Brian McKenna: Giving Thanks to America's Indians: Native Resurgence Spurs Hope
Eli_S
Giving Thanks to America's Indians
Native Resurgence Spurs Hope
http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna11242006.html
By BRIAN McKENNA
A few days ago my 4th grade daughter came home with a 20 question
"Thanksgiving Quiz" very disappointed at her failing grade. We looked
it over and noticed not one question about Indians, a topic she knows
well. But I quickly noticed that there were two questions about
football. "How many football games are played between Thursday and
Sunday? And "What pro football team always plays on Thanksgiving?" At a
loss, she had kept both blank and was marked wrong.
There are, in fact, two Thanksgivings in rough torn opposition, I told
her. There is first the U.S. imperial tradition in which American
Indian history is swept under the banquet table so that the feasts of
turkey, football and shopping can be thoroughly enjoyed. All three are
tied, fittingly, to accumulation and war. This year brings news that
K-Mart and other top retailers opened on Thanksgiving Day itself.
Meanwhile Walmart, Target and other top retailers are going for the
"holiday jugular" in their competition for consumers, encouraging folks
to preview websites on Thanksgiving Day to prepare for the Black Friday
siege.
The other Thanksgiving is being born in the Indian resurgence of the
last forty years, culminating in some dramatic leaps in the 21st
century. In 2004 the ($100 million) National Museum of the American
Indian opened along Smithsonian row just across from the Capital, Their
main message is not "we seek justice, " but "we are still here." The
Museum should be required for all visitors to DC.
We also discussed the fact that President Bush pardoned two turkeys
this Thanksgiving season, sparing their lives. This had also been
mentioned in school. Then we talked about the power of pardons and how
it relates to Thanksgiving. I pointed out that the President didn't
pardon Leonard Peltier, the American Indian political prisoner unjustly
jailed for 30 years now.
Thanksgiving is a fitting day to pardon Peltier since American Indians
are - or should be -what Thanksgiving is largely about. In the
celebrated European tale the Wampanoag Indians rescued the starving
Pilgrims with their friendship and bounty leading up to a glorious
feast in 1621. We learn that the Pilgrims gave hearty thanks to the
Indians at this very First Thanksgiving in North American history. To
commemorate the ritual our children are encouraged to wear paper brown
bag costumes and feathers in school plays celebrating this poignant
affair of brotherhood.
But, like the substitution of football for American Indians, there is
no mention in the official tale-become-myth that just 16 years later
the Pilgrims returned the gesture by massacring hundreds of Pequot
Indian men, women and children at Mystic, Connecticut. John Winthrop,
the Massachusetts Governor, announced a thanksgiving in celebration of
the slaughter.
Like the Pequot massacre, Peltier is unmentionable.
America prefers Tonto-esqu "good Indians" located in the far off past
where Indian rebellion can be ideologically managed. Real Indians with
real culture and real grievances are generally taboo.
The Smithsonian Museum counters this though several creative multimedia
exhibits and artistic displays, illustrating how hundreds of thousands
of American Indians are actively reclaiming their identities. One of my
favorites is "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities" which shows
how residents of eight Native communities - from the Campo Band of
Kumeyaay Indians (California, USA), to the Pamunkey Tribe (Virginia,
USA) - live in the 21st century. Visitors hear their stories and come
to understand the difficult choices American Indians make daily in
order to survive economically, preserve their languages and traditional
arts.
But the Smithsonian messages are remarkably modest as anthropologist
Jack Weatherford underscores in his important book, "Indian Givers: How
the Indians of the Americas Transformed the world." Weatherford goes
far beyond common sense to demonstrate that indeed, "the Indians gave
us three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation." These crops range
from potatoes (associated with dramatic power shifts after its adoption
in Europe), the peanut, squash, beans (string, butter, lima, navy etc.)
and chocolate. In the dominant consciousness corn is usually relegated
to a few ears of disfigured, multi-colored "Indian Corn" not the raging
agricultural empires of Archer Daniels Midland, a transnational that
has not given anything back to the Indians.
A visit to the Smithsonian museum this summer revealed some severe
cognitive dissonance with this kind of knowledge. I overheard a
lunchtime conversation from a visiting family in which the children
said they wanted to eat at the Indian museum which hosts a spectacular
cafeteria with 100% American Indian foods. An elderly man in the group,
probably the father, announced, "No way am I eating here, I want to eat
real Amercian food!" and then led the group outside to Union station
where they, no doubt, ate Indian food.
