Ep 13: Jews Talk Thanksgiving, Part 2

In this second Thanksgiving episode, April and Tracie dig in to the unpleasant truths behind the myths of Thanksgiving. April recounts some of the deep sadness and loss she feels around missing knowledge and culture from her Native ancestors, while Tracie reflects on the holes in her education around the oppression of Native people.

Content warning: we discuss the genocide and oppression of Native American people, as well as rape and sex slavery in the context of American history.

Resources mentioned or recommended:
More on Leonard Peltier
The Native people at the first Thanksgiving were Wampanoag. Read more from historian David J. Silverman about other details your elementary school left out or got wrong.
Learn more about native land acknowledgement.
To find the names of the peoples whose ancestral land you inhabit, check out Native-land.ca.
Tracie inhabits Susquehannock land. 

Transcript

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- In this second Thanksgiving episode, we dig into some emotional spaces as we unpack anti-Native racism that the holiday brings up, that for American Jews, it's an unexamined holiday that, like, adopting it was part of how they assimilated, and so they have adopted it, like, full bore, and it's completely unexamined, and I'm including myself in that as well. Like, I really have never done a whole lot of thinking about Thanksgiving and the-- Well, I'm a great person to do it with,- Well, yeah, I mean, that's kinda what I- as someone who's spent a lot of time on it. (giggles)- was thinking. Yeah, so it feels like a useful thing, and also too, I just edited the one, the white supremacy one, where you sort of said, like, "I decide, and sometimes it's not for me. I'm not the right person'cause it's too hard for me to have that conversation," so if that's the case with this, like, I wanna honor that.- No, I'm up for it. I'm up for it. Thank you, I appreciate that. This is "Jews Talk Racial Justice with April and Tracie,"- [Tracie] a weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker.- [April] In a complex world, change takes courage.- [Tracie] Wholehearted relationships can keep us accountable.- So Tracie, you proposed this morning that, you know, you said that it would be good for us to talk about Thanksgiving and that you're on your own journey, that, you know, you've been really dedicating yourself to learning more about race and racism and racial justice and anti-racism, all the phrases,(laughs) and in terms of Native American oppression, that's one piece that you have relatively less knowledge of, and so you were excited for us to possibly explore that subject as well as any other things relating to the holiday.- Yeah, yeah, definitely. Realizing that there is sort of a hole in my education regarding the origins of the holiday. I think I still mainly have the myth that I was taught as an elementary school kid, but also just the structural and systemic nature of the oppression of the indigenous people of North America. I think I have a couple of moments in my head, you know, Trail of Tears, maybe, and, you know, other moments that, like, they did teach me in school, but I don't, I haven't done the same kind of learning regarding the oppression of Native Americans as I have done around the oppression of people of African heritage in this country. So yeah, it's definitely in a hole for me that I'd like to address, and I'm guessing that maybe some of our listeners have similar gaps in their education.- So I'm looking up and out because there's this bird that you can probably hear, and it feels in my mind like it's my ancestors in some way. I'm not sure what the message is, but I haven't had birds land on my window, and this bird is just chirping away, and I feel like it's my indigenous and African ancestors being, like, "Oh, like, we have a lot to say about this subject. Guess what, we have a whole bunch to say," right, and here's the thing, like, I kinda hate Thanksgiving. Like, I, and I hate it because I love it. Like, I love part of it. Like, it's not like I'm apathetic. It's not like I don't care, but it makes me angry with my home country in a lot of ways about a lot of things. You know, I think before I could even talk about education or those pieces, like, I just have to get it off my chest. I didn't wanna ruin some folks' Thanksgiving with this stuff'cause I don't think that, I think at times, actually, I think that there actually is a real purpose for direct action, but I wasn't looking to do a direct action and mess up people's Thanksgiving with our podcast show.- Thanksgiving.