Day 146: Gratitude for life in all its maddening complexity
Here is a different version of the first Thanksgiving from the one most Americans learned in school. This blog of the Potawatomi nation describes Squanto’s (Tisquantum’s) enslavement and travels, the deadly pandemics that preceded Puritan settlement, and the alliance of the Wampanoag with the Pilgrims as a defense against the much less devastated Narragansett.
Gratitude for Life in All Its Maddening Complexity
Many people resist alternate versions of history from the ones we were taught in grade school. I get it. We all want to cherish a day of gratitude for the blessings of life, for gathering to share those blessings with family. We don’t want our family day to become about guilt and genocide. We certainly weren’t alive then; we didn’t create evil, and Europeans didn’t invent it. Can’t we just eat turkey and be thankful?
Fortunately and unfortunately, history refuses to fit into neat categories. Colonization devastated native nations. Some causes, like disease, were unforeseen. Some, like land theft, were deliberate. Puritans fled persecution in England. They caused it in North America.
For all the tragic costs of colonization, the English, embodied by Pilgrims, brought with them the principle of freedom of speech and of conscience. Today, we have the privilege of looking squarely at history. History, if we’re willing to look, reveals life in all its ghastly, beautiful, messy, tragic, hopeful complexity.
That is something all humanity will share today. Let’s give thanks.