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To be a queer Anglican of at least attenuated First Peoples descent at Thanksgiving is to find oneself roused to silent dissent over the holiday.
Thanksgiving, as we have come to understand and to celebrate it, finds its origin in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of November, 1863. It has been a federal holiday since then. Given the origin of Thanksgiving in the maelstrom of the Civil War, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken on a profoundly Northeastern coloration. Thanksgiving is now, and always has been, about retelling the next story with a distinctly Massachusetts-centric, white, Anglo, religiously Nonconformist accent.
Going to school in California ---among classmates of every conceivable sort and condition, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latino, families that had been in California for generations and classmates who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves— I always found it vaguely amusing to see an Ethiopian-American schoolgirl, descended as she was from an ancient, Christian, African civilization, togged up to look like a “comely Indian maiden” of the Wampanoag tribe. I, descended as I am from Native Americans appearing on one or more Dawes Commission reports, and therefore myself a “Congressional Injun,” was inevitably cast as a towheaded Englishman in whatever Thanksgiving pageants the educational bureaucrats of my elementary school had seen fit to inflict upon us. (It’s worth remembering that the rate of intermarriage among the Eastern Cherokee has always hovered around 100%; scratch a Cherokee and you will find Scots Highlander.)
But togging up Ethiopian, Latino, Native American, and Latino schoolchildren as English religious Nonconformists or Wampanoag Indians inflicted upon us a kind of historical amnesia that bereft us of knowledge not only of Native American Thanksgiving-type harvest feasts, but also of earlier, pre-Plymouth Rock European observances.
As we pranced about in our inauthentic pilgrim garb, we were blissfully ignorant, for example, of the thanksgiving feast held on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to mark the foundation of the City of San Augustín, Florida, or of the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by Juan de Oñate and his compadres at what is now San Elizario, a suburb of El Paso, Texas.
As much as we were ignorant of these early Spanish thanksgivings, we were equally ignorant of the very-similar-to-Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving feast that had occurred at Berkeley Hundred Virginia in 1619. For us, togged up in our inauthentic, Nonconformist Massachusetts 1621 attire, our Thanksgiving history and our national history was presented to us as having begun at Plymouth Rock with the arrival of the pilgrims aboard Mayflower.
The other shortcoming of the triumphant Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was that for those of us who came from religiously Conformist families, i.e., we were members of the Episcopal Church, was that it tended, and tends, to cast the Episcopal/Anglican Church as the villain of the piece. When we were taught the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth, the pilgrims were always presented as noble, stalwart, Calvinist souls fleeing religious persecution that, according to the myth, was somewhat akin to the sufferings inflicted on Christians under the Emperor Diocletian or on "heretics" by the Roman and Spanish inquisitions.
In short, the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was intended, whether knowingly or not, to poison our minds against the Anglican faith and to bias us with a pre-disposition in favor of Calvinist Nonconformity.
Now the truth be told, it has been said that the two foundational ideologies of our American society are capitalism and Calvinism. Given the tentacular reach of both ideologies into just about every aspect of American life, it is hardly surprising that the “official” Thanksgiving narrative should postulate what is, to all intents and purposes, an anti-Anglican, anti-Indian, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, narrative.
More than 150 years after the initial Thanksgiving proclamation, Thanksgiving has come to mean little more than an occasion for gluttonous feasting, political arguments with the Trump followers at the dinner table, and vacuous football pageantry afterwards. The thankful introspection to which President Lincoln’s proclamation called us has become as beyond our knowledge as have the other harvest feasts and thanksgivings which formed the context in which the Plymouth pilgrims celebrated their own Thanksgiving.
Instead of seeing Thanksgiving through the Massachusetts-centric, Yankee triumphalist sectional lens through which we have heretofore been accustomed to see it, perhaps we should read President Lincoln’s proclamation as a call to a broader, more inclusive time of thankful introspection. Perhaps we should give thanks for the coming together of native and newcomer, for the expression, throughout what has become the United States, of the basic human imperative to build communities, and for the equally basic human imperative to find gregarious companionship.
For what are we human beings except creatures whom God was gathered together into families and communities?
Nearly a generation ago, when the science fiction television series Babylon 5 was running, I watched the episode entitled “Lines of Communication.” In it, the character of Ambassador Delenn tells the commander of the Babylon 5 station that “[she] began studying [human] history. I came to the conclusion that of all the races we had encountered humans were the most dangerous. Because humans form communities, and from that diversity comes a strength no single race can withstand. That is your strength and it is that which makes you dangerous.”
Perhaps that’s the true message of Thanksgiving; we build communities; perhaps that will be our saving grace.
When we can understand that Thanksgiving is not about the triumphalist sectional narrative of a particular part of our society, but about coming together in thanksgiving and love as communities within our body politic, then we may envisage an hypothesis of salvation.
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
