Gratitude After Colonization

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Fall 2019) the group is reading Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

Gratitude After Colonization

By: Lauren Sanner and Kenzi Garner

 

The US’s holiday season brings with it many narratives of how the dominant US culture celebrates gratitude. Thanksgiving is still heralded as a holiday that brings families together for sharing food and feelings of gratitude. Despite the holiday’s genesis being rooted in deceit and genocide, the US still refuses to engage in recognition of the eradication of indigenous culture. Reparations, on a national level, is not a part of the conversation.

 

Thanksgiving’s colonial narrative does not exist without critiques. A new generation of comedians use their platforms to criticize the dominant narrative. To a certain extent, mainstream US media makes it easy. Trevor Noah’s Thanksgiving mash-up creates a montage of Fox news appropriating a feather head-dress and ABC’s primarily white news anchor’s face cut-outs pasted over the archetype of pilgrims and native peoples holding hands. 

 

 

There is so much to unpack in this two-minute clip. Trevor Noah, a South African comedian who immigrated to the US in 2011, has a fresh perspective on US culture (“Trevor Noah | Bio | The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” n.d.). This short montage flashes clips of cultural appropriation, misogyny, and blatant disregard for animal life. The various news anchors proclaim that they are very thankful for booze, getting drunk, and “my five-month old son”. 

 

Trevor Noah is not the only comedian to present his own critique of Thanksgiving. Hasan Minhaj also came out with his own Netflix clip addressing the subject just last year. Best known for his Netflix series The Patriot Act, he dissects our modern world and its politics through storytelling, comedy, and his experience as a second-generation Indian-American Muslim. 

 

 

Touching on a few different things throughout the clip such as potluck festivities, and changing the subject away from politics at the dinner table, Hasan ends with the idea that you will always be asked what you are grateful for on Thanksgiving. Through his comedic style, he says what you should say you are grateful for instead of your family are worms, as they “maintain soil health and stability”.

 

Whether over-analyzing what Minhaj is saying or not, it’s clear he is trying to get the general population of our society to think about gratitude as something that goes beyond our family and close friends. While to some it may seem abstract, it is important to remember that each of us is only one individual of one population of one species living in one ecosystem within all the regions of Mother Earth. There is a lot more to be grateful for.

 

As some may know, the environmental justice reading seminar has been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Throughout the book, Kimmerer explores gratitude, generosity, and reciprocity to the land, and shares examples from her life about how these themes play out.

 

So how do we as a society move from seeing gratitude as a human to human connection to human and earth? The first step may be to understand how interconnected our planet is, so we can shift our ideas of gratitude and reciprocity. As many of us give gifts to our loved ones on holidays, what gift should we give to the land? It may be something as little as watering your houseplants, to as big as completely changing your lifestyle or what you eat. Whatever journey you may be on, whatever your story may be, it starts with you making that connection between you and the land.