We Should Have Handled It Better But We Did Need To Take The Land From The Indians

Happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Last year, I published a long post about blogging and social media and not self-censoring and…Thanksgiving. I’m running out the door to go to my own Thanksgiving dinner so instead of a new post, I’m excerpting the Thanksgiving part and posting it again. Xoxoxox

Thanksgiving Online

Every Thanksgiving, digital publications produce a zillion bits of Thanksgiving content. There are recipes and shopping lists and Black Friday guides, yes, but the three main ones I’m thinking of are:

1. how to not argue about politics with your family as Thanksgiving

2. how to beat your idiot family in your political  arguments at Thanksgiving

3. Thanksgiving is evil and here’s why you, a white genocidal maniac, should be ashamed for celebrating it.

• Re: 1) well, this is easy. If you want to avoid talking about politics with your family because you all are too unhinged to discuss it without crying, then there is this thing called small talk and you can just talk about sports or movies or your romantic relationships (or lack thereof).

• Re: 2) well, this also seems unnecessary. If your family is so idiotic that you feel compelled to argue them to the death, then you shouldn’t need a cheat sheet for that unless you yourself are a fucking idiot.

• Re: 3) This is the one I wanted to discuss.

Thanksgiving is not evil.

First, let’s be clear about what Thanksgiving is and what people say it is. The annual columns that come and say that Americans should be ashamed for celebrating the pilgrims—because they didn’t actually come here seeking freedom of religion, or because after the first Thanksgiving, the pilgrims and the Indians didn’t get along, etc—are insane. No one actually gives one shit about the pilgrims. The people who do give a shit can’t even agree about which pilgrim Thanksgiving we’re nominally celebrating: one in Massachusetts or one in Virginia.

In the real world, Thanksgiving is a nice excuse for people to eat too much with their friends and family, watch football, and give thanks. Thanks for what? Anything! It doesn’t need to be political. Indeed, it almost certainly shouldn’t be political. It almost never is! It is a good and healthy thing to remind yourself of what you are grateful for and it is a good and healthy thing to tell people for whom you are grateful that you feel that way.

That’s literally all Thanksgiving is for 97% of Americans. There are 11 people who are deeply invested in whether the pilgrims at (either of) the first Thanksgiving(s) were nice people. No one else cares.

None of this is controversial, but we’re getting to that part.

There are people who believe that Thanksgiving—whether intended or otherwise—represents the sanitizing of a great many sins committed by Europeans against Native Americans. They find it offensive even if Thanksgiving isn’t actively about the pilgrims because they think that very eagerness to just talk about football is a telling symptom of a larger refusal for Americans to grapple with the sins of our past.

I completely understand why they feel that way. I get it. Europeans committed awful crimes against Native Americans. The United States continued to do awful crimes even after it was established as a country and through the 19^th century. The 19^th-century treaties that tribes were essentially forced to sign were then often broken by the US, who had no intention of even abiding by the terms they themselves had forced. For decades into the 20^th century, the US government had a truly heinous policy of actual “cultural genocide” by which they kidnapped native American children and forced them to assimilate through barbaric and evil boarding schools. Still today, the legacy of these acts exists in poverty stats and health outcomes among native Americans on reservations. This is all very bad, indeed! The only sin on par with it in American history is slavery.

Now, I didn’t have to do any research to write that last paragraph. Everyone knows about this. Despite what the Nation thinks when it calls for a Truthsgiving, everyone is aware of the bad acts.

I’m sure there are a few whackos in the world who are willing to defend the trail of tears, but they are not demonstrative of a significant number of Americans. There are disagreements about to what extent and how we should try now in the 21^st century to make up for this. In those debates, I side with people who would do more to make up for it. I don’t know of any pro-native American policies that I don’t support.

A few years ago, the Atlantic published an article (that got a lot of criticism from people who know more about this stuff than me) arguing that we should parcel out Yellowstone to native American tribes. A lot of native Americans and other people had problems with this suggestion for various reasons, which you can research on your own time, but as far as I’m concerned, I would have no problem with this general concept. I would want a commission of some sort to work out the details but sounds fine to me. Or if Yellowstone is too precious and must be untouched and native Americans should have land they can use, give ‘em another national park. I honestly don’t care. If this is doable and would improve the lives of people who have been on the bad end of US fuckery for a long time, let’s do it.

Now, having established my bona fides as a person with a heart, let me do the “on the other hand” of all this.

Thanksgiving And What We Mean When We Say We Made Mistakes With The Indians

The United States did a lot of terrible things to native Americans. But the worst things done to native Americans were done by the Spanish and the English. I don’t think those are on our tab. If I were Spanish, I would to this day feel very bad about it.

With regard to our own actual sins committed with the expansion of the country west, bad things were done on both large and small levels, but…we did have to take most of their land.

Mexico has some claims here, too, and I’m sorry for their trouble but the United States did have to cross the continent and make most of it our own.

The world is better because the United States is as powerful as it is, and it wouldn’t be that powerful had we only stuck to the eastern third of the country.

Everyone everywhere would be speaking German if we hadn’t crossed the continent.

When I say, “We made mistakes and committed terrible crimes against the Indians,” I mean, “The treaties that we forced them to sign should have been more equitable and we should have abided by them.” But we still would have had to force them to sign treaties. We could and should have gone about it in a nicer way and we certainly should have compensated them for all that we stole more generously, but we did need that land.

Up until the 20^th century, but really up until World War II, what the US did is how nations were built. It doesn’t justify the trail of tears. It really doesn’t. It doesn’t justify a million things. I am from the future, and I know that there are better ways. But the past was terrible, and people who lived then were stupid and awful, and they didn’t know everything I know.

And we did need that land, though.

I honestly didn’t realize that any non-native Americans felt like we shouldn’t have taken the land. I mean, I get why lots of native Americans feel that way. I don’t begrudge them that at all. And I am again happy to sign off on giving native Americans a national park or two to settle all accounts, but that’s because no one lives there. And we have established a system whereby we are responsible for defense and foreign relations of reservations and stuff. I’m not saying we should give them Denver.

So anyway, why am I sharing this with you? One reason I’m doing it is in response to that third type of post that the internet is flooded with on Thanksgiving. No liberals on Thanksgiving ever publish something like this.

But the other reason I’m doing it is in response to the first two types of posts everyone else publishes on Thanksgiving about how to avoid or win political fights with your family.

Trump is going to come up. Israel-Palestine is going to come up. Someone is going to make an argument about who is indigenous to the Holy Land. Someone else is going to mention the US experience with native Americans. Everyone is going to nod in agreement about that being terrible.

Then you should throw a curve ball and poll the table about why they think it’s terrible. Is it terrible because of tactics and a lack of compensation? Or is it terrible because we actually shouldn’t have taken the land?

That fight? No one came prepared for that fight.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Xoxo

Ben

P.S. When I give thanks tonight, I will be thankful for my family and my friends and my health. I will also be thankful for you. I torpedoed my own journalism career with my unfiltered social media presence, but, in a previous age, that would have forced me to become a drug dealer or sex trafficker. You guys are why I get to keep working in the realm of ideas. And I owe you more than I’ll ever be able to explain.

So thank you!