By Eva-Jeanette Rawlins
Growing up outside the U.S., I never fully appreciated the Thanksgiving holiday. So, when I sat at my first traditional turkey feast only a month after I came here, I wondered how I’d managed to survive without this magical day. I was hooked. It became one of my favorite holidays, as much for the food as for the family and friends I knew I’d see.
In recent years, though, as the day approaches I question what I’m really celebrating, for two reasons.
First, I look at the supposed origins of the holiday, the ones still taught to children in schools today: Some happy pilgrims and some equally happy Indians came together to feast and share in the bountiful blessings of the land they cohabited in such peaceful fraternity.
Generally, this is represented by cutouts of figures arm-in-arm, wearing top hats and feathered headdresses or something to that effect. I suppose having kindergartners cut out massacre scenes from construction paper wouldn’t go down that well.
It’d be closer to the truth, but that’s not important. It’d ruin our appetites before we got to the pumpkin pie.
In general, my growing disgust with the day’s true history made it less and less enjoyable.
Then I read something that Sherman Alexie, Native American poet, writer and filmmaker, said in an interview with Sadie Magazine. When asked if he celebrated Thanksgiving, he replied:
“Yup, [we] make a turkey, invite our lonely white friends over. We live up to the spirit of Thanksgiving ’cause we invite all of our most desperately lonely white [friends] to come eat with us. We always end up with the recently broken up, the recently divorced, the brokenhearted. From the very beginning, Indians have been taking care of brokenhearted white people…we just extend that tradition.”
Obviously, this is only one Native American’s opinion, and I’m aware that there are many equally important arguments against the celebration of a day that symbolizes lies, exploitation and genocide. Many call for a day of mourning instead. Rightly so.
What struck me about Alexie’s statement, however, was how he chose to represent the holiday. Rather than regurgitating a patronizing, Eurocentric story, he tells one that honors a people upon whose land shiploads of immigrants arrived, and who, though never acknowledged as equals, were ready to offer their knowledge and understanding of the land. This tradition—extending compassion, whether deserved or not, is one he chooses to relive.
The holiday would look very different if this were the Thanksgiving taught in schools and celebrated on tables across the country.
Which brings me to my second point: Black Friday.
It was recently reported that Wal-Mart stores will open their doors for the shopping weekend earlier than ever before—8:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Stores used to wait at least until the wee hours of the morning on Friday before allowing the masses to stampede through their doors, but no more. The retail giant has officially sunk its greedy teeth into Thanksgiving Day.
Instead of counting our blessings on Thursday, we’ll be counting the number of people ahead of us in line at Best Buy.
If ever there were a need to savor what’s truly important, it’s now. As we teeter on the brink of an economic depression, can we not have one day—one day—to focus on what we do have without the incessant reminders of those two, three, four things we don’t have (and absolutely cannot live without).
Last year, Americans spent a record $52.4 billion over Black Friday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. Despite the fact that the unemployment rate was over 9 percent and we were in a recession, we blew the previous year’s spending—$45 billion—out of the water. I guess that’s what plastic is for.
Seriously, though, imagine what we could do with $52.4 billion. For one thing, we could cover Oregon’s $5.7 billion public education budget for almost 10 years.
Okay, so dreaming won’t make it happen. I ask myself, though, what if Alexie is right? What if my Thanksgiving Day became about extending hospitality to the broken—instead of breaking the bank?
I have a sneaky suspicion I might feel really, truly thankful.