dontravis.com blog post #525
For the second week in a row, I’m going to post something unusual for me. Not a story… but a greeting to all on this national holiday of Thanksgiving. And a reminder we do not all view this holiday in the same manner.
****
Ever
since President Abraham Lincoln in 1863—for political reasons of his
own—declared the last Thursday of November to be a National Day of
Thanksgiving, most of our citizens have blithely observed this holiday with a vision
of a three-day feast by Pilgrims and Native Americans (namely the Wampanog) in
celebration of a good harvest and the burgeoning friendship between the two
peoples. As usual, it is history as written by the victors. In my opinion the
story is pure myth.
· In the second
place, the Wampanog were likely rethinking their welcoming of the strangers who
came to their land aboard ships with great sales.
· In all likelihood,
the Pilgrims were dependent upon the Natives for survival in the early years,
so it is unlikely they had much to contribute to a feast.
·
Others
who consider it merely as a paid day off from work, usually enriched by turkey,
dressing, sweet potatoes (or creamed potatoes), cranberry sauce, a green
vegetable, buttered buns… and likely a pie for dessert. FYI, this is likely
where I fall.
·
And
those who consider this not as a day of thanksgiving, but as a day of mourning
over the theft of billions of acres of land, a sustained and continuing assault
on their culture, of genocide by murder, warfare, and the introduction of
devastating diseases. For many years, some of our indigenous tribes have
celebrated this as a Day of Mourning, not a Day of Thanksgiving.
In honor of the latter group, I would like to present a poem by my friend Mark Wildyr, who has written five books exploring how the attitude of certain tribes who honored Two-Spirits as people who could see from both the eyes of a man and the eyes of a woman changed over the years after the coming of the white men. He calls his poem, “Echoes of the Flute,” the name of the third book in his Cut Hand series. I hope you enjoy his thoughts:
ECHOES
OF THE FLUTE
With curious hearts,
we greet
whey-faced strangers
on canoes with great
white sails,
honor them with
booming drums
and welcoming
songs of the flute.
Still they come.
Blue seas turn ghostly with blossoms of gray
canvas.
Dismayed, we
withdraw to lodges.
Thrumming drums
become wary.
Warbling flutes
grow drear.
Bearded men cast
cold eyes upon lands our fathers left us.
“Now it is ours,”
they claim.
The beat of drums
turns angry.
Beaded flutes go
shrill.
Timbers fall to
ringing axes, game to booming sticks.
Hunger drives us
from ancestral homes.
Tribal drums go
hollow.
Flutes pipe in
despair.
Invaders overwhelm
us.
We fall to
thundering guns, flee west across broad rivers.
Beating drums
become frantic.
Flutes give voice
to fear.
They seduce with
bright beads and iron hatchets, then trade
blankets of
spotted death.
Drums throb in
mourning.
Flutes proclaim
our loss.
Rails and wires
despoil vast prairies.
Buffalo, once flowing
like rivers, now piles of sun-bleached bone.
Drums pulse in
anger, and flutes call out for war.
We wither like
weeds before fire.
Conquerors herd us
to far, fallow patches of unwanted land.
Drums fall silent
in misery.
Flutes become
forlorn.
“Be civilized and
prosper.”
Warriors put into
trousers, called by alien names.
Yet fortune never
smiles.
Only wretched
pain.
Drums remind of
yesteryear, and flutes lament what was.
Children exiled to
distant schools, familiar tongues forbidden.
They weep for
faraway fathers.
Drums lie rotting
in corners.
Flutes are cast
away.
Long, dark decades
we languish, mere shadows of a paler people.
Where are our
silent drums?
Our sad, broken
flutes?
Hah! Our hearts
swell in pride as young ones dance anew.
We are yet alive
and always will be.
Drums lift up our
spirits, and we hear echoes of the flute.
****
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Don
sts every Thursday morning at 6:00 a.m. US Mountain time.
