From Nichola Torbett, Associate Director of Kirkridge Retreat & Study Center

Dear friends,

Gratitude is certainly a great thing—a spiritual practice, a discipline of noticing the gifts we receive. Festivals of gratitude honor the generosity and abundance of the earth and reinforce human interdependence with the more-than-human world. They have the power to restore relationship.

In this country, at this time, what we have as a festival of gratitude is Thanksgiving. How does that land for you? How is this holiday for you?

I know that so many of those reading this email are spiritual deep-divers. I’m wondering if Thanksgiving rings hollow for some of you, if you find yourself longing for something with more authenticity and depth.

After digging into the history of this holiday, I’ve come to think that Thanksgiving is “under occupation.”

Thanksgiving was declared a federal holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as a celebration, pretty explicitly, of the genocidal campaign he was actively waging against the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. Lincoln was in the process of clearing the West for the completion of the Transcontinental railroad.  His Thanksgiving declaration came down while more than 10,000 Navajo people were being rounded up, under Lincoln’s command,  into what was essentially a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo; the campaign is known among Navajo as The Long Walk. The holiday was announced just months after the Bear River Massacre in which US troops under Lincoln’s command killed hundreds of Shoshone villagers and less than a year after 38 Dakota people were hanged in Minnesota–the largest mass execution in American history, again, under Lincoln’s command. In his Thanksgiving Address, Lincoln proclaimed:

“Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.”

In other words, the occupation of the land for the purpose of settler wealth extraction was proceeding well, and Lincoln declared a feast of gratitude to celebrate that. That’s the day we mark on Thursday.

If you’ve ever sat around the Thanksgiving table and felt a sense of hollowness despite everyone’ commitment to sharing genuine gratitudes, perhaps it is because the gratitude at the base of this last Thursday in November is under occupation, trapped under a thin propaganda veneer covering over a genocide. From the time we were children, we’ve been taught a Thanksgiving story that sugarcoats great violence. 

In these tumultuous days, many of us desperately need some time off, a day with family and friends. And of course, expressing gratitude is good. But I’m not sure we can get to genuine gratitude from here. Not without honesty about the true history of the day. Not without a reckoning. Not without ackn0wledgement and mourning and reparation and #LandBack. Gratitude lives deep below the shame that keeps us from this reckoning. (More on shame below.)

So, how do we begin to move toward honesty about this day? 

There is no perfect way. We aren’t going to “get it right” when so much has been wrong. But nonetheless, we can begin. Here are some humble suggestions for things you might do this Thursday:

Learn about and talk about the people indigenous to the land you are on. Talk about them in the present tense.

Sign the petition for Pennsylvania state recognition of the Lenape people

Watch Mark Charles’s video called “Why I no longer celebrate #Thanksgiving (and neither should you) This video is the source of much of my learning this year.

Read aloud a children’s book written by and recommended by American Indians

Read aloud the suppressed speech of Wamsutta (Frank B) James

Watch some or all of the livestream of the National Day of Mourning held each year by the United American Indians of New England

Tell truthful stories about the role your family members played in the history of this land without making them into caricatures.

Take a collection and donate it to indigenous-led organizing such as:

NDN Collective

Sogorea Te Land Trust

Indigenous Environmental Network

I know these are hard conversations to have as families. It’s easy to let anxiety tense us up, especially around more conservative family members,  so that we end up coming across as self-righteous rather than broken-hearted and longing. It’s okay to start small and come from the heart.

We wish you not so much a “happy Thanksgiving” as some realness, some connection, some depth in your gatherings. The need is huge. We are grateful to be in the search with you.