Native Americans - The Other Side of Thanksgiving

Putting aside the fact that the first Thanksgiving took place at Berkeley Plantation here in Virginia on December 4, 1619, rather than in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there is another whole side of Thanksgiving that most will not reflect on today: that of Native Americans.  While popular culture and school room drawings this time of year reflect on the assistance that Native Americans gave to the Massachusetts colonists, nothing is said about the fact that those same colonists would soon launch a campaign of genocide and land theft against the same Native Americans that helped them survive.  Worse yet, that genocide would eventually become national policy for the new American nation.  Along with this agenda was the campaign against the two spirited Native Americans whom the godly Christians viewed as an abomination.  A piece in Gay Star News looks at this other side of what Thanksgiving means.  Here are highlights:

[F]or many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather a national day of mourning, remembering the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed with European settlers.

And in a supposedly more enlightened, if not ‘post-racial’, you would think that television images of whites doing ‘war whoops’ and ‘tomahawk chops’, coming across your screen were buried and long gone with its troubled era of Native American relations in this country.

I am also reminded of my Two-Spirit Native American brothers and sisters who struggle with their families and tribes not approving of their sexual identities and gender expressions as many of us do with our families and faith communities.

Homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.

‘Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion,’ Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written.

‘We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had.’

Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans’ acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities.

They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a ‘universal knowledge’ and special spiritual connectedness with the Great Spirit.

The term Two-Spirits was coined in the early 1990s. Prior to this, Different indigenous peoples had specific words for Two-Spirits. In Lakota they were wíŋkte and nádleehé in Navajo. Today, the term has come to include all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Native Americans.

The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual rights of Native Americans.

And the Pilgrims’ animus toward homosexuals not only impacted Native American culture, but it also shaped Puritan law and theology.

Because the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious liberty was devoid of an ethic of accountability, they acted without moral liability and legal justice. They brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual national celebration of Thanksgiving for their arrival.

As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World.

It is in the spirit of our connected struggles against discrimination that we can all stand on a solid rock that rests on a multicultural foundation for a true and honest Thanksgiving.

And in so doing, it helps us to remember, respect, mourn and give thanks to the struggles not only our LGBTI foremothers and forefathers endured, but also the ongoing struggle our Native American Two-Spirit brothers and sisters face everyday – and particularly on Thanksgiving Day.

Sadly, wherever they went be it the Americas, China, Japan or Africa, the Christian missionaries took their hatred and bigotry against LGBT individuals with them and caused the elimination  of long cultural acceptance of same sex love.  Just as is the case today, for the "godly folk," religious freedom has always meant depriving others of their rights and freedoms.  Selfishness and hypocrisy are two words that spring to mind.