Tomorrow I’m going to do the cheesy “what I’m thankful for” post, but for today, I wanted to share my sentiments as an “Indian” on Thanksgiving. For those who don’t know the actual history of Thanksgiving, the TL;DR is that it wasn’t really a festival of friendship. It was a celebration by colonists after the slaughter of most of a tribe. History being written by the winners leads to cornucopias and turkey dinners, but it’s sort of sinister how it started.
The following is an excerpt from one of my larger works soon to see print (it makes references to the game World of Warcraft for anyone confused by the name Tauren– they are half-human half-cow characters like the legendary Minotaur who also happen to borrow from Native traditions). We join in progress:
Native tribes have complained about the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins for years and the change their assertion of racism has brought can be measured as drops in a metaphorical bucket while society incrementally crawls toward a point of realizing that racist mascots are damaging to some citizens. As a native scholar, I can invoke moments of white guilt or collective shame by pointing out simple factual things. There’s that football team I just mentioned in Washington, DC, with a nickname that is a racial slur for my ancestors, once used in a newspaper as part of a bulletin detailing the value of our dead bodies. This country was once 100% Native American and now we make up less than 2% of the population, many of those living in crushing poverty on reservations. There are road signs that tell drivers when they are on the very Trail of Tears that most of my ancestors were herded along, and other Americans stop to look at the signs and show their kids how amazing American history is. How amazing it is to stop and see the trail where my Cherokee ancestors, the ones who barely survive as a culture, were herded like cattle from their home to the most barren, resource-worthless land in this country.
Those are things that in our society are just wrong. I’ve never been in a room where someone tried to justify Manifest Destiny or the Washington Redskins to me intellectually. I’ve never had someone tell me it’s okay to try to erase my ancestry. We all know better, just as we don’t consider making a holocaust video game or a KKK simulator. Everyone understands how those things are wrong, because there aren’t nearly as many layers of justification lying on top.
Native American cultural colonization still happens all the time. There’s a pipeline in the Dakotas looking to destroy traditions as I write this. I’ve seen at least two incredibly inappropriate football mascot related stories this week, and that’s true every fall homecoming season. This stuff happens regularly in life and in games, so much so that it is largely still considered no big deal. There are still Washington Redskins, and my friend’s children still learn about Thanksgiving as a holiday when the pilgrims and the Indians made nice and lived happily ever after with turkey and stuffing and corn and friendship and rainbows. I’m sure the tinge of anger, the little splinter in my mind, reads in those sentences, even as I celebrate the things I am thankful for with my friends and make hand turkeys with their kids and watch the Redskins play football and enjoy the game and the sleepy feeling that comes from eating too much turkey every November. We all live in this world. These things happen, just as colonization and relocation happened. I can’t erase any of it, and as I hope you can tell as a reader, I want nothing more than to make our mutual world better.
That said, I propose that we look at the Tauren as a chance to better understand our culture. Let me repeat that last part. OUR culture. There is no value in me—regardless of my level of disgust—finger wagging at Blizzard over the Tauren, particularly when considering I devoted over a year of my life to researching players of their game, spending hour upon hour and hundreds of dollars with WoW. My disapproval has rhetorical force, but it’s clear to me as a scholar and an activist that my anger alone, my outrage, isn’t going to fix things. What has meaning is what we can learn about how these things happen and if game studies as a field will listen to me and the others of us in the minority as we explain why these things make us angry. What has meaning is to not just see what is happening and choose to look away. What has meaning is to dwell, to come at the topic from multiple viewpoints. To understand. To know. I need you to look and to see. I need you to care. And you should, because if you’re part of the massive majority of game designers, game producers, game researchers, and game journalists, you’re doing race wrong. You’re alienating and perpetuating something you could easily help end. You can do better…
As you prepare for tomorrow’s holiday, extend love and respect to your friends and family. Enjoy the meal and the time to be with those you care most about (or, in some cases, the people you have to see because it’s a holiday). I’m not trying to make you feel shame while eating your turkey. You didn’t kill a bunch of Indians and make it a holiday.
What I want you to do is understand the history. I want you to think about it, to not teach your kids a fairytale about friendship that didn’t happen. Don’t erase my history to invent one for yourselves. Just be honest.
I work at a university named for the tribe the university displaced to have the land to build the campus. As such, I have not said “Thanksgiving” at work in five years. I find some way around it (“holiday” “enjoy your Turkey” “the super-long weekend”). It’s not that I don’t respect or care about Thanksgiving. The spirit of Thanksgiving is part of every day for me. We should all be thankful for who and what we have in the world. But I won’t disgrace the memory of a tribe that was relocated while classes were in session by perpetuating the myth of the first Thanksgiving. And you shouldn’t, either. We can have a holiday that shows our thankfulness AND not pretend that a bullshit story meant to erase the shame of slaughtering 700 innocents is real. Life is about understanding, after all.
Happy Turkey Day, everyone.