A Brewster on Thanksgiving 2022
In the past hour I’ve come across two articles about Native Americans and Thanksgiving. The first was a more general take on the fact that not all Native Americans are happy to celebrate a day of thanks when in fact they lost their culture, their history, their language, themselves, and instead see Thursday as a Day of Mourning. This is an important concept but most of the rest of the article is pretty light in terms of why Native Americans might be upset beyond the obvious genocidal historical approach. There was a bit in there about the inappropriate nature of dressing up like pilgrims and Indians for elementary school pageants, that kind of thing. The second (link), by Tony Tekaroniake Evans, a Mohawk writer, examines the role of Squanto in that first Thanksgiving of 1621. Not only is this account much more factual, it is also more detailed in its examination of colonialism.
The reason I’m writing this piece is that I feel I have both a vested interest and a rather complex perspective on Thanksgiving. My Brewster line goes back through Jonathan Brewster, who was granted land in Connecticut by Uncas to maintain a trading place with the Mohegans, to his parents William and Mary who were on the Mayflower and must have had intimate contact with Squanto.
As a decolonialist, it’s complicated for me to celebrate myself and my heritage when that moment is also a symbol unlike any other. It’s so important that people understand this fact-based account of Thanksgiving and the landing of the Mayflower.
I spent last weekend in Rhode Island, and spent the day at the shore. It was sunny and 72º in mid-November. I sat on the beach and thought about James Thomas Stevens, the Mohawk poet, who wrote the long poem ‘Tokinish’ about that shore and the Narragansett nation’s dealings with Roger Williams. The word tokinish, we learn in the poem, is the Narragansett word for wake him. I studied Stevens and Eric Gansworth for my Master’s Thesis, and in doing so, my goal was to learn and pass on my learning about Haudenosaunee literature. Having Stevens’s and Gansworth’s perspectives helps me remember how to stop and partake in observation while using other ways of seeing to mediate both my thoughts and my desire for knowledge.
Stevens writes in Tokinish that “Weight is the catastrophe of what we don’t know, the unsleeping gravity drawing boat to shore.” Though he is playing with John Donne’s ideas about sleep being a “Malediction… in perpetuall sleepe,” he is also drawing focus to the assumed inevitability of history. Roger Williams came ashore in Rhode Island, and brought with him the heavy unsleeping gravity of colonization. This weight we still carry.
The reason I read Stevens in the first place was a suggestion by Daniel Heath Justice, a Cherokee professor of literature at the University of British Columbia. In a chapter called “Indigenous Writing,” Justice shifted my own perspective of writing, knowledge, and history. His argument is not that as the voices of Indigenous writers like Stevens and Galsworthy gain prominence that some accord of justice will come to their heritage, their cultures, but that “Simply by existing, Indigenous voices are a threat to the presumptions of settler supremacy, for they insist on other ways of abiding with the world.” I asked for his recommendations for contemporary Indigenous writers.
Justice packs a lot into that sentence, but it can be understood without a load of grad courses behind you. Existence, he says, is all that is necessary. And all around us here in the United States, we see and hear Indigenous peoples. I live about 25 miles from sovereign Onondaga land. Since before the existence of the United States, the Onondaga have resided there and over the years, though their lands have been subject to repeated encroachments by New York State, the Onondaga abide. Present tense.
The point Justice is making continues. Indigenous voices “insist on other stories, other ways, other possibilities.” Like Stevens’s unsleeping gravity, this insistence is a natural law. Indigenous voices, like gravity, exist, and in existing, they create their own gravities. Are these weights, as Stevens implies, catastrophic? Or is this the crushing weight of 400 years of colonialism on the Narragansetts, the Wampanoags and other nations who bore the brunt of that first English contact and the relentless waves that followed?
On this day of Thanksgiving or Mourning, all I ask is that you take a moment to consider how your life would be enriched if you learned more about the Indigenous people where you are, and listen to their voices. They will share concerns and joys, just like any other community, and you will gain another perspective. Their voices “offer us a way to imagine otherwise.”
For Justice, and for myself, the mere existence of Indigenous voices is enough to know that colonialism is not inevitable. Unlike Donne’s perpetuall sleepe, the weight of their voices will wake us.
