I wasn’t always this conflicted about the quintessentially American holiday of Thanksgiving.

As a child, Thanksgiving was something like a practice run for Christmas: My parents, my brother, and I would drive to my maternal grandparents’ house for a fun, delicious, and somewhat chaotic celebration with our large extended family. The foods we consumed were not dissimilar to those we would eat at Christmas; the fast-paced, witty conversations we would share were comprised of the same sorts of jibes and teasing exchanged by our stereotypically rowdy Irish family at Christmastime; in fact, the primary difference between Thanksgiving and Christmas to my eight-year-old self was the lack of presents and gingerbread at the former. The company was the same, as was the food, more or less, so Thanksgiving was simply a trial run for what I considered to be the vastly superior holiday of Christmas. (Superior because of the gifts provided by jolly old Santa Claus, of course.)

When I went off to college, I had a certain professor who was vehemently and unapologetically opposed to the institution of Thanksgiving on moral grounds. Throughout the semester, this professor would wax poetic about the degree of racism and prejudice in books, films, and popular culture today, particularly when it came to the portrayal of Native Americans. (We accidentally spent an entire class discussing the patronizing and historically inaccurate snapshot of Native American culture in the films Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas; in the interest of full disclosure, neither the professor nor any of his students were Native American, but this did not deter him from the cultural genocide or the literal democide which were, in his view, the darkest aspects of American history.)

Although everything my professor said contradicted the romanticized portrait of the Pilgrims’ and Native Americans’ relationship I had learned from my public school education, his ideas resonated with me nonetheless. Why is it that indigenous Americans have so few of their own in positions of political and financial power? Why is it that a predominantly Caucasian person who grew up amongst other Caucasians and knows nothing of Native American traditions can qualify for affirmative action because they happen to be one-sixteenth Choctaw Indian? Why is it that President Andrew Jackson, who defied a Supreme Court decision and evicted the Cherokee Nation from their rightful land and sent them packing along the deadly and infamous Trail of Tears thousands of miles away, is honored with his picture on our twenty-dollar bill?

Two years later, I am just as ashamed of the history of violence, prejudice, and injustice between Caucasian and Native Americans as when I took that class. I still celebrate Thanksgiving with my family, but there is a dark cloud hanging over the fundamentally good aspects of the holiday: feeling gratitude for all your blessings and spending time with family members whom you might not often see during the year. To know that some Native Americans regard Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning grates my conscience as I eat far too much turkey and apple pie. I know that this guilt does not come from any fault of my own; I did not commit any heinous acts against this group of people. Yet, I feel that to do nothing is just as bad as deliberately harming this underrepresented faction of American society.

So this Thanksgiving, I plan to attend a protest for the National Day of Mourning at Plimoth Plantation, from which all this Thanksgiving business originated. My aunt happens to be good friends with several members of the Wampanoag tribe but has never ventured to the peaceful gathering of dissent at the site of the first Thanksgiving, so she will accompany me on what will undoubtedly be a unique experience for the both of us. We will still attend Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of our family at my aunt’s house about thirty miles away from Plymouth, but I have a feeling that this will not be like any Thanksgiving I’ve celebrated before. I will still thank God for my family, my friends, and the comfortable life with which I’ve been blessed, but I doubt that I’ll ever buy into the legend of the first Thanksgiving ever again.

Without the help of Squanto and the other Native Americans, the legend says, the Pilgrims would have never survived their first winter in the New World and American history might have been a bit shorter than it is today. In exchange, the Native Americans received smallpox-infested blankets, the unwelcome imposition of fundamentalist Christianity upon their own spiritual beliefs, and a literal and culture war that persists, to some degree, to this day. Please excuse my cynicism: I understand that Thanksgiving is an important American holiday and I do not believe that it should be abolished or that Caucasian Americans ought to feel pessimistic or guilty about sharing a meal and goodwill with their friends and family on this occasion. My intent is to share my personal conflict with the institution of Thanksgiving and to suggest that we as Americans may want to think twice about the true meaning of this day, which is arguably the most important holiday that we all observe.

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