more vagabond than king

[lotesse]

On the one hand, the workers' rights advocate in me is horrified by the fact that so many American businesses are going to be open on Thanksgiving this year. My mama tells stories about having oddly-timed holidays as a girl because my grandpa often chose to work at the steel mill on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day - but since that was an oldschool union job, he had the choice, and the reason he chose to work was that he got time and a half and every little bit helped. It's really terrible to think about similar families now being torn apart on holidays against their wills because workers no longer have rights to holidays or even the right to request unpaid time off. It reminds me of indenture. It feels really wrong.

But on the other - oh how I long for a War On Thanksgiving to be properly fought and won. I don't know if my dislike of potatoes is a factor here, but I hate hate hate Thanksgiving. Bland-ass food, and sure you can dress it up to taste better but why eat turkey and potatoes when you can eat red curry or beef bourginon or spicy tortilla soup? There's a reason we only eat traditional Thanksgiving foods once a year, y'all. Thanksgiving break cuts academic semesters really awkwardly - just as students need to be gearing up for finals, oh, no, go home for a week and forget everything you've learned since you left high school. Thanksgiving break comes when I least want to see people, when I'm most tired and irritable and overworked and underpaid and no I don't want to drive nine hours north, thanks, can't I just stay home?

And the racism. Columbus Day might be the most overtly racist of all US holidays, but Thanksgiving was the one they got me on back then; I was raised by a leftist family with a pretty good grasp on decency around diversity, but Thanksgiving was one major vector of racist indoctrination they missed. Year after year as a child I was encouraged by teachers and grandparents and other adults to bedeck myself in construction-paper-feather crowns, wear lipstick "war paint" and two fat blonde braids and brown-colored clothes and the pink fringy moccasins that I got every summer up on Mackinaw Island. So shamed of that shit; can't believe they let me do it, can't believe I didn't get that it was wrong. I was a dressup queen who'd grown up watching a blonde white Tiger Lily dancing with Mary Martin's Peter Pan singing uggawug songs. Blonde girls playing Indian Princess was modeled behavior.

And I got told stories about Squanto, about Pocahontas, about "The First Thanksgiving," came away with the impression that NDNs were all gone now, wasn't it sad, nothing we can do about it. Indiana, they called this place, the land of the Indians. There are burial mounds on the farm where I live, or we think that's likely what they are; no matter how good it feels to walk barefoot in the grass here and feel the vitality of the soil under my feet, this is not actually my land. My own relatively recent immigrant progenitors might not have been around to contribute to NDN genocide and marginalization, but we profited by it, picking up the good land that had been taken from native peoples. This is the knowing that Thanksgiving covers up: celebrate your harvest, sure, because winter gets long, but don't act like we have some sort of peaceable history with the native inhabitants of the land you live on, the land whose bounty you celebrate. Wouldn't a just and historically-minded nation have a day of restitution, or mourning, or anything other than self-satisfied celebration? We survived another year at others' expense, go us, let's throw ourselves a party.

Comments

[staranise]

It says something that Thanksgiving is a day of smug excess, not, "Wow, we are so humble and grateful to not be starving."

[executrix]

Ritual Sacrifice With Pie!