“What are you doing for…this week?” It feels like many of the people closest to me are in a transitional state regarding the Thanksgiving holiday. We’re beginning to agree that it’s in poor taste to celebrate a mythologized event so tied up in our American history of genocide, but the luckiest among us still get the better part of a week off from work. Even “Friendsgiving” tastes off to me. Aren’t we observing the same feast by a different name? Often with the same food? I’m happy to report that this year will be my first year successfully doing nothing resembling the turkey feast tradition. I hope to build on the “nothing” foundation in years to come, perhaps joining my friends who fast for the day or finding another way to observe the National Day of Mourning.
I have (mostly) great memories of Thanksgivings past with my large extended families. My divorced parents each have large families and both sides have hosted past meals topping thirty attendees. Now, though, one side has geographically scattered. The other, I prefer to visit when there is no risk of snow in the mountains. It’s made it more convenient to call out of a tradition I don’t believe in. As an adult, my queer household has made it a priority to build community and familial traditions outside of colonial holidays and networks of blood kin, but it takes that kind of a network to expand beyond Friendsgiving. And to me, that network is part of the point—a way to divest from the “nuclear family as the basic acceptable unit of society,” a formation which itself is deeply colonial.
This year, my partner and I are bringing back an old classic from our Adbusters days, the first heyday of Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, and hosting a Buy Nothing Day on Friday. It’s twice old-fashioned, because it feels like Black Friday scarcely exists as a dystopian holiday anymore, but it’s always a good day to buy nothing, I suppose. We’ll share the sauna we (mostly she) just finished building, swap clothing and household items, go for a walk in the country, and work on our mending with friends and neighbors. I’m not sharing all this about Thanksgiving to come off as smug, and I hope its received more as invitation than as admonishment. We can’t have a functioning society without small rituals, seasonal rites, and excuses to gather. They don’t have to be the ones we grew up with in a culture that’s rapidly fraying from the strain of its own internal contradictions.
Particularly this year, I have colonialism on the brain. I don’t know what kind of dinner guest I would be for my biological families of varied political belief, but I know I couldn’t offer an honest life update to an uncle without mentioning the fact that I’m writing about the legacy of settler colonialism in our family. Working on this memoir dictates what I read, watch, think and talk about—even when there aren’t mass atrocities being funded by my government in one of the last bastions of old-school settler colonialism halfway around the world. Do they want to talk about the railroad, the gold mines, the buffalo, and our Montana ancestors? Or do they want to talk about Palestine?
The last month and a half has felt like an extended bout of deja vu. Ten years ago, I traveled to Palestine and Israel as a young activist-journalist and came back thinking about my own life in the American West. It was weird how I traveled across the world to learn about somewhere new and instead saw the desert hills that looked so much like my mother’s hometown in Central Washington. I made a body of work about this comparison—the ethnic cleansing, forced migration and ecological destruction done in my name as a descendent of white settlement and that being done in real time in the name of Zionist ideology 250 years later with militarized support from my own colonial government. I plan to revisit that work (a task I’ve avoided since making it out of self-consciousness) in the coming weeks and will be writing and sharing more about it then, so stay tuned.
I stayed active in Palestine solidarity work in the years immediately following my trip, doing popular education and supporting various campaigns, until our local group imploded. My activist focus shifted gears to the domestic during the early Trump years, when well-established social justice movements everywhere went into “absorption mode” to receive the liberal legions who’d just received their first (or at least loudest) wake up call. Combined with the internal politics that had fractured our group, my efforts were elsewhere, but Palestine remained on my mind.
My writing took a turn as well, and a trip to the back burner while I focused on my health for a few years before the onset of the pandemic. When I came back, I found I had time to tackle the family history I’d inherited after the deaths of my maternal grandparents. These were the Montana ancestors whose stories I now held in my care. How to represent them, understand them, and respect them while still grappling with the violence that their presence in the West signifies? So when Hamas attacked Israeli citizens in early October and the Israeli government responded with the full capacity of its high-tech occupying military force (against a captive population comprised mostly of children), these two rivers converged again, flooding out most other thoughts.
The difference ten years later is the atmosphere. Much as I may go on about social media (see last week’s post), the sheer visibility of first-person perspectives from Gazans, along with the visibility of their being silenced (through algorithmic suppression to more brutal and deadly means), and the general availability of solid analysis seems to have changed the ground game of the American solidarity movement. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people protesting, publicly mourning, and speaking up has been heartening, even as it’s heartbreaking to know how much suffering it takes to move the distracted hearts of Americans to action. And how long will we remain in action and for whom?
