The Politics of Thanks

Earlier this fall, I started watching the new NBC television program Outsourced, particularly because I wanted to see if episodes or segments of it would be useful for some of the classes I teach, especially International Communication. After the first episode or two, I didn't like it, feeling that it was relying on all-too-easy stereotypes of people from both India and the United States. I kept watching, though, and the show has grown on me. In fact, the opening of the most recent episode, "Temporary Monsanity," impressed me a bit with a discussion of Thanksgiving that occurs among the main characters, challenging some of the historically dominant ideas about the meaning of Thanksgiving and articulating questions about the consequences of the history of interaction between Europeans and Native Americans. The show raised nothing particularly new that hasn't been said before by various individuals and groups who have critiqued Thanksgiving, but it did articulate them in a very public, mainstream way, which I think illustrates something significant. I'm not sure that I would have seen this kind of discussion on a primetime NBC show twenty years ago.

I ended up talking a little bit about the clip not only in my International Communication class, but also in my Political Communication class on Monday. I brought it up in the Political Communication class largely because it shows that holidays are political. The meanings of holidays, the traditions that surround holidays, the practices in which people engage on holidays, and even what is designated a holiday and what is not all involve the processes of inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization that I argue are fundamental to politics.

Recently, I've seen many examples in which, given the insensitivity of the idea of Thanksgiving as a time to remember Europeans and Native Americans celebrating together, various individuals, groups, and institutions have chosen to divorce the holiday from the historical narrative and to focus the meaning of the holiday on a more general sentiment that it is good to have a day to be thankful for what one has, which often blends well with the idea of getting together with family, since family is often considered something to be thankful for.

I find this move to change the meanings of Thanksgiving reasonable enough. There would seem to be some merit to the idea of a day to be thankful, and it does mean at least some level of recognition of the insensitivity of the historical narrative toward Native Americans. Yet, that said, this practice is not without significant limitations. Notably, while recognizing the insensitivity of the historically dominant narrative, this view chooses to brush that narrative aside rather than engage it. In the process, issues involving exclusion and marginalization of Native Americans remain unarticulated and, to a significant extent, further removed from rather than addressed in public discourse. Additionally, articulation of the holiday as a day of giving thanks, even when not explicitly invoking the historical narrative of European-Native American interaction, more subtly reinforces that narrative by generalizing out from one perspective on that history of interaction--that of the Europeans who could be thankful for the privileges they have gained as they interaction has proceeded. In other words, by making the holiday a general one about thanks, the process of decontextualizing the holiday reinforces the perspective of the group whose experiences are being generalized for everyone, to the exclusion and marginalization of those groups whose experiences are not being articulated. Even though this kind of generalizing of the holiday's meaning might seek to be sensitive, it ends up reinforcing and extending the exclusion and marginalization of non-dominant voices and perspectives.

Given this, I think it is useful to articulate alternatives to the dominant meaning of this holiday as a day of "thanks." With that in mind, I choose to articulate this holiday as a day of "mourning." This holiday marks the 40th anniversary of the first National Day of Mourning, which was held near Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, to remember the grief and loss that Native Americans have experienced in connection with European interaction. Just like the historically dominant narrative of the Thanksgiving meal between Puritans and Indians, this narrative can be articulated as a way to think about U.S. history. (Indeed, I would argue that this narrative is a more valid and valuable one than the Thanksgiving meal one.) And just like that historically dominant narrative, the sentiments associated with this narrative can be generalized. So, I choose to consider the consequences of European expansion for Native American civilizations, and I choose to generalize the meaning of today as "mourning" instead of "thanks," recognizing that with mourning comes an element of thankfulness for the time one has had with whom and what one mourns--a thankfulness that, at least to me, feels more properly contextualized when articulated as one aspect of mourning.