'Day of Mourning' better describes Thanksgiving

By: Bryan Murphy

Posted: 11/19/08

Typically, when one invades a country, conquers its native inhabitants and puts the vast majority of them to the sword, one does not then declare a national holiday and invite the descendants of the few remaining survivors to join in on the festivities.

But, hey, the Pilgrims were never exactly well known for their social graces.

If any particular celebration on Nov. 27 were to receive an "A" for both "Ideological Consistency," and "Moral Unobjectionability," it would probably be "The National Day of Mourning," held by United American Indians of New England (UAIE). This "Mourning-giving" commemorates the fact that, in the UAIE's own words, "many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers," since the traditional holiday is a "reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture."

Fair enough. Taking a glimpse around just this university's campus, it's difficult to deny that New England's racial composition isn't a tad bit different from what it was before the first Pilgrim donned his first ominous little black hat and stepped onto the Mayflower. The "Day of Mourning" gets an "A" for "Legible Origins" as well - the day indisputably began in 1970 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited Frank B. (Wamsutta) James, leader of the remnants of the Wampanoag tribe, to give a speech celebrating friendly Indian-Pilgrim relations at the annual Thanksgiving celebration at Plymouth Rock. Wamsutta agreed to speak, and wrote up a few words detailing the manner in which the Pilgrims landed in the New World to find empty villages wracked by plague, proceeded to rob the graves of Native Americans for supplies and then began to raise funds through slave-trading. The Commonwealth was not pleased. Wamsutta was uninvited, and he and his supporters headed to a nearby hill to stage their own day of remembrance where Wamsutta would be allowed to speak freely.

That's all there is to the history of "The National Day of Mourning;" it's a hell of a lot more orderly than the historical jumble that is Thanksgiving's march to national holiday-hood. The difficulty derives in some measure from the fact that Thanksgiving has always been less of a theoretical and more of a pragmatic holiday. The traditional "first" Thanksgiving, held among the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims in the autumn of 1621, was probably held as much to curry the continued favor of the Wampanoags as to give thanks for anything. The Wampanoags ceased to receive dinner invitations, incidentally, around 1675, when their support was less essential, and their current Chieftain, Metacom - also known as "King Phillip" - decided he'd had about enough of the Pilgrims' increasingly insistent incursions, and declared war. (Guess who won that one?)

From that point onward, "Thanksgivings" were declared with great irregularity, at various times, for various reasons, ranging from the traditional "hooray, a good harvest" sort of Thanksgiving motive, to the not-so-traditional "Hooray, we slaughtered the (Red Coats/Native American warriors/Native American civilians)" sort of Thanksgiving motive.

The holiday didn't truly adhere to the national consciousness in a permanent fashion until Lincoln declared in 1863 that Thanksgiving be a national holiday, to fall on the fourth Thursday of November. There is some evidence that Thanksgiving was another round in Lincoln's public-relations salvo, intended mainly to boost the morale of the North and demoralize the South, kind of like the Emancipation Proclamation, coincidentally.

Thanksgiving continued in a relatively uninterrupted fashion from 1863 until the present day, barring the "Franksgiving" period during F.D.R.'s reign, during which Roosevelt tried to push the date of the celebration up to the third Thursday in November - so that the merchants might have more time to sell Christmas presents, and in the process hopefully drag the nation out of recession. This last bit of blatant commercialism was a bit much to swallow, even for Thanksgiving; the "Fourth Thursday in November" clause was cemented by a hastily passed law in 1941.

So while exams aren't easy on any of us, "The National Day of Mourning" managed to easily ace its finals in Moral, Historical, and Ideological Coherence. Thanksgiving managed to pretty much bomb them.