Giving Thanks in a Native Way

Today, I am honored to share a guest post by Malinda Maynor Lowery, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Lowery was born in Robeson County, North Carolina and is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Her book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation was published by University of North Carolina Press in March 2010. She has published articles about American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, and religious music. Lowery has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning “In the Light of Reverence”, which showed on PBS in 2001 to over three million people. Her two previous films, “Real Indian” and “Sounds of Faith,” both concern Lumbee identity and culture.

Giving Thanks in a Native Way

by Malinda Maynor Lowery

“Ooh, I’m going to spend Thanksgiving with the Indians!,” joked a co-worker of mine one autumn afternoon in the late 1990s. He and I were crewmates on one of my short documentary films which discussed Native Christianity among the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, the tribe to which I belong. He was from New York City and had never been to the rural south, nor to an Indian community, and he had a whole host of notions, beginning with the idea that it was odd for Indians to celebrate Thanksgiving.

I thought he was equally odd for thinking this. I’ve known a lot of New Yorkers, and most of them don’t assume they know everything, but this friend wore that stereotype as a badge of honor. Of course, that should have been my first clue that I was going to have un-educate him before I educated him. We were going to do a chunk of our filming over the Thanksgiving holiday, when my mother’s family had a large gathering at my grandparents’ house. It always featured our traditional Lumbee food, our family “singings” (to us, that word was not just a verb, but a noun–an event), and the parade of dozens of relatives. Why shouldn’t Indians celebrate Thanksgiving? My family reveled in its meaning, not as a national holiday that commemorated a Pilgrim fantasy, but as an actual time to give thanks. We ought to have Thanksgiving four or five times a year, at least.

Actually my friend’s statement was the first time I realized that to some people, Thanksgiving might mean the commemoration of some colonizing event. “Geez,” I wondered naïvely, “is that what those paper headbands with feathers were all about in grade school?” Honestly, I had never really noticed; it just seemed like yet another item in the endless procession of stereotypes about Indians that we learned in school. My dad, a college educator long experienced in un-educating, enlightened my friend first. “To us, Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest,” he told him. “We thank God for giving us what we have.” My father didn’t elaborate any further, because to him, that said it all. In saying “we,” he wasn’t just speaking for himself or his family or his generation, but in fact speaking about our whole history, our tradition of giving thanks on a seasonal, monthly, even daily basis. That tradition extends back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, before anyone ever heard of the Pilgrims. And my friend evidently got the message. Thanksgiving meant something different for us than it did for him. Foremost, he understood that Indians, not the Pilgrims, came up with “Thanksgiving.” The holiday is only meaningful in that it gives us all a few days off from work; otherwise, we take every chance we get to give thanks.

Not all Indians take this rather nonchalant attitude about the holiday. Many New England descendants of the Indigenous peoples at that first event feel that the only proper response to the predictable European theft of their practice of giving thanks is to boycott the holiday. This response is also rational–to idealize the Pilgrims as people who thanked the Indians (after robbing their graves, threatening and kidnapping them, and so forth) is sort of ludicrous, especially when it happened to your own ancestors.

My friend’s “un-education” showed me how deeply many Americans are trapped in such amnesia, and how, despite being the objects of that amnesia–the ones forgotten–many Natives are free of it. We are blessed to remember our ancestors, our history, and our values, despite the centuries of neglect, oppression, and outright theft we have suffered.

If the Pilgrims and the Indians cross your mind this Thanksgiving, remember that they only do so because of a symbolic theft of the very practice which has sustained our Native communities in those nearly four centuries since: the practice of giving thanks. It started with us, but we are happy to share it with you.

Learn more about Malinda Maynor Lowery, and her work, at her website.