Weatherford shows how the U.S. Constitution borrowed heavily from the
Iroquois Great Law of Peace, with 500 year old established ideas and
practices related to the federal system, the separation of powers, how
to accept new member states, the importance of letting one person speak
at a time (unlike the British) and impeachment. In many ways the Great
Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee.
is superior to the U.S. Constitution. There is a provision for example,
endorsed by Franklin, where warriors had a say in electing the chiefs
who put them to war. Weatherford calls his chapter "The Founding Indian
Fathers," the sort of courageous language that the Smithsonian curators
have not broached, sitting as they do a stones throw from world power.
Weatherford also has much to say about Zapatistas and others who "gave
the world generation after generation of revolutionary inspiration."
The ongoing rebellions in Chiapas continue this example.
Today 2.4 million U.S. citizens claim Indian heritage as of the 2000
census, up significantly from 1990. There is a dramatic growth of
Indian Law programs, Indians Studies programs, a regeneration of Tribal
Colleges, and an all out effort in the fight for sovereignty.
In public education some teachers are increasingly action confronting
the distortions. The AP's Ana Beatriz Cholo reports that when San
Francisco teacher Bill Morgan enters his third grade class wearing a
black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper he begins snatching up
pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils, telling them that
the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The kids
protest and want their things back.
There is resistance from some quarters. "It's an uphill battle," he
said.
Make no mistake, the pressure of neoliberal capital is incessant. A
terrific 2005 award winning film "Homeland: Four Portraits of Native
Action," captures this dialectic well. It documents one of the least
known but most important human rights stories today: nearly all 317
American Indian Reservations in the US face environmental threats from
the Bush administration -- toxic waste, strip mining, oil drilling and
nuclear contamination. The film profiles four instances of how First
nations are fighting back, and sometimes winning, if only until the
next wave of right wing battles. The film is beautiful to look at
showing spectacular backdrops from Alaska to Maine to Montana to New
Mexico, at the same time it is a call to action showing how grassroots
organizing and environmental lawyers can help in the fight. Winona
LaDuke gives important insights in the work.
There is a historic thread leading from Peltier to the Homeland film to
the new Smithsonian museum. Peltier stood with the American Indian
Movement when AIM and similar groups helped reassert Indian pride using
many of the strategies and tactics of the Black Panthers. They took
over Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to draw
attention to their plight. Peltier is part of the movement that the
popular t-shirt announces is "Defending the Homeland since 1492."
The essence of the struggle is that the Europeans and U.S. colonized
these lands through genocide, slaughter and deception. It was,
theoretically speaking, part of the primitive accumulation of capital
in which the Europeans played the part of the primitives. In Algeria
the indigenous people kicked out the French and in Southeast Asia the
Vietnamese turned back the French and Americans. But where does the
U.S. government go if the Native Americans (dwellers here for at least
10,000 years) remove them from its soil? The issue raises too many
uncomfortable questions. And thanks to the Indian resurgence, these
questions are increasingly being asked.
But they are not often asked on Thanksgiving where it is most
appropriate. The dominant Thanksgiving is instead a prolonged ritual
enactment that works to help reassure Americans that our country was
founded on good will and cooperation between two equal peoples. It's a
fetishized (false) harmony that suppresses much of the essential truths
about Indians and about capitalist culture, in general. In this version
the ritual also works as a relief valve, a celebration of the ideal of
family togetherness in a world of job insecurity, suffering and broken
families.
In Native American culture, every day is Thanksgiving and in fact,
harvest celebrations (i.e. thanksgivings) go back thousands of years.
But with European colonization many of them, like the Creek's Green
Corn Festival were forced to go underground. This is all part of the
hidden history of thanksgiving.
The truth is, the two alternate narratives are not reconcilable.
Do we pay homage to good dead Indians or honestly reckon with the
redress of grievances of millions of native peoples before our own
eyes?
Do we thank the Indians for helping out a few puritans or thank them
for helping to give us our culture at large?
Brian McKenna can be reached at: MCKEN...@aol.com
Red Cloud
Eli_S wrote:
> November 24, 2006
> Giving Thanks to America's Indians
> Native Resurgence Spurs Hope
> http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna11242006.html
>
We should thanks 20 million Mexican invaders to spur the population
of native people
of US America. Who needs real Native America Indians, anyways? We have
20 millions invaders claiming themselve native.
Flint_...@hotmail.com
bleedin heartz can BUY$ N hug at night while dey criez demself to sleep
over allah shit dey put on da world...