For those who feel they haven’t done enough, or who are seeking a longer-term way to contribute to movements supporting Palestinian self-determination, I recommend reading through the Campaigns section of the Jewish Voice for Peace website—not because they’re the only group working on the issue, but because they do an excellent job laying out all of the ways the military-industrial partnership between the U.S. and Israel harms us all. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is another great place to find a foothold in your own life, whether on a household level or at an institution you work or study within. People in power are betting on our digital disaster/grief/rage fatigue (which is real), and I highly recommend unplugging from the reaction machine and finding a sustainable, long-term way to plug in to an offline movement.
Back home (for me, in the Western U.S.), our own colonial legacy looms. I should say that most of my work on these topics is directed toward fellow settler-descended white people, but I am always seeking the perspective of non-Indigenous people of color, immigrants of later eras who do not share the same direct history of violence in this land, Black people whose legacy on this continent deserves its own distinct reckoning, and—of course—Indigenous people who know better than any of us how to heal this unimaginable damage. But I’m working to speak on what I know, which is “white supremacy culture” from the inside.
For folks like me who hope to deconstruct the myths we’ve learned around our own colonialism, I would point to this resource that a collective I work with generated last year at Thanksgiving. It’s geared toward our region, spanning across the Washington-Idaho border on the land of the Schitsu’umsh, Palouse, and Nimiipuu people, but could provide a useful framework for inquiry where you live as well.
I recently read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination for school. While she focuses on what she defines as the “Africanist presence” in early American literature, I found it very useful for unpacking the use of the “wild” or “savage” Other as a broader trope, particularly as I immerse myself in the Western for my work. In one particularly relevant passage (which I violently highlighted), Morrison laments the one-sided nature of theoretical and functional explorations of racism.
“Another reason for this quite ornamental vacuum [on the presence of what she calls “Africanism” in white American literature]…in American criticism is the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim—of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes…But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject.”
If Toni Morrison wants me to consider the impacts of the delusion of whiteness on my own family’s consciousness, that’s good enough for me.
I thought about this lack of self-reflection in our storytelling traditions when I went to write about Killers of the Flower Moon last month. I have still intentionally avoided reading any reviews or “takes” about this film, because I wanted to preserve my genuine reaction before I got swept up into the automated frenzy of the Discourse Factory. The short version (because I’m getting long-winded here) is that I think it did a good job of doing what Morrison describes, examining “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.” Rather than a friendly re-writing that favors the white ego (see The Help, Green Book, Hidden Figures, nearly any other Oscar-getting film with racial themes), it uncomfortably stares down our own complicity. Will a white audience take that message from a nearly four-hour film? I hope so.
The one commentary I watched about this film was a short Youtube video from the red carpet premiere featuring Osage language consultant, Christopher Cote. He said, “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that.” I wholeheartedly agree and expect that there may be complaint online about the white-centric perspective in Killers of the Flower Moon. But I also believe that this kind of story needs to be told to white people in a more honest and adult tone.
In my favorite scene, we see the deadly contradictions embedded within political whiteness. In the film, Robert De Niro’s iconic gangster persona is put to work on the character of William Hale, a two-faced rancher who masterminds a plot to kill Osage tribal members for their oil rights. His nephew Ernest (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) marries into the scheme and repeatedly betrays his Osage wife, Mollie (played by Pigean Blackfeet and Nez Perce actress Lily Gladstone). In a turning-point scene, Ernest is cornered by his uncle, who tells him he has to sign over his oil rights to the family (to William himself) just in case anything should happen to him. Ernest balks, wondering why they’re talking about anything happening to him. He’s supposed to be helping get other people out of the way of his right to the oil under the land.
Over and over again, De Niro repeats the phrase, “You have to sign the paper. Sign the paper.” Dicaprio clearly fears for his own life in this scene. He knows what informed viewers know: nothing good comes from signing the papers of a scheming white man. He also knows the violent acts this uncle is capable of committing, because he’s been helping him commit them. “You have to sign the paper.” And grimacing, he does. Sign the paper. Acquire the private property. Pay the taxes that buy the knife-bombs that kill faraway children. How many times are we still faced with a choice like this, to participate in a system that is meant to mostly hurt other people, but will sooner or later come to hurt us as well? Is it all the papers we sign that convince us of our separateness?
Cote expressed his hope for what viewers might take away from Killers of the Flower Moon, despite—or maybe because of—its white-centric perspective.
“I think in the end the question that you can be left with is ‘How long will you be complacent with racism? How long will you go along with something and not say something, not speak up? How long will you be complacent? This film was not made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody not Osage…this is an opportunity for them to ask themselves this question of morality.”
And I hope you do. Whether you’re spending time with your nuclear family or experimenting with a new tradition, I hope we can all find time to consider our roles in living history and begin to step outside of their confines. I’d love to hear what others are doing in this vein, so feel free to reach out.