Offensive to be Thankful?

I recently noticed a headline that Thanksgiving is an offense to indigenous people, promotes colonialism, etc.

Let’s just take a moment for that to sink in. A celebration following a winter they didn’t think they would survive, helped in part by people they had met in the North American continent, and spreading a table is an offense.

I really wanted to believe it was a joke, a parody of headlines, The Babylon Bee, or The Onion, publications designed to be humorous and deliberately misleading. No such luck.

A news source reputed to be conservative publicized another account of “The White Man” being wrong for no other reason than his skin is white and he is from a different place. Sound familiar?

I was struck by the irony. No, I’m not a well-researched historian. I am one who watches to see if the parts fit together. I ask questions look like they’re left on the editor’s desk. If all of the colonists, and explorers who landed in the North American continent came only to expand the slave trade, as some critics have said, why aren’t the critics protesting in European countries where these explorers came from.

The real question is why are we criticizing every effort to celebrate, to enjoy each other’s company. We’re to the point we can’t defend ourselves socially. Reply to criticism with “I’m not racist. I have a friend who is…” and immediately get called racist because you need a token minority in your circle. Again. Guilty based on superficial evidence, the very line of thought less than 10 years ago society was told not to.

The biggest mistake is people should thank their Native American friends. Historically, they are why Thanksgiving happened. Argue with me? Ok. But consider if there hadn’t been someone to guide the newcomers, the famine would have been another Roanoke Island with more questions than answers.

The European culture that came to North America clearly carried ignorance and aggression in the same hand, and it would make sense some of the native tribes and nations were equally as ignorant and aggressive. It makes sense because people, and many other species, get nervous among newcomers.

The key word, on both sides, is some. Not every white guy has slavery in his history. Not every Native American is angry, and not every black American is here because of slavery.

It would surprise me if some of the natives who first befriended the European settlers chastised, even cast out by their people. But we still need to hold onto the “some.”

The point from my side of the table is in this quest to find more victims, more reasons why the American white guy is evil, we miss the obvious. It is not an iron-clad situation. It is, however, an historic example of how a bad situation can be overcome, and how even the most unlikely meeting can result in a friendship.

I have had Thanksgiving dinners with people I was historically completely opposite… by appearance at least. The scene was the same as countless Thanksgiving dinners. The mothers aka cooks of the house scrambled to make sure everything was ready or cooking, the house was presentable and the children were behaving. Family members entered the home to be greeted with warm smiles and hugs and any bitterness society tells us we are supposed to wear was forgotten. They are people who don’t flash their differences. They spread the table to all who are invited. Some of these dinners I have felt closer to the hosts than with people I would be typecast. The difference is not the race. It is the attitude, the deliberate effort to accept people in their glories and their faults.

Ironically, the most-known history of the first American Thanksgiving involves a Native American who was taken into the slave trade, he escaped after learning English and found his way back home to the North American continent. Rather than being raged at a new encounter with a European, he helped.

He showed them how to live in a country they did not know. That is reason to be thankful.