Thanksgiving as Tragedy

The 17th century highwayman Claude Duval once stopped a lady’s coach, and pocketed only ₤100 of the ₤400 he found. The rest he exchanged for a silent, moonlit dance by the side of the road. Immortalized in English lore as gallantry by a prince of thieves, I find the episode deeply unsettling. As Garret Keizer put it,

"I have always been appalled by any attempt to compel an action that ought to be a freely chosen pleasure."

This is precisely what galls me about Thanksgiving.

On the face of it, it is a bittersweet kernel of what could have been: Native Americans and the Colonists sharing resources in harmony. But the power dynamics that underlay the feast were the same that would soon end Native American life. As such, it was little more than an innocent death row inmate’s last meal: a feast as a prelude to a massacre.

The difference between the Wampanoag tribe at the original Thanksgiving and Duval’s dancing partner is one of perception. Duval’s gallantry cloaked his dagger and musket, just as underneath the Pilgrims’ generosity lay a deep-seated belief that the land was theirs, as were its resources.

It is not simply ironic that this imbalance of ambition was expressed over something as pleasurable as a feast. It is tragic – to use something as universally uniting as the breaking of bread to give the lie to the ensuing tragedy that is the history of Native Americans in the United States of America.