The following article is adapted from an Earthkeeper’s Podcast. We encourage you to listen to the full episode on their website.
Every culture has core stories, mythologies that have everything to do with group identity. Sometimes those stories are connected to national holidays, as is the case with the American holiday called Thanksgiving. But here’s a question: who gets to determine what those core stories should be? And who gets to write history? And what if some of the core stories that we’re told to believe in are just not true? Well, in this interview, Forrest Inslee talks with two wise women who have made it their life’s work to serve as truth-tellers and advocates for the stories of Native peoples that are seldom heard. Lenore Three Stars of the Oglala Sioux Band of the Lakota Nation and Robbie Paul of the Nez Perce People help us understand the importance of knowing, telling, and listening to each other’s stories in ways that bring healing and restoration.
Forrest: I want to ask you some questions about the story behind American Thanksgiving, but let me start with a grounding question: Do you and your family celebrate Thanksgiving?
Lenore: I think we agree that Native people celebrate some kind of Thanksgiving several times a year. There are many opportunities to celebrate, and one would be harvest, like the Thanksgiving myth that was supposedly centered around a harvest. But yeah, that’s pretty normal for Indigenous people everywhere to have ceremonies of celebration and thanksgiving.
Robbie: They have different ceremonies in my tribe of the Plateau region. They have the First Roots feast in the spring; they have the closing before the fall; the harvest of the fall. So, they have several feasts throughout the year.
As for the first Thanksgiving, it’s a myth that they were all joined together. Yes, the Pilgrims were enjoying their first harvest, but it’s because Squanto taught them how to raise vegetables and how to fish and hunt in the area.
They were going to celebrate because they had a good harvest. The native people were not really invited. There were hunters who just happened to be in the neighborhood when they saw this ceremony going on. The Indian women were not there, so it was not a joint event where they brought things. The Indian men had shot six deer and decided to share part of the meat, so the Pilgrims decided to share what they had, as well. It wasn’t a joint effort; it was just that they happened to be there in the neighborhood.
Later, one of the chiefs made a treaty with the Pilgrims. But then those treaties were broken by the Pilgrims, and they started killing the people in the villages, wiping them out.
Forrest: Obviously that’s such a different story from what most American kids in the mainstream grow up learning. Everyone grows up learning the story of the European Pilgrims traveling to North America, being welcomed by the Indians who are already there, and then they learn to live in peace with each other and share this big meal.
How do you think this came to be the dominant story that’s the basis for the American Thanksgiving holiday?
Robbie: Well, who writes history? Who whitewashes it? They don’t want to face the serious crimes that they did. I really encourage listeners to go to the National Museum of the American Indian and look at their resources on the Native perspectives on Thanksgiving. If you’re a teacher, I really encourage you to go and look at the curriculum they have for different age groups, so you can reteach.
Forrest: I love that you’re being so practical right from the get-go. You’re pointing people to a resource that they can go to and learn from. I wonder if you could talk about this idea of whitewashing, as you put it, or as some people will call it, revisionist history.
For whatever reason, there was a time when a story got created and then sort of superimposed on the holiday. I’m wondering if you could speak to the logic of that. Why does that happen? What’s the importance of myth, and maybe what’s this myth doing for mainstream culture?
Lenore: People our age have grown up with this myth. We were taught a bloodless myth. People like that because it just means we conceded our lands over to Manifest Destiny.
The ideology of the Thanksgiving myth is essentially an affirmation of American exceptionalism and triumphalism. It allows America to sidestep its accountability to land theft and genocide. So who wouldn’t prefer that kind of a myth over what actually happened?
Abraham Lincoln established the first Thanksgiving in 1863 when he was trying to preserve the Union. He was elected right before the Civil War. He was trying to preserve the Union and in his proclamation, he thanked God for enlarging the borders of the settlements and the mines and the iron and the coal and the precious metals, and then the increase of population, which was obviously not speaking about Indigenous people, and saying that these were the gracious gifts of the Most High God. So when you frame colonialism and expansionism in theological terms, then it’s very palatable to people.
Forrest: You used the phrase Manifest Destiny. I wonder if you could explain that, because that’s a foundational idea behind so much of what happened.
Lenore: Well, that goes even as far back as the 15th century when the Doctrine of Discovery was promulgated by the Pope. The Pope gave authority to the explorers to take land and possessions, to exterminate individuals or convert them, if they could. These people were “enemies of Christ” because they were not Christians.
So, the Doctrine of Discovery got to decide who was human. It was a very dehumanizing ideology that said because the Indigenous inhabitants were not Christians, then they could be subjugated or exterminated and their possessions taken. And when America claimed independence from Britain, they received that discovery principle from them, and so they used it in America as Manifest Destiny. All of this had supposedly been ordained by God. That theological framework continued and just permitted all kinds of dehumanizing activity, and Indigenous people in America are still reeling from the effects.
The ideology of the Doctrine of Discovery was codified in the United States through the Supreme Court decision of Johnson versus McIntosh in 1823, which basically said that Indigenous people in this country were only inhabitants. We were occupants. We had no right to title or property. So once you dissolve the right to property, then you can take everything. And that led directly to ethnic cleansing when Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
I have taught in high school classes, history classes, and when I’ve explained the Doctrine of Discovery, they’ve come up to me after class and said, “how come I never was taught that?” They were incensed that they had an inadequate education. And so I think we’re doing kids a disservice when we tell them that, yeah, the Indians just gave their land over and everything was friendly. That’s not a good education. And how then do they recognize colonial activities that are still taking place today?
