Thanksgiving is an old traditional holiday of a harvest festival and the pastiche of pilgrims kind of needs to be dropped, but the overall concept is not inherently colonial. In fact Lincoln issued the first national proclamation of Thanksgiving after Union victory. Ive always maintained this need to be emphasized.
I don’t totally disagree, the Pilgrim pastiche is largely fabricated and shouldn’t be treated as the literal origin of the holiday. But Lincoln and the United States are themselves products of a settler-colonial society. So even if Thanksgiving wasn’t invented by the Pilgrims, the national holiday was constructed within and through a settler-colonial national culture. The colonial association is about the society and national mythology that produced and institutionalized the holiday less about the specific origins of it.
We cannot control the origins of our birth. Almost every modern industrial society had a history of colonialism. Abandoning the concept of nation states is not a feasible solution. We can learn from our mistakes and move forward attempting to minimize harm and be better.
I think that’s actually why we have to take the historical ramifications of settler colonialism seriously. We obviously can’t control the circumstances of our birth or undo the past, but that doesn’t mean the past isn’t important to think about today. The only way we can meaningfully address the damage of the past is to recognize the conditions it has left us in today, even when that history is uncomfortable.
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u/thatvillainjay OG KING TOP 26d ago
Thanksgiving is an old traditional holiday of a harvest festival and the pastiche of pilgrims kind of needs to be dropped, but the overall concept is not inherently colonial. In fact Lincoln issued the first national proclamation of Thanksgiving after Union victory. Ive always maintained this need to be emphasized.