How Can We Celebrate Thanksgiving?

Time Immemorial

I’ve always loved the poetic phrasing time immemorial. Somehow its lyricism fits with the spiritual dimensions place takes on through the lens of eons. 

A decade of experiences on the Olympic Peninsula, most recently a foggy visit to the mouth of the newly undammed Elwha River, have left me deeply curious about the story of this place and the people who have lived here for time immemorial. 

Lest that phrasing feel too nebulous or clichéd and for that reason difficult to appreciate, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula has been occupied by the ancestors of today’s tribes since the Cordilleran Ice retreated. 

A great flood tradition exists across Olympic Peninsula native cultures, one that, according to oral histories, covered all but the tips of the highest mountains in the range. 

“It is possible that some of these [great flood] accounts relate to the retreat of the continental glaciers about fifteen thousand years ago,” reads Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are, a slim volume published by the Olympic Peninsula Intertribal Cultural Advisory Committee. “Geologists are currently conducting research relating the oral history of this region to earthquake and tidal events.”

In Elwha Klallam tradition, Mt. Carrie, in the northern reaches of the Olympic Range and visible from parts of the Elwha River Valley, was the high ground above the great flood’s reach. Those who took refuge on this 6,935’ peak lived to tell the tale. 

The Elwha Klallam People–themselves formed of the riverbank’s mud and then delivered by a mountain peak, bound and rebound to the land in their creation cosmology–have stories that place them here continuously for a duration so vast it fails to have meaning to my imagination of time entirely.

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“Every river has a people.” 

Ron Allen, Former Chairman Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe

Native historian and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. writes, “American Indians hold their land—places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind.”

What is the reference point from which my statements are made, I wonder. Is it the microcosm I think of as me? Is it the constructs of religion and culture I was born into? Or is it the place in which I’m held? What will it take to make that shift?

In 1974, the Boldt Decision–a pivotal court case in continuing jurisdiction for fifty years now–upheld Washington Tribes’ 1855 Treaty rights to harvest salmon and other seafood. These resources were historically abundant in the waters of and off Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, and Pacific Northwest Tribes thrived because of them. 

Per Judge Boldt’s ruling, Washington fisheries are now managed collaboratively by the state and Tribes, and habitat mitigation work is on-going. Dams have come down; culverts that block the upstream migration of salmon are being redressed across the state. The salmon runs today are only fractions of what they were pre-colonialism, and climate change has further stymied recovery efforts, but where restoration work has been done, the salmon are returning.

“I often wonder what standing we would have to protect the natural world and our environment if we did not have Judge Boldt,” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians is quoted in Charles Wilkinson’s Treaty Justice. 

I often wonder what standing the natural world and our environment would have if we did not have Indigenous peoples.

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How Can We Celebrate Thanksgiving?

In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Part of me loves Thanksgiving—the opportunity to be grateful in ritual. It feels so necessary, so welcome. But the origins of Thanksgiving haunt me as I confront what it means to be the descendant of colonists on stolen lands. Despite the historic feasting in 1621, the good will between the Puritans and the Wampanoag People–likely fabled to begin with considering the Puritans stole Wampanoag corn in the winter of 1620–lasted less than a generation. By 1637, these same colonists went to war with and ultimately massacred the local Native people.

Today, many Indigenous Americans observe Unthanksgiving Day, a day of mourning and remembrance of what was lost with the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Many other justice minded Americans struggle to know how to observe the holiday in a meaningful and honest way. But holidays and observances are mutable expressions of culture—I’ve wondered this week what it could look like to reimagine this one.

God was the recipient of the Puritans’ thanks per the story we’ve all heard, but in another view, Thanksgiving’s origins are held in place and in American Indigenous peoples’ deep knowledge of and intimacy with the land. If any part of the first Thanksgiving tale I was told as a child is true, then this week commemorates the feasting that was the result of the Wampanoag Tribe’s generosity in sharing their place-based knowledge and abundance with the European colonizers. 

When we go around the Thanksgiving table to name what we’re thankful for, it tends to be for our and our family’s good health or fortune in the past year. The origins of this being a celebration of land and a bountiful harvest are there in the feast, but otherwise invisible, forgotten. What if Thanksgiving was reimagined as an opportunity to give thanks for the land and these Keepers of Place? 

How do we honor the truth of the past and begin to make amends? What role might Thanksgiving play in reconciliation? How do we bridge the divide between our day of feasting and Indigenous peoples’ day of mourning? 

My family eats salmon each year for Thanksgiving, and we visit a nearby salmon run together. I love these traditions, and I think they’re a step toward the right relationship with this place and its people I long for. What more can I do?

These are the questions filling my thoughts this week. These are the inquiries I’m packing up today, along with dinner rolls and persimmons, mushroom gravy and a pumpkin cake.

And this poem.

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Remember

Joy Harjo

Remember the sky you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.