Forrest: Can you imagine a way of practicing Thanksgiving by mainstream folks that could actually undo some of the damage, that could actually provide an opportunity for truth-speaking?
Robbie: I still encourage everyone to learn the real story of that first meeting, but also look at the tribes that are in the area where you live and see what they do. There’s over 567 tribes throughout the United States, therefore there’s 567 cultures. Look at the tribe you’re closest to, see what their practices are, and get to know them.
Lenore: We’re still here. We’re doctors and lawyers, and we want the same thing for our kids that everybody else wants. We live on this planet together, and there isn’t any reason why we can’t share. There’s enough for everybody.
Forrest: There’s so much about the experiences of Indigenous folks throughout history that most people are unaware of. And there are some people, of course, who understand and believe that Native peoples were treated unjustly by European settlers and continue to be. But that might be the extent of their knowledge.
Why is it important that people seek to understand more than that basic level of, “yes, there is injustice, let’s move on”? Why is it important to look at the terrible things that happened?
Lenore: There’s a thing called restorative justice that teaches us to identify what has been harmed and to repair it. And that’s a healing that we all need. The oppressor needs just as much healing as those that are oppressed. We cannot begin an honest healing process if we don’t bring the pain into the light, if we don’t bring that out. How would anybody know that there’s healing that needs to be done if we allow them to believe in a bloodless history? We have work to do.
Robbie: For me, it’s generational trauma: going back generations to those first wounds that occurred and understanding that in my own family history, understanding how that got passed on. So many of us don’t know our story because it was squashed.
I was raised in a time when we were told: assimilate, assimilate, assimilate. You don’t need to know your culture or your language or your traditions. I’ve been undoing those things for about 32 years now.
When my grandfather was a small boy, he was a survivor of the Nez Perce War of 1877. So he’s already traumatized by witnessing war, and his brothers and sisters and father dying in the war. And then he’s sent to a boarding school. His mother, my great grandmother, has to send her only surviving child with love, giving him something to help him fight this. So, she gave him a medicine bag to hang onto. He still speaks Nez Perce eight years later, even though he’s there at the boarding school for eight years.
We need truth-telling before we can get to reconciliation or reparation. You’ve got to truth-tell or you can’t heal. You’ve got to go through. It doesn’t happen overnight. I’ve been working on my journey for 32 years, and I’m not all the way there, but I’ve made a pretty good leap, and I’ve helped my family go along.
Thirty-two years ago, we did not do any Native ceremonies—none. And just this past summer, we were able to have 15 people in my family receive their Nez Perce names. So, I’ve helped my family in those healing journeys.
And the Nez Perce War is another one of the wounds that occurred in my family. On those anniversary dates of the Nez Perce War, I was depressed and I couldn’t figure out why I was so depressed until I started putting my story together. My depression lined up with those battles that occurred in the Nez Perce War. You have to do a genealogy and find out what those stories are and understand that in your life so you can heal and you don’t have to pass it on again.
Lenore: The epigenetics that Robbie is talking about, that blood memory, that affects Indigenous people, descendants of slaves, the interned Japanese families, the Holocaust victims. It’s recognizable globally.
Robbie: For me, my beginning was to know my creation story of my Nez Perce people. And my father told me I needed to find that story. And then as soon as I learned to tell the story from the heart, that’s when the head and heart come together, and that gives you your power.
We all have a creation story, whether you’re English, you’re German, you’re Japanese, but what is it? That is who you are, that it’s in your DNA, that’s in your epigenetics.
Forrest: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Robbie. Lenore, how have you been able to bring these truths to your family and to the people around you? How have you helped them to enact healing around story, around identity, around recovery from collective trauma?
Lenore: When I first realized that I wasn’t fitting into white church culture, I thought I was having a theological crisis, but it really wasn’t. It was a clash of worldviews, because an Indigenous worldview is very holistic. And that’s what Robbie’s talking about, how she’s integrated the brain and the emotions and the spirituality, all of those. It’s the whole person that you are treating and engaging. A Western point of view is more dualistic than that. The ethereal, the thinking, the mind is more important than the material, so you can believe one thing theologically and do something else physically.
When I began to see the difference between an Indigenous worldview and a Western worldview, then I began to see that that is something I want to pass on to my grandkids. I don’t want them coming back from preschool believing that there are these dichotomies, the heaven and hell, earth, mind, and body—that is not a whole person. When you can categorize that way, then you disconnect and you’re just not a whole person.
I got to be there when my grandkids weren’t even walking, so I got to transform with them. I wanted them to know the things that I didn’t know, so they wouldn’t have to go through all the shame and fear that Western Christianity teaches you. Like Robbie says, the Hebrews have a creation story. They know who they are and where they came from. And now I do and I can pass that on to my grandkids, and we can talk about who we are. I feel like they have a better grounding.
I heard an author once talk about decolonization, and he said that if your grandchildren know more about their culture than you did when you were their age, you’re decolonizing. And so that’s what I’m offering my family.
We strongly encourage you to listen to the rest of this interview to hear Robbie and Lenore share their families’ stories in their own voices. These stories begin at 23:08.
Cover photo credit: Meritt Thomas
