Giving thanks has been celebrated at different times and places since time immemorial on this land we call America. Harvest meals have been an integral part of the lifeways of Indigenous peoples, a way of expressing gratitude for the earth’s bounty, the power of the creator and the people’s survival that continues today.
Our history books mark “the first Thanksgiving” in 1621 when at least 90 Wampanoag men, led by Massasoit, walked in on a Puritan harvest feast. It was held to celebrate the colonists’ first successful crops and survival in this new land. The Native guests stayed several days eating and feasting with the separatists, hoping to bolster their strained alliance.
Approximately 150 years later, all 13 colonies celebrated a day of solemn Thanksgiving to celebrate the win of the Battle of Saratoga in December of 1777. George Washington called for a day of thanksgiving and prayer in 1789 to give gratitude for the end of the Revolutionary War.
Then, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held in November of every year. His proclamation states: “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”
As the United States grew stronger and expanded across the continent, it unified around this national day of thanks. As a woman whose ancestors were displaced by manifest destiny, my feelings about Thanksgiving are ambivalent at best, and I imagine that most Native Nations did not celebrate a day of Thanksgiving and Praise without also recognizing it as a time of displacement, erasure and removal policies. Many of us have given thanks while also mourning the many instances of dislocation that our people have suffered.
During the same year that Lincoln canonized Thanksgiving, the Shoshone experienced the worst slaughter of Native Americans in U.S. history while winter camped on the Boa Ogoi (Bear River) near what is now Preston, Idaho. More than 400 men, women and children were massacred. Those who survived, including their leader Sagwitch, must have given thanks while holding the children who were spared and mourning those lost on January 29 of that year.
I’m sure the Diné/Navajo gave thanks amid mourning while walking 250 to 450 miles home to Dinétah in 1868 after the forced march of 1864 to Bosque Redondo, a military outpost to be held as prisoners in the most inhumane conditions. Many lost their lives, but those who survived walked home with hope of a better tomorrow.
And then there’s the boarding school experience for Native American families which started in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act Fund. The policy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” gave license to churches and the federal government to forcibly take children from their homes to live hundreds and even thousands of miles away in boarding schools where they experienced unimaginable abuse. United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) posted on social media that “Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person I know. Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry the trauma in our hearts.”
Some of my aunts and uncles were taken to boarding schools. My mother was spared because my grandfather hid her and a younger brother. My father and most of my uncles, remarkably, voluntarily joined the armed forces to fight for their country as did their children.
This Thursday, my family and I will gather for a meal of thanksgiving. I have extended an invitation to whomever needs a place to rest, feast and give gratitude. There is room at my table. Ultimately, it is my hope that we as a nation can continue to consecrate days of remembrance, where we can both celebrate and mourn, acknowledge and repair, and find ways to be thankful, even with a wounded heart.
(Brenda Beyal) Brenda Beyal is an enrolled member of the Diné Nation, born into the Salt clan and born for the Towering House People.
Brenda Beyal is an enrolled member of the Diné Nation, born into the Salt clan and born for the Towering House People. She is a mother, wife and currently the program coordinator for the BYU ARTS Partnership Native American Curriculum Initiative.
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