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Should we celebrate Thanksgiving?
I will, but with remembrance
Once the buffalo roamed the plains and the earth trembled beneath them. Once the passenger pigeons were as numerous as the grains of sand. Once the forests cloaked the Northeast in silent majesty.
The Europeans came. Unfortunately, the Native Americans didn’t have a big, beautiful wall to keep them out. They actually taught their new neighbors how to grow crops and survive in their new land. No good deed goes unpunished.
Hundreds of years later, we can talk about the Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act, discuss The Last of the Mohicans and The Lone Ranger… but what remains of Native American culture?
It’s not that Native Americans were some ideal people. They were human beings, just like the rest of us. And white people weren’t evil. Most were escaping persecution or poverty and wanted a better life for their children.
If we have sympathy for Mexican or Central American or Laotian immigrants to the United States, we have to also have sympathy for the Irish escaping the Potato Famine or Germans fleeing religious persecution.
Yet should we have a holiday that seems to glorify the extinction of a people, and myriads of Native cultures?
