An American in Paradise (Lost)

Every Thanksgiving I do a little dance in my emotional self. The whole week I feel soooooo incredibly lucky to have been born in a country that has known virtually no war on its shores, plenty in its opportunity and freedom with very, very few encumberments on its people--in other words--all that is my birthright.

But then I remember and shed tears for another part of me, my Cherokee ancestors, whom no one in my family can remember or name before my grandmother; their names are not even written in the only family tree we keep--the frontispiece of my Mother's personal Bible. I am lucky enough however to carry some of their imprint in my features so that even if their names are unspoken they are honored and remembered in the presence of my being.

It may have been on my first learning about the protestant-backed doctrine of Manifest Destiny that I developed my mixed feelings toward religion and my country. The policy that gave God-fearing pioneers a supernatural stamp of approval to colonize the West, embraced the terrorism and genocide necessary to suppress and contain the 'heathen' and 'savage' American and Mexican Indian populations already inhabiting that coveted land.

Did my angst evolve into liberalism--a thinking that some charge "blames America first"? Perhaps, but not unless Americans forget the truth of our foreign military and economic policy; to occupy and usurp through a kind of political terraforming; or when Americans refuse to acknowledge that true intent and deflect rightful and mindful criticism with the shield of the flag or the cross. There is no one else to blame--if it is America--that goes there first.

So I offer, on this white man's holiday, in observance of all the indigenous tribes of the Americas and my heathen ancestors:

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.