Thanksgiving: One Navajo’s Perspective

The students in China were interested in learning about the American Thanksgiving. So last week their American teacher, my friend Bianca, set up a Skype call between her Chinese students

and a real live Native American (yours truly!). The questions were basic; we talked about my Navajo culture and what Thanksgiving means to Americans. Then a cute little Chinese girl who was even too shy to show her face to the camera asked me a question that made me think.

“What do the Navajo people think about Thanksgiving?” 

Huh. That’s a thinker.

The immediate answer that comes to mind is that we love it. For many, it means time off of work to gather with family and to eat good food.

But Thanksgiving feels a bit different to me this year.

This is due to the time I have spent on the Navajo Reservation this semester. I have been working at a chapter house as a Health and Wellness Educator and have taught tennis to Navajo children in schools, a chapter house, and a foster home. I have taken Navajo Language 111 at the local community college and embarrassed

Tennis just outside of the Navajo Reservation

myself over and over trying to speak it with other Navajo people. And I have taken advantage of every opportunity to listen to the stories, thoughts, and feelings of the Navajo and other Native American people around me. After five months of immersing myself in the Navajo culture more than I ever have before, I feel differently about Thanksgiving. It feels…..dirty. It feels as though good Native Americans aren’t supposed to be happy about Thanksgiving.

This feeling was brought to the surface by the circulating Facebook memes that compare the acceptance of Syrian refugees by modern Americans to the acceptance of British refugees by Native Americans in the 1600s. These memes assert the idea that the Europeans were more dangerous to the Native American population than Syrians could ever be to Americans today.

I must admit that the Navajo part of me gets satisfaction from the underlying messages that these memes seem to send. I hear, “Those immigrants didn’t belong here” “They destroyed Native America” and “They were unwelcome intruders that never should have come”.

Perhaps all of these statements are true. Perhaps Europeans had no business on the North American continent. But they came anyway. And that caused havoc on the Native American population. Their foreign diseases alone wiped out over 80 percent of the Native population. That’s millions upon millions of people. This was followed up by centuries of war, genocide, culture stripping, and broken promises. We Native Americans have every reason to be angry. I have every reason to feel hatred and bitterness toward the “intruders” who intentionally or unintentionally tried to either kill or change every one of my Navajo ancestors. I am angry that the

A Navajo Codetalker monument in
Window Rock, AZ

government tried to eradicate the Navajo language in boarding schools, then used the Navajo tongue as a means to win their war. I am angry about The Long Walk. And my head throbs with anger when I think about the Anglo religious leaders who convinced my great aunts to give up our traditional Navajo medicine bundle- a bundle of everything that was once held sacred in our family- in exchange for a promise of protection from their deity. Even as I did research for this article, I found myself wishing that I could go back in time and punch Christopher Columbus in his special place. Kit Carson, too. Fuck him. My heart breaks to think what my great, great Navajo grandparents endured when the settlers reached our part of the country in the 1800s. War. Displacement. Being hunted like animals. They watched their world get burned to the ground. They froze. They starved. Their friends and loved ones died around them as they watched, helpless and terrified. And the small percentage of people who survived were surely broken and traumatized. As modern-day Native Americans, we are descendants of those broken-hearted survivors. We still feel the effects of what

Horseback riding in Canyon de Chelly,
the motherland of the Navajo

happened. We were told the stories as children and we took field trips to the sites of those atrocities. We have stood where our ancestors fell. Oh yes, it’s personal.

Historical trauma is real and it lives on the reservations. It lives where there is poverty, racism, abandonment, suicide, domestic violence, sexual and drug abuse, alcoholism, disease, and general hopelessness. It lives where the people have been lied to and mistreated so many times that trust is a distant memory. These are the symptoms of generations of brokenness. It is reality for many Native Americans today.

We have every right to hate.

I have every right to hate.

But I don’t.

I can’t.

See, as an American with German and Dutch roots, my mother descends from those “intruders”. Her great grandparents immigrated from Germany and Holland with high hopes of finding
a good life in a new world. Decades later, their great granddaughter ran away to New Mexico and married a Native American- a Navajo man whom I call “Dad”.

Because of this, I am not filled with hate toward those European intruders. I am filled with gratitude. Because of them, I exist. Because of them, my German-American mother, my German/Scottish-American best friend, and my English/Scottish-American boyfriend are here. Maybe others don’t feel this way, as

Attending a Kinaalda (a rite of passage
ceremony for girls) near Tuba City, AZ
 January, 2014

that seems like a lot of trouble to produce little ‘ol me. But I sure appreciate it, for without that grotesque history, I wouldn’t be here to have much of an opinion at all. Many of us wouldn’t.

In addition to my gratitude, I feel indescribably saddened when I think about the history that led us here. I am burdened by the brokenness that I witness every day at work on the Navajo Reservation. I am distraught from the deep and pervasive heartache I see in the eyes of many Native children whom I teach. We still have gaping wounds that must be tended to. We still hold burning resentment in our hardened hearts that can only be soothed and softened with forgiveness.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. He suggested that we use this holiday as an opportunity to “heal the wounds of the nation.” He wasn’t talking about the sad history of the Native Americans. But it’s time to. This is the original wound of our nation. It has been bleeding for 400 years. We all know what happened and as Americans we each carry the results in our very DNA. None of us were there. But the story belongs to all of us. The responsibility to heal this wound belongs to all of us. We have to forgive each other. We have to actively participate in the conversation, bringing compassion and understanding to the table. Then, and only then, will the wounds of our nation begin to heal.