- So I tried my best to hold my tongue. (laughs) What I would love, I actually don't fully know, but this is my best thinking that I can do thus far, and I think if there's likely still emotional processing I need to do to think even more clearly about this, that there's just so much betrayal and anger I feel relating to the holiday, but, like, it's, like, my basic stance is I love the idea of family time and being grateful for everything, but I don't want it intricately tied with the settler/colonial narrative about a people that this country, or a nation-state tried to entirely annihilate over hundreds of years and continually broke treaties with. Like the story of Natives in America after the arrival of settlers is just, not exclusively, but it's mostly one promise made and promise broken and treaty signed and treaty broken, and just countless murder and, you know, putting diseases, smallpox in blankets, and distributing them to Native people, and slaughter and, like, at the risk of saying too much, it is the equivalent to me if- I think the safest thing I can say, I think I'll say a safer thing that won't trigger other people's trauma as much, but, like, as if we had a similar holiday around slavery, where it was, like, the slaves were so happy and danced for us and love doing this, and we're all going to eat food together, and for me personally, and, you know, and I get into arguments about this with a beloved family member because they take the perspective of, "I want to bring in anti-racism into the holiday," and I'm just, like,"I wanna completely do away with this holiday. Let's find a different date on the calendar, ideally in the fall because Thanksgiving food is delicious, and recreate a different narrative." I mean, maybe if it's even just, like, switching the day or, you know, like, it needs to be some shift so people's work schedules are planned out, and because of capitalism, like, I need some kind of reset here, where we just do away with that asinine lie of a story. Like, and it's not even just that it's in the past. Like, with the pipeline stuff, like with-- Yeah, the Keystone Pipeline.- Excuse me?- The Keystone Pipeline.- Exactly, with the Keystone-- Was meant to go through Native land.- Yes, and, like,- Sacred land.- and Mount Rushmore is in the area that is a Native burial ground, and Leonard Peltier, who I did my international baccalaureate high school paper, a history, extended paper on, his wrongful incarceration. He is still wrongfully incarcerated for the suspected murder of an FBI agent, but the case was incredibly flimsy. Different witnesses have recanted. It was just totally bogus. Like, it's happening now, and so, it just-(sighs) I just get really upset about this stuff. Like, I think I need to take more time personally, honestly, to cry about it. Like, it's really upsetting to me, and it's heartbreaking, and it is so- I'll stop in a moment 'cause I don't, it's not like I put this on people who practice. Some folks do. I don't put it on. Like, I don't think some of my extended family who observe this, like, they're not, like, "Oh, yay, like, Native slaughter."(sighs) It's sickening to me. Like, I love gratitude. Like, I love food, all of those beautiful things. I want my mother to be able to keep one of her favorite holidays for all of the reasons why she loves it, because it's beautiful, right, and to me, some of the stuff is just not, there just needs to be a separation because it's sickening to me that that narrative is, like, it's just too- (sighs) Why don't you talk, and I just- It really, it really is genuinely upsetting for me, just heartbreaking.- Yeah, I see that. Part of what I think really is so heartbreaking is that the lie of the story that goes with Thanksgiving, at the core of it is the lie that the relationship between the white European settlers and the Native people was consensual, that this was, like, a consensual coming together of equals, that the Native people who- The name of the people, actually, we never learn it. We just call them Indians. We don't, at least, I never learned the name of the actual nation when I was a kid. I, just today, read an article that named them. Anyway, the story that we are told is that it was a gift, that the Native people came, like, consensually, lovingly giving to the white settlers, and that is just, I mean, even without any real education around it, just what I do know from what I did learn in middle school, I know that, well, that can't have been the case in the same way that I think I mentioned to you this morning that I sort of realized it's very similar to the lie that we were told about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave, who I was taught was his mistress. I'm putting quotes around that word, but the word mistress implies a consensual relationship, and she was his slave, and she was 14 when their relationship started. There was nothing, there's nothing truly consensual about that relationship.- Yeah, she was a survivor of rape.- Yeah, and sex slavery. I mean, the power dynamic there is-- Yeah, a child, sex slavery.- Yeah, yeah, and actually, her mother was too'cause her mother was the child of an enslaved woman and Jefferson's father-in-law. So I guess what I'm getting at is I'm inviting listeners to (sighs) really hear the distress that April is feeling around this and think about, like really sit with that and bear witness to it, and think about too the stories that you're told and really just scratch just a little bit and see that we weren't told the truth. We have not been told the truth about where this holiday came from and how it came to be and the people who were involved in the so-called first Thanksgiving.