Composting Trad Thanksgiving with a Mythos for the Wider "We"
- Laura A. Weber
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
Happy Thanksgiving! What are we celebrating? The annual display of children's artwork commemorating the First Thanksgiving is a bit cringe-worthy: turkey-hands with colorful finger "feathers," native headdresses and pilgrim hats. The pernicious traditional tale reminds us how pervasively damaging solipsistic myths can be. Even ones that yield darling little turkey-hands and paper hats. We see what we believe.
How does our national observance of Thanksgiving fill us with Gratitude? Is it merely a prequel to the excesses of Black Friday? Perhaps an excuse for self-induced food coma while many are starving in our communities and around the world?
Or is it pointing to something deeper - this desire to Give Thanks?
How might we truly celebrate with ALL our relations, the wider "We?" If there is a ritual or prayer of Gratitude at the beginning of the family feast, in soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hospitals and community centers, is it inclusive of everyone? Does it help us slow down for just a moment, savor the loved ones around us, remember the ones we've lost, gather and embrace the ones we've hurt, and forgive the ones who've hurt us? Does it represent our fuller Story? If not...
Maybe it's time to compost the narrative leftovers before we baste the turkey.
Traditional First Thanksgiving mythology, featuring welcoming Wampanoag tribes and European pilgrims settling into a harvest feast to celebrate peaceful friendship by roasting turkeys and giving thanks for the harvest, is far from full disclosure. Myopic histories favor winners, sadly. The 1621 harvest meal was more about political alliance than peaceful co-existence. The relationship between Natives and conquering settlers was fraught with violence, abuse, cultural genocide, slavery, and massacre. The decimation of our Native kin at the hands of white European settlers.
For Native Americans, the holiday marks a reminder of the brutality of colonial imperialism and genocide, and many choose to celebrate it as a day of mourning. Others continue a practice of gratitude in their tribal spiritual traditions, such as the well-known Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving prayer. It offers a Nature-inspired thanks for all people, Earth Mother, water, fish, plant food and medicine, animals, trees, birds, and the Four Winds, Thunderers, the Sun, Moon, stars, Enlightened Teachers, and the Creator. Its unitive refrain: "Now our minds are one."
Gratitude that leads to Unity - a truly healing ethos for the wider "We." What can we learn?
At the inspiration of Sarah Josepha Hale in 1846, during the brutal period of American history known as the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared a national holiday, highlighting the 1621 event. It was set aside for Gratitude for abundance and harmonious living, as brothers, fathers, sons and friends were fighting each other to the death over freedom for black slaves. "Thanksgiving" as a national day of gratitude and harmony was meant to heal what divides us. And, as in 1621 and 1846, we are divided over fundamental rights in 2025.
What Thanksgiving story we tell ourselves matters. The traditional colonial story is a nightmare for Natives still bearing generational trauma passed down through revisionist "history." This Thanksgiving may be an opportunity to compost the received tradition and widen our circles of companionship, trust, and accountability. It may be a chance to do justice, to seek forgiveness, to walk humbly, to heal wounds, and to co-create a new mythos for the wider "We."
Do we see goodness in everyone, in all living Being - in all creation, as in the prayer of the Haudenosaunee? Are we grateful for the abundance of the wider "We" of our beautiful common Home? For every plant and creature-kin, arbor elder, rushing river, towering mountain, lush prairie and vast ocean? For the clean air that allows us to breathe, the water that births all life, and the generative soil that is our womb and our tomb?
This Thanksgiving, in a time of division and trial for our planet, let's give thanks together, tell a fuller Story, and may ALL our relations sing.