As usual, I received by email the annual invitation of Stone Soup Café to its Thanksgiving dinner (see link because I couldn’t paste the whole thing here).

The Cafe, which was begun by the Zen Peacemakers back in Montague some 15 years ago, moved into the All Saints Church in better-located Greenfield, and prepares some 500 meals each weekend for pick-up and delivery, a line of cars double-parked outside to bring five-course meals beautifully packaged for every person who ordered, as many as they want. Not to speak of harvest meals, Monday evening soup, and lots of other events.

So I wasn’t surprised to receive this notice of a fabulous Thanksgiving meal with all the usual accoutrements, but I was taken aback by what they’d added (see link). This wasn’t just a day of roast turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, squash, cranberries, etc., it was also a Day of Mourning “to uplift the true history of Thanksgiving and affirm the experiences of Native people. Beginning at 12pm, we livestream the Day of Mourning, followed by a buffet-style meal at 1pm.”

What! Another expression of this Valley’s crazy strain of progressivism, where pronouns reign, words that had vowels now end with x, dotting every single i and crossing every t according to what is most culturally appropriate today. Now they’re co-opting Thanksgiving!

This, I’m sorry to say, was my first reaction.

Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday precisely because it’s not religious or sectarian; I don’t know a family that doesn’t celebrate it, even if it involves Chinese dumplings rather than turkey. From the most fundamentalist religious observers to the newest immigrants, including the son and father who blew 10 tons of leaves off the front and back yard today, who doesn’t celebrate a day dedicated to giving thanks? It’s becoming popular outside the US, too.

It took me a few days to reflect more deeply. I’m well aware of our national narrative, that Native Americans showed the white Pilgrims how to plant corn and squash and avoid starvation, and the Pilgrims in gratitude invited the Indians to sit with them at the meal.

Then comes the second narrative: The white people decimated them. Wiped out entire tribes. Provided blankets laced with smallpox knowing that the Natives had no natural defenses against it. Took the land, killed the buffalo, made practicing their culture and religion illegal, stole their children to place in Christian boarding schools, and dishonored every treaty they ever made with the tribes.

That’s what the Stone Soup Café invite was for: Come to witness and experience two different narratives of this country’s evolution—not by eliminating one in favor of the other—but by putting both in front of you. You still have your wonderful family meal, you can continue to offer thanks for your bountiful life—and don’t forget the catastrophe that we visited on a people we despised for no reason other than that they were not like us, even as many of them taught us what to plant, even as they continue to teach us how to live. They lived here first, and those we didn’t kill we continue to impoverish both physically, culturally, and spiritually.

This is the complexity of our lives. There isn’t just one individual, national, or religious story, there are many. I have long known that, practiced diligently to expand my listening capacity, only to discover my resistance: Not this time, too. Not Thanksgiving! Doesn’t everybody love Thanksgiving?

Probably not, even as I know that so many Indian families celebrate it, too, just as they joined the army to fight our wars and honor their veterans.

I have similar feelings towards Columbus Day in October, which here in our Valley is often referred to only as Indigenous People’s Day, to once again mark the terrible history that unfolded in the Western Hemisphere after Christopher Columbus set his feet here, thinking it was India.

I’m fine with referring to it as Indigenous People’s Day, but isn’t it better to combine the two: Indigenous People’s Day-Columbus Day. After all, Columbus’s discovery opened the door to all the immigrants coming from around the world, first Europe, then Asia and Africa. Probably no one reading this post would be in the US if not for Columbus (or the Vikings, if you want to get technical). You can’t make one disappear in favor of the other, you have to add. Always add.

It continues to be hard to let in both joy and suffering at the same time. Love and loss commingle, it’s the way of the world. So after a few days I felt deep gratitude to Stone Soup for bringing this to light and consciousness, an act even more generous than their usual delectable food, supplied by local farmers often free of charge.