- Right, and I think, you know, I think part of it, you know, if I wanna be brave and go deeper because part of me, as I'm talking with you, I'm questioning, like, why is it so charged for me? Like, I do this kind of work all the time. It's something that I've been studying since I was a small child, and I think that that's part of it, is that there's still this, (sighs) like a certain amount of incompletion and disruption for me as someone with Native heritage. Like, my family are members of a Native American tribe. My grandfather, my grandfather's mother was Native. She was Cherokee with Chickasaw and Choctaw heritage from Chickasaw County, Mississippi, and I had to fight my entire childhood to find the scraps of identity, to know that part of myself. Like in middle school, I did this, for History Day, this National History Day competition, I spent a lot of time, I learned about the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. They're a group of people who are like my family, who are like me, who are the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the Southeast, and they, every year, they make these gorgeous, ornate costumes, and they bead, like, thousands of beads, and they bead, like, you can look it up, and they're stunning. I thought they were so beautiful, and I was, like, "They're like me," and I spent, I did an amazing project, and I was disqualified because I only had one source, one, what do you call, a primary source?'Cause there was only one published book about them.(scoffs) Like, I did all of this research, and I made my own costume with, like, a Star of David and the world, and I did, and I beaded these patches myself. Like, it's like, so I think part of this also just is, like, intertwined with the profound sense of loss I have, and what keeps me going is as I get more into my mystical education, and can find ways, but it's like it's a fight to connect with people who know something. You know, I had, I made huge progress for a while when I dated this guy who ended up being not so great in a lot of ways, but he was a former chief of a tribe of, I almost said the tribe for specificity, and then I was, like, that could identify him, so I'm not gonna say more, but and through him, I learned all of these things that made my life make more sense and helped me understand the visions I have and helped me understand a lot of things, and so, you know, I wonder if, (sighs) as I do more work to heal, that loss of, like, constantly reaching and not always having something to grab onto or specifically by white, but not only white. There was one black dude in college. I still at times have wanted to confront this person. He's actually really lovely, but I was at a mixed heritage club, and he was, like,"Girl, you ain't Native American Indian," like, and I, in that moment, I allowed him to silence me, and I got what he meant, and I felt that shame, but I shouldn't feel that shame, and just, this show isn't about me, but I think, for the purposes of, like, self-awareness and transparency, I think that might explain some of the heightened emotion and lack of clarity I have is that I need to do more work around just mourning, like, mourning what has been lost and what I feel missing in my own life in certain ways, and it won't fix it, but it will help relieve, it will help, like, release that suffering that I think could make more room in my mind and my heart to navigate this issue with the level of skill and sophistication that I do with other issues, whereas with this, it's just like I just feel stuck between the people I love who love it and me just feeling like I don't, I don't want anything to do with it. I value the positive parts of the propaganda about things that I deeply believe in and practice, and I want there to be correction around this other stuff, like, this has gotta get out of textbooks. I'm sure, I hope there's some group of smart people who are working to get this myth out of the textbooks. (sighs)- You know, sitting with you, with this-- Thank you for listening and being present.- Yeah, of course. You warned me that this would be hard for you, and sitting with you as this comes up, I'm really feeling the loss and the loss of the culture and the loss of sort of that connection to the ancestors. I actually, family lore is that I, on my non-Jewish side, actually have one Cherokee woman ancestor, so she was my father's mother's great-grandmother, so it was pretty far back, and the only name that we have for her is Elizabeth, which I suspect, though I can't know for certain, was the Christian name that she took when she married the white man that was my ancestor, and I almost never think about this woman, and hearing you think about your ancestors and trying to find more about them and being sort of stymied is really underscoring that loss of my knowledge of my ancestors as well.