The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

“As kids we’ve been manipulated into believing we have a sweet sugar-coated history only to grow up and find out the sugar is rotten," Inica noted in this week's podcast, underscoring the “loss of innocence” that comes with trying to figure out an appropriate response to recognition of the stained history of Thanksgiving and so many other holidays. Should we stop celebrating Thanksgiving? Should we even acknowledge it as a holiday?

Isaiah shared a striking analogy about the distinction between the shining surface of American holidays and the more complex and confusing narratives underlying them, which often run at odds with values that America prides itself on.

Eliza pointed out that if she were an Indigenous person, her feelings about the Thanksgiving holiday would likely be radically different. She also underscored how marginalization gets carried forward to today, for example, in the heightened rates of coronavirus on reservations and lack of access to health care. So while some communities can celebrate the holiday with no baggage, for others, it carries a different weight that needs to be acknowledged.

Inica underscored that the falsified tale of Thanksgiving is part of a pattern throughout American history and many of our holidays. Too often there seems to be a dark truth that has been sugarcoated for children for the sake of portraying America as a nice, happy narrative with everyone getting along and without any kind of racist or sexist past. She pointed to how important it is to recognize the foundation that America was built upon; otherwise we’re going to keep living a falsified reality. She shared the rebranding of Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day by many as an important example of recognizing history and its implications. If we continue to call it Columbus Day, then we’re living in a world in which Columbus HAS a day and on which we celebrate his so-called discovery of the Americas, whereas if we call it Indigenous People’s Day, we’re celebrating the people who lived and thrived on the land AND who were compromised by Columbus’ “discovery”

Madeline shared her thoughts that Thanksgiving in a modern sense is less about the original event that occurred (or didn’t occur…) and more about the idea about gratitude and family and belonging. Although the idea of the holiday may have STARTED with the idea of Native Americans and Europeans meeting and exchanging cultures, whether in a positive or negative sense, in the larger sense, that’s not what we’re celebrating anymore--if it ever was. It’s now about American culture rather than about the act of finding a new land and interacting with new people. And she doesn’t think we NEED to have a struggle between these two ideas because it comes to point at which the two alternate universes collide into one

Eliza spoke about the challenges of the factual inaccuracies underlying Thanksgiving, and the ways many of our families have handled this holiday since we were young, as being about practicing gratitude, visiting our grandparents and cousins, and really warm family traditions. Eliza proposes that we capitalize on the holiday to value competing narratives and to understand that there are multiple perspectives that reflect our experiences. Because of the “falsified foundation” Inica characterized, many have very positive family experiences associated with Thanksgiving and at the same time, if you look at the real history behind the holiday, it’s really about settler colonialism. So how do we best grapple with and makes sense of the competing truths about this holiday and so many others?

Inica shared her growing up reflections of Thanksgiving always being framed as a holiday about putting aside our differences and Squanto the good Indian; however, that was NOT the reality the first holiday was built on. So we have an unstable and falsified foundation that is starting to crumble now that reality is being shown

Our conversation led Madeline to reflect on Columbus. On elementary school, it was a patriotic holiday about celebrating our differences. We weren’t taught the things I learned about in middle school, when my social studies teacher started talking about the violence that occurred as a result of Columbus’ exploration to the new world. she had never previously heard about violence and war between the native people and Europeans. It led to multiple classes and conversations over the years about whether we should frame Columbus as a hero or a villain. Initially, she was really excited to frame him as a villain, to challenge everything she’d previously learned. Now in high school, she’s come to see value in finding middle ground around Columbus and other dark chapters of our country’s past.

We’re excited to launch our series on national identity, inclusion, and belonging! We’ll be exploring this through many perspectives , starting with this episode on holidays and how what we celebrate does or doesn’t reflect our values. We all know the American mythology of a melting pot doesn’t reflect the complexity of reality and what we’ve seen, both recently and historically, is that not everyone is included in that reality. In this week’s episode, our stellar podcasters grapple with holidays vs reality, and how we might broaden the narratives that inform our holidays, starting with (surprise!) Thanksgiving.