As
A Native American, I've Found A Better Way To Celebrate The Holiday
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Various
ingredients foraged from prairie land around Coteau des Prairies
Lodge near Havana, N.D., July 19, 2016. Dan KoeckThe
New York Times/Redux
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Sherman is the founder
and CEO of The Sioux Chef and the author of The
Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, which won the 2018 James Beard
Award for best American cookbook.
Every November, I get
asked an unfortunate, loaded question: "You're a Native Americanwhat
do you eat on Thanksgiving?"
My answer spans my lifetime.
I was born and raised
on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South
Dakota in the 1970s and am a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux
Tribe. Growing up, I went to a very small country school on the
reservation, in the poorest county in the United States. Our school
had predominantly Native
students, but we were still taught what everybody was about Thanksgiving:
It represented a time when "pilgrims and Indians" celebrated together,
and it was about being thankful. Only later would we find out that
it was a lie.
But as I was taught this
story, my family gathered on Thanksgiving at my grandparent's ranch,
where we held a huge feast of very typical recipes, most of them
straight out of a circa-'60s Betty Crocker cookbook.
I remember the mingling smells of dishes cooking throughout the
day as our moms and aunts crowded every kitchen surface preparing
for the large offering. We had the staples, like roasted turkey;
mashed potatoes and milk gravy; sweet potatoes with marshmallows;
green bean casserole with onion crisps; brand-name stuffing; canned
cranberry sauce; an assortment of cold pasta salads, Jello molds,
cookies, deviled eggs; and 1950s-style glass platters filled with
canned California
black olives, pickles and piles of veggies. On occasion, we had
Lakota dishes like Taniga (intestine soup) and wojape (chokecherry
sauce).
Those are good memories.
Though once my grandparents passed away, my family never celebrated
holidays like that again, gathered in one place on the reservation.
In the years since, my perspective on Thanksgiving has changedat
first from a sense of bitterness surrounding the real history of
those lies we tell, of the actual stories we should honor and mourn,
and then with a renewed hope for what our celebrations
could be, if we simply changed our focus.
It was the Wampanoag
in 1621 who helped the first wave of Puritans
arriving on our shores, showing them how to plant crops, forage
for wild foods and basically survive. The first official mention
of a "Thanksgiving" celebration occurs in 1627, after the colonists
brutally massacre an entire Pequot village, then subsequently celebrate
their barbaric victory. Years later, President Washington first
tried to start a holiday of Thanksgiving in 1789, but this has nothing
to do with "Indians and settlers, instead it's intended to be a
public day of "thanksgiving and prayer." (That the phrase "Merciliess
Savage Indians" is written into the Declaration of Independence
says everything we need to know about how the founders of America
viewed the Indigenous
Peoples of this land.) It wasn't until the writer Sarah Josepha
Hale persuaded President Lincoln that the Thanksgiving holiday was
needed and could help heal the divided nation that it was made official
in 1863. But even that was not the story we are all taught today.
The inspiration for that was far more exclusionist.
According to the 2009
book, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday
by James Baker, who was a researcher at Plimoth Plantation, this
changed during the Progressive Era (18901920), when the United
States became a global power rife with industrialization
and urbanization. It saw a rise in nationalism, as European immigrants
poured into the country, and the Protestant
Americans who'd massacred indigenous people feared being displaced.
Colonial ideology became the identity of what it was to be truly
"American," and they began implementing teachings to clearly define
"Americanism" for the new immigrants. One of these was the sanitized
story of Thanksgiving which fabricated a peaceful depiction
between the colonizers and the tribes and neglected to mention the
amount of death, destruction and land-grabbing that occurs against
the first peoples, setting the tone for the next 200 years. By 1920,
writes Baker, the story of "pilgrims and Indians" became a story
every American school child was taught, even in Native schools.
But our families lived
something different. My great grandfather helped fight off General
Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, alongside other Lakota and
Cheyenne, not even 100 years before my birth. I think about my great
grandfather's lifetime, being born in the 1850stoward the
end of the genocides that began in the 1600s across America, and
stretching into the subtler but still damaging years of assimilation
efforts we have endured since. He saw escalating conflicts between
Lakota life as he knew it and the ever-emerging immigrants from
the east. He witnessed the disappearance of the bison,
the loss of the sacred Black Hills, the many broken promises made
by the U.S., along with atrocities like the Sand Creek and Wounded
Knee Massacres. He saw his children attend the boarding schools
where they had their hair forcibly cut and were punished for speaking
their languages. I wonder what he thought about the Thanksgiving
story.
But I do not wonder about
this: Thanksgiving really has nothing to do with Native Americans,
and everything to do with an old (but not the oldest) guard conjuring
a lie of the first peoples welcoming the settlers to bolster their
false authority over what makes a "real" American. (Remember, only
in 1924
were Native Americans allowed to become citizens of the United States
and it took decades more for all states to permit us to vote.)
It is a story of supposed unity, drained of the bloodshed, and built
for the sake of division.
Many of my indigenous
brothers and sisters refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving, protesting
the whitewashing
of the horrors our ancestors went through, and I don't blame them.
But I have not abandoned the holiday. I have just changed how I
practice it.
The thing is, we do not
need the poisonous "pilgrims and Indians" narrative. We do not need
that illusion of past unity to actually unite people today. Instead,
we can focus simply on values
that apply to everybody: togetherness, generosity and gratitude.
And we can make the day about what everybody wants to talk and think
about anyway: the food.
People may not realize
it, but what every person in this country shares, and the very history
of this nation, has been in front of us the whole time. Most
of our Thanksgiving recipes are made with indigenous foods: turkey,
corn, beans, pumpkins, maple, wild rice and the like. We should
embrace this.
For years, especially
as the head of a company that focuses on indigenous foods, I have
explored Native foods. It has given meand can give all of
usa deeper understanding of the land we stand on. It's exciting
to reconnect with the nature around us. We Americans spend hours
outdoors collecting foods like chanterelles, morels, ramps, wild
ginger, chokecherries, wild plums, crab
apples, cactus fruit, paw paws, manzanita berries, cattails,
maple, wild rice (not the black stuff from California, which is
a modified and completely different version of the true wild rice
growing around the Great Lakes region), cedar, rose-hips, hickory,
acorns and walnuts. We can work with Native growers producing heirloom
beans, squash
and pumpkins, and Native corn varieties, all coming in many
shapes, sizes and colors. We can have our feasts include dishes
like cedar-braised rabbit, sunchokes with sumac, pine-stewed venison,
smoked turkey with chestnuts, true wild rice with foraged mushrooms,
native squash with maple, smoked salmon and wild teas.
No matter where you are
in North America, you are on indigenous land. And so on this holiday,
and any day really, I urge people to explore a deeper connection
to what are called "American" foods by understanding true Native-American
histories, and begin using what grows naturally around us, and to
support Native-American
growers. There is no need to make Thanksgiving about a false
past. It is so much better when it celebrates the beauty of the
present.
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