Where were you last October 9th? What about November 23rd? If you spent these days as I did–the former enjoying the small glories of a three-day weekend, and the latter around a table heaped with turkey and trimmings–you may have missed an important new twist in the chain linking the present to the past. In recent years, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, two seemingly all-American holidays, have been “outed,” unmasked as racist rites. Turned upside down, mostly by Native American activists, these festivals have re-emerged transformed: Columbus Day has become Indigenous Peoples’ Day; Thanksgiving, the National Day of Mourning. These are days of rage, their organizers tell us, not days of rest, occasions for fasting rather than feasting. But we might wonder, when and why did the nasty business of Colonialism get mixed up with the quaint charms of ye olde colonial holidays?
Thanksgiving, long a painful holiday for Native Americans, first came under sustained public attack in 1970. That’s when officials of the state of Massachusetts vetted the text of an oration that Frank B. James, a Wampanoag leader, was slated to deliver at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower‘s landing. Deeming James’s impassioned narrative of stolen lands and broken promises off-key for the occasion, they promptly rescinded their invitation to break bread with him, thus inverting the very mythic, ancestral feast they were gathered to commemorate. But James didn’t go away hungry–or silent. He found another outlet for his voice when, that Thanksgiving, he gathered with hundreds of other Native American protesters on Cole’s Hill, the promontory above Plymouth Rock. There, they countered ritual with anti-ritual as they blanketed the rock with sand, dusted it off, and buried it again, thereby covering Thanksgiving with the first National Day of Mourning.
Thirty-one years later, this annual commemoration of an “un-Thanksgiving” continues. Now organized by the United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the National Day of Mourning lays at the alabaster feet of those mythic Pilgrims not a wreath, but a host of present-day evils including “sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system.” Last fall’s protest–which the Boston Globe pronounced “peaceful and uneventful” when compared to the alleged police brutality that had marred the event in 1997–was dedicated to the cause of Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement leader sentenced to death for the 1976 murder of two FBI agents. Quite a distance from William Bradford and Tisquantum.