Thanksgiving: The American Myth
In November of 1621, the Wampanoag Indians took pity on the newly arrived Pilgrims, and they provided a harvest feast as a gesture of welcome and to share their abundance with those in need. Three hundred and ninety-five years later, Thanksgiving is writ large as the American holiday for all families. The Norman Rockwell-esque dining room table groaning with every imaginable side dish and a perfectly golden brown turkey taking pride of place is an image seared into our cultural lexicon, in the same way that football games and televised holiday parades are.
We Americans like our myths, especially the ones where we can gloss over uncomfortable truths as we unbutton our pants to make room for more pumpkin pie. One of the worst myths of our country is the idea of Manifest Destiny, which emboldened us to think of the land as ours, not theirs. “They” being the Indigenous/First Nations Peoples, incorrectly identified by Christopher Columbus in 1492 as “Indians” and more recently referred to as “Native Americans.” Not only was the land ours but also we knew better how to manage it than the people, who had lived in harmony with it for generations. With wars, broken promises, dishonored treaties, and campaigns of genocide, we broke the Indigenous Peoples to our will and pushed them out of sight and mind onto reservations. That was their “sovereign territory”, though as with anything western Europeans want, “ownership” never favors the other. It’s a game best played by those who invented the rules.
Here we are in 2016, and we sit around our tables with friends and family, celebrating our time together. We’ve had 395 years of myth-making and story-telling. In those stories, conflicts are in the past, as we’re all Americans now. Whether we just arrived this morning on a direct flight from wherever to JFK or our lineage boasts of being the first people to draw breath on this land, we tell ourselves that we are one.
Meanwhile, in Standing Rock, ND there is a situation that exposes our hypocrisy and lies. All the stories and myths are for naught when it becomes clear that “American exceptionalism” is just another code phrase for greed. Despite being warned forty years ago that our dependence on fossil or non-renewable energy sources was a losing game, we chose doubling-down on oil because…there was money to be made there. Certainly with advances in technology, using oil seemed reasonable. We could kick the environmental can down the road for another few generations while we made money for our shareholders now.
All of these decisions have crystallized in a little known place, inhabited by the Standing Rock Sioux. Men, wanting to capitalize on increased production of oil from fracking, decided to build a pipeline. As with anything men decide to do, money was the primary factor. Major corporations, national and international, helped create the Dakota Access Pipeline Group, and the expectations were of easy profits for decades to come.
What these men didn’t expect to encounter was opposition. First in a suburb of Bismarck, ND where the Army Corps of Engineers re-routed the pipeline away after residents spoke out about concerns to their well water and then in Standing Rock, where the Sioux voiced the same concerns about their water sources being contaminated by a pipeline spill. As is the case in many of these eminent domain situations, wealthy (white) neighborhoods take precedence over poor (non-white) neighborhoods. The DAPL Group chose to re-route the pipeline through an area that was sovereign territory of the Sioux. What they didn’t expect was push-back.
There have been protests in Standing Rock since mid-summer. The “water protectors”, as the anti-DAPL side is known, have garnered attention from environmentalists and activists around the world. With a rallying cry of “Mni Wiconi/Water Is Life”, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has had an outpouring of support from other Native tribes as well as concerned non-Natives. The stand-off has become increasingly tense, and there is a likelihood that the DAPL will succeed, despite property and human rights violations.
Despite the renewed environmental interest in clean water, many people sitting around the Thanksgiving table this holiday have forgotten about another place in America, where the water has been poisoned. Flint, MI has been without clean drinking water since April of 2014. The governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, has been aware of the crisis in Flint for over 400 days. To date, the water in Flint remains undrinkable. It is contaminated with lead from an aging infrastructure, and the water source, the Flint River, is not safe.
Flint, MI was already ravaged by the decline of the auto industry, the loss of union jobs, the globalization of the economy. However, without clean water, its residents can't survive there and can't afford to leave. Those, who own their homes, are unable to sell because they're (ironically) "under-water" on their mortgage or their entire savings was wrapped up in their property. Entire neighborhoods are half abandoned and almost entirely forgotten.
The fact is that we all have a duty to each other, which was a lesson the Wampanoag Indians were trying to impart on the bedraggled Pilgrims back in 1621. In typical western European fashion, we fail to learn from our history as we repeat it in nauseating circles. As we are beginning to realize, we can’t expect the government to solve our problems. In fact, we are beginning to realize that government, especially when it is run by corporate interests, is the cause of our problems. With each day, we realize that we have only ourselves to lift one another up. With each day, we realize that Thanksgiving is the greatest American myth of all: the idea that we could take from someone in our time of need and then repay them in beads and small pox while writing stories about our heroism. If we are to be thankful for anything, let it be the fact that many of us are waking up to see the world as our Mother, not our piggy bank.
Water is life, but in America today, clean water is also a luxury for the wealthy. We live in a country of abundance for the elite and rancid scraps for the most vulnerable. If Thanksgiving is to mean anything as a holiday, we have to love each other and we have to honor the environment, which is both our Mother and our Home.