” As it proceeds, "each element of the ecosystem is named in its turn, along with its function."
As I understand it, the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwe was a daily sunrise prayer, as well as a convocation and blessing recited at the open and close of social and religious meetings. As it is recited, thanks are given to each of:
And after each is addressed — spoken directly to, with honor and gratitude — all assembled name their unity in that expression, saying: "Now our minds are one."
This ancient ritual lights me from within me for many reasons. First, it connects the human social world with all its relations, across time and space in a way that honors — but does not instrumentalize — any. Second, it is a collective practice of gratitude that requires all present to connect and align themselves through gratitude before any other activity or business is conducted. Grounding in gratitude for all that is alive with us — and acknowledging both animacy and interdependence — surely shifts the universe of the possible and creates a sense of deep belonging. It's reverence narrows the spaces into which impulses toward violence and destruction creep. Fourth, it aims to be comprehensive and does not cut corners. Reciting it takes time. As that time is given, any tendency to rush slips away. Fifth, it doesn't assume that it has actually addressed all that is worthy of thanks. It's closing acknowledges what may nevertheless have been unacknowledged:
"We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we have named, it is not our intention to leave anything out. If something has been forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send their greetings and their thanks in their own way."
While the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen was not a part of my lineal ancestor's practices, it was absolutely part of how the lands I've lived on were loved. As a descendant of displaced persons who settled here and left most of their culture behind, it helps me find a way to be in right, loving, and reciprocal relationship with the place that makes my life possible. It is part of how I try to naturalize myself to the continent that holds my body. It is one way that I offer thanks for the hills that hold my home. And it reminds me that it is possible for our minds to be one in both gratitude for live-giving forces and determined resistance to what desecrates.
I do not listen to or recite the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen often as over-relying on it starts to feel appropriative. But I've allowed it to influence my own gratitude practices and rituals. I revisit it in full least once a year. On Thanksgiving.
