Rethinking Thanksgiving: How Colonialism Still Shapes Us -- Dalin

Looking at old photo albums of myself is often embarrassing. The way I’m smiling, the size and fit of my clothes, or my haircut usually make me cringe. But even more regrettable and sometimes haunting for many of us are offensive pictures of ourselves of which ignorant adults – or sometimes even our past selves – initiated. For me, in kindergarten, my teacher asked us five-year-olds to reenact America’s popular perception of “the first Thanksgiving.” Boys dressed as Native Americans in tattered tan dresses and headbands with feathers made from different colored construction paper. And girls, as pilgrims, wore black dresses with white aprons and bonnets. That same day, my preschool-aged sister was also dressed in an offensive, culturally appropriating, and honestly inaccurate costume. Her picture in the album abhorrently reads, “Little Indian Girl.” Recently, she tore that page out. And I don’t blame her. Taxidermist Carl Akeley and filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson also mimicked, replicated, and targeted similar groups to an extent that similarly culturally appropriates and sensationalizes minorities for entertainment. Together, Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor, and Donna Haraway, in “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Chthulucene: Making Kin,” argue that such appropriation and sensationalizing is bred by the colonial roots and attitudes that systemically pollute America, and effective advocacy requires we reimagine our perception of and discourse surrounding history in order to think about the environment more inclusively and, in turn, seek social equality.

The Field Museum’s Ground Level displays Carl Akeley’s “three bronze life-size castings of native lion hunters and their prey” (Libguides). The sculpture depicts three men standing over a dead lion with swords at their hips and shields above their heads. Their only clothing is a strip of fabric tied at the waist (Libguides). Certainly culturally, such a covering is appropriate, but it becomes problematic when bodies are displayed to other cultures – in this case, often American – in which such attire is easily misunderstood, misrepresented, and not shared. Akeley realized, at least subconsciously, that this clothing, juxtaposed by our Western definition of modesty, creates a sensation out of the natives’ culture, foregoing any chance of learning about them ethically – not to mention consensually. In a museum, viewers are likely fascinated by the realistic sculptures of natives who were probably unaware they were being studied, replicated, and displayed – still now, almost a century later. And thus, their perceived lack of clothing simply becomes a spectacle and a distraction from any ethical learning. This power imbalance between Akeley and his subjects, and the recurring problematic nature of ethnographic work, demonstrates – and perpetuates for future ethnographers – a sort of authority over other cultures that, realistically, should and does not exist.

Adventurers and filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson also demonstrate this misguided authority as they often took advantage of natives by taking and displaying candid photographs of tribal groups. At the Safari Museum in Kansas, photographs of the couple’s 1929 trip to Africa depict a crowd of indigenous men holding spears and wearing minimal clothing at the waist (Expedition 7). Many of the members are not posing, nor even looking at the camera. One in particular, with his back to the audience, has turned his head around, likely to assess the explorers’ disruptive and unpermitted presence on their land (Expedition 7). Such photographs, again, demonstrate an underlying sense of entitlement held by the adventurers, who were also known for the objectifying films they made of people and animals. On a trip to Oceana in 1917, the couple “filmed ceremonies and customs unique to the Solomons, including the large wooden and coral cemetery headstones” (Expedition 1). This sensationalizing of the tribe’s religion and ritual lacks respect; what should be recognized as sacred was disrupted and worked over by curious, entitled Americans. These examples go beyond just research and instead, reveal America’s ostentatious superiority complex, derived from and strengthened by our colonial roots, which we still perpetuate today.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon points out a current example of this colonialism. He discusses former president of the World Bank Lawrence Summers’ proposition of “export[ing] rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa” (Nixon 1). Summers himself said that “countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles” (1). In the name of “global managerial reasoning,” he thought, “shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?” (1). Environmentalist Nixon realizes that Summers’ idea would conveniently “benefit the United States and Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation environmentalists” (2). Here, Summers’ logic demonstrates America’s biased attitude that prioritizes our soil and our people over others’. To us, Africa is “an out-of-sight continent, a place remote from green activists’ terrain of concern” (2). And thus, we strategically distance ourselves from such places, and other groups with which we are not familiar, often viewing them as data rather than living beings. And suddenly, our treatment and exclusion becomes justified. Certainly, not much has changed since our colonial days.

Donna Haraway’s article “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” poses solutions for fixing these colonial mindsets held by Akeley and the Johnsons, and likely by most of us, too. She encourages us to rethink the elitism we often bring to environmentalism. Instead of focusing on clearcut environmental lifestyle changes that many of us cannot afford to make consistently enough to have any real impact, we must “cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge,” she says (Haraway 160). That – not driving electric cars and boycotting large corporations – will “make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible” (106). Thus, recognizing and targeting the largely social and “severe discontinuities” that the Anthropocene reveals is much more environmental and will play a larger part in combatting systemic issues (106). Haraway writes, “Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and time of refuge for people and other critters” (160). We should thus prioritize “replenish[ing]” refuge over other elitist options (106). “Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge,” Haraway writes (106). And the systemic inequalities contributing to the existence and prevalence of such refugees comes from our ancestors’ colonial tendencies, which we have internalized and copied, over and over again. Haraway writes, “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (106). In this way, extending refuge often requires we rethink the stories that shape our history and inform our treatment of other cultures. So, let’s stop celebrating our colonization and forced assimilation of natives on days like Columbus Day – fortunately but slowly becoming recognized as Indigenous Peoples’ Day – and having culturally inappropriate Thanksgiving dress-up days. These stories we teach and impose upon children inaccurately shape their historical conceptualization, which leads to a generational attitude that never stops culturally appropriating and sensationalizing those we colonized. No wonder English majors have to learn and apply colonial and postcolonial theories to literature.

America’s colonial history precurses and explains Carl Akeley and the Johnsons’ sensationalized representations of indigenous groups and their self-entitlement to even enter into those groups’ spaces and land; environmentalists Nixon and Haraway argue that such biases are why environmentalism is social and thus full of inequality. Condescending colonial attitudes like Akeley’s and the Johnsons’ inform the ways in which we teach children about history. Why else would we show students unethically sourced photos and force them to reenact the events we shouldn’t necessarily be proud of as a country? Despite the explorers’ disruptive and overstepping research, we should not completely discredit their work. The Safari Museum insists that the Johnsons’ photography and filmmaking “capture[s] a permanent record of a culture that has all but disappeared” (Expedition 7). Without these primary sources, we would likely not even know the tribe Mbuti, for example, existed (Expedition 7). I think many would argue that total ignorance is worse than flawed research, but to me, that notion is still driven by our colonial tendencies and bias. Making ourselves aware of every group of people to ever exist is not our responsibility, even though we seem to live that way. But regardless, Akeley and the Johnsons’ work still play an important role in environmentalism. Their research styles serve as a reminder of the unethical mistakes that can be made so easily during ethnographic research, and their examples strengthen our understanding of environmental advocacy – more specifically, its social ramification. Because of the explorers, we know what not to do. This duality is always important to consider when studying our past. In the same way, I can promise to teach my future kids about history ethically and with brutal honesty, but still look fondly upon memories of chewing the Styrofoam on our cups of Kool-Aid and trying cranberry sauce for the first time during that Thanksgiving meal in kindergarten.