- And the culture of genocide, right, that it is hard to find, that, like these, there are millions, or there were millions and millions and millions of them. Where are the records? Where are the narratives? And, like, this is a part of genocidal settler colonialism, that either they were erased, or they're hidden, or they're incredibly hard to find, right?- Well, I think that actually, my ancestor Elizabeth is kind of speaking to that in my mind right now, and even the way that my family has sort of passed that down, it was like it was a point of pride, but it was really just like a little, "Did you know?" And then we moved on because we had, the whiteness had completely, you know, absorbed her, and she was just like a, she's become just a footnote kind of thing in our family tree, but the whiteness has completely absorbed and erased any Cherokee anything.- That's part of what whiteness does. It does that to European culture.- Exactly, I think that's really the profundity of that micro of my family tree to the macro of the way that whiteness and colonialism works is really kind of blowing my mind right now.- Right, yeah, and you know, I think, to sort of draw this to a close for the time being is some things that I'm holding in my mind that I think are important to name. As a general liberatory practice, I often like to name my specific tribe. I'm not in this moment because I'm anticipating that someday our show will be even more prolific, and I want to be, at times I try to be thoughtful about privacy of different folks around visibility and things, but you know, I think it's really important to contradict the notion that Native Americans are no more, that their numbers are much smaller, but Native Americans are still very much here and live in US society and are leading powerfully in all types of spaces around planetary sustainability, around women's rights, around public health, and so, you know, the first place I would go to once I process more of my own internal disruption is checking back in with liberation leaders from the American Indian Movement historically as well as what are current modern-day Native leaders saying around what are excellent next steps and what needs to happen?(sighs) Just like I look to black liberation leaders in terms of their thoughts, and movement leaders, and I consider myself a leader in my own right, but I am very much standing on the shoulders of many giants and following the lead and believe my leadership, and it's important for my leadership to be in accountable relationship with those who have come before me. You know, if it's meaningful for others, I invite you to search or maybe if and when I do take the time to do this, or you do, Tracie, we can revisit this conversation. You know, I don't know if I, I think because of what's live around for me, I don't know if I exactly addressed your specific (laughs) prompt.- I mean, I still have work to do, educating myself more about the truth that's behind the myth that I've been given, but even just being able to bear witness to the pain that's real, and today, I think, was an important moment for me and for our listeners because to your point that you just made, I think there is this sense that Native Americans kind of are no more, and that's obviously not true.- That it's not an issue, that it's purely a thing of the past.- Exactly, exactly, and it's clearly not true that these people or their cultures are extinct. The other thing I'm going to do, I'm gonna commit to you to do this, and I'm gonna invite our listeners to do this as well as a first step to start doing this is that there's a mapping project that looks at where, what different peoples inhabited the different lands, and I'm gonna look up what peoples inhabited the space where I now live, learning about them and honoring them regularly and saying their name and bringing their name back to the space that is now Baltimore. So, and I'll put the mapping site in our show notes, and I wanna invite our listeners to actually take the time in this sorta post-Thanksgiving moment to start to undo some of the myths that we've consumed and internalized about our fellow citizens whose families were actually indigenous to this land.- Yeah. Thank you. That's perfect. That's something that is often done in movement spaces, and we haven't talked about that practice, so I'm so glad you mentioned that, and so I think some of our listeners will be very, very familiar with it, and some may have seen it and not fully understood the context, and some may have not, so I really... One, I adore you in general, and so I'm really glad, since I'm more in a tender space right now, that you brought that up. It's really great. (laughs) Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliott Hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram, @elliotthammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation, visit jewstalkracialjustice.com, where you can send us a question or suggestion, access our show notes, and learn more about our team. Take care until next time, and stay humble, and keep going.