Recipe for a Thanksgiving Ceremony

one white settler’s reckoning with our past and present

This year for Thanksgiving, I will burn a turkey dinner.

And not because I forgot it in the oven — no, no this burning will be an act of sorcery.

This fire will be one tended after the kids go to bed, on Wednesday night. This fire will be spoken over with low prayers, listened to. The sky above will be watched for omens. And I will sit, and just as last year, I will see what I can do with my own two hands, and the will of my ancestors.

Let me start at the beginning.

I am someone who has always felt what is wrong with the world, despite my privileged position in it. As a kid I saw and felt the veins of harm that lived in my family, in the relationships and systems around me. I didn’t have language, no — this was the 90s — but I knew wrongness and I felt wrongness, both within and without. I (like my kids don’t now) did not accept the narratives told to me to explain how everything was safe and good.

I could feel it was not, and had no one to talk to me about how and why. No one was ‘woke’ in those days and everyone in my close relationships was white. I would have to sit and wait, until I grew older and read more, developed friendships with people of color who had language for the truth of the world, and eventually began to uncover what it was I was feeling.

The unbelonging, the perverted power dynamics based upon unethical things, the way men acted and were responded to — at university, I finally wove all of these together as expressions of what I would call “the white sickness,” the drive inside of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy. The taking of things.

The power through taking, which is a sick form of power.

This is the most salient form of power that most of my family has known, through whiteness and the power relationships that preceded it, for hundreds and for some, thousands of years.

Over the last decade, I have been seeking the deeper knowledge of all of this: of how the world really works, of how the death-cults of white supremacy and capitalism work, discerning threads of what is what. Working hard and deeply to try to remember reality beyond and before the possession of whiteness that now touches most of what I see, think, and know.

I have sought out ancestral healing of all kinds, and I have come in to a steady and lifelong relationship with my own ancestors, the old ones, who lived in right relationship for millennia, and who watched and became the people who would become the settlers of this indigenous land I now call home.

Most of my relationship with my ancestors does not happen through the level of ego, fantastical ‘shamanic’ journeys and epic dreams. Sometimes it is like that. But mostly, becoming in relationship with them has meant that I have learned to tune to the subtle pulls and whispers that is how and where they reside in me, to listen and act and speak those parts of myself. To listen closely and long, sometimes for years, with a devoted heart, to what they need to say to me, here, now. This is my main spiritual practice.

For, I am the face of my recent ancestors, the ones who acted like monsters. I carry that responsibility. But I am also the face of these older ones here, I came, I believe, from deep inside that cave, and I am here to bring the older memory into contact with the present perversion and forgetting.

My marriage — the gold, the gem inside — has carried with deep love and persistence all of this. My husband is mixed-race, has his own holding of both sides of the coin. We have made our way, even in the deepest intimacies of our life together, through tracking, finding, feeling, healing the broken parts inherited from whiteness and from the violence that has come and touched so deeply so much of the world. He is in dreams my twin. We walk it together.

He, suffice to say, will be tending the fire and burning the turkey dinner with me.

Last year, something big happened.

I found out that two of my lineages came to this place by way of invading Wampanoag land, a famous invasion in 1620, that many of us are thinking about this week. Both of my grandfathers came from men who were on the Mayflower.

This was new information for me. Though my grandfather Hugh was obsessed in genealogy (dragging his youngers of many kids on family vacations planned around looking at baptismal and death records in various places), on his paternal line he could never get back beyond 1804. In my mom’s family, the layers of abuse, leaving, abuse, leaving go back into remembered time, and while there was a knowing that some of these men were “very religious” they were also the abusers and leavers — and so stories didn’t reach that far back, actually.

But turns out, both lineages came through what we call Canada, and before that, what we call Plymouth.

I found out last year in a way my grandfather could not during his life, on ancestry.com. Clicking through names, dates, and records, last November I happened to feel compelled to sit down and really dig. The more I found, the more I held my breath, moving through generation after generation. The thing about genealogy and white men, is that they love leaving records of themselves actually, so it is so different than trying to do genealogical research about basically anyone who is not a white man, when we are met with obstacle, omission, and fog.

So I sat and I did not get up, until I found what my organs already knew, my breath already held: that these men were so-called pilgrims, the religious zealots convinced by capitalist investors to come and settle the so-called “new world.” Virginia colony and the kidnapping of people from West Africa for forced-labor camps, that had already begun, but this process, it needed a white story at the center of it.

My crazy, abusive, and already unbelonging family brought their torment to new shores, and became the perpetrators of this horror story, this tragedy. Unspeakable things, and uncountable people murdered and lost.

I am sure some of my family were nice, and many felt bound in “trying to survive,” to perpetuate what they did, but I see these common patterns, even in my recent family, and I can see how they match the act of being some of the first colonizers in a place. I can see the wounds and how they are ignited, explosive, how they could murder again and again with that pain. How they could close off, in order to continue.

So, I know that to be grown up I also can hold compassion and curiosity for them, and I do. But just let me be inflammatory about them for a minute, because their sanitized story (even unknowing our personal family connections to it) was the most I could ever get as an origin story for us as a people growing up. And I’m still upset about it, and upset about them.

Even as a kid, I already knew the dynamics I saw amongst white people and between us and others, and I knew the residue of lying that I tasted all around this mythical story, this mythical dinner. The supposed compassion and friendliness. And the “why did they kill the Indians, then?” unanswered.

I have no doubts that the Wampanoag were gracious hosts, even to assholes. Intact cultures, built around reciprocity, have built-in kindness and respect that many Europeans have not known since Rome.

And I can see the fear and unbelonging, already deeply imbedded in my ancestors from centuries of dirty pain, power-over, and stealing, sexual violence, I can see how those traumas might bloom and erupt, pushed through the bodies of the Wampanoag and every other tribe my family went on to displace and murder — among them the Wolastoqiyik in “Nova Scotia” where one ancestor went to literally initiate white settlement.

I can see how these traumas and pain continued in our own families, how silence, and sometimes addiction and alcohol, were the main coping strategies. A family does not abuse the land and other peoples in this way without having strong cords of harm within ourselves, too.

What to do, when I found this out? I had been holding my breath when I clicked and searched through records, but when I saw these names, and I saw birthplaces in England and Holland, and death places in Massachusetts, in those years, early 1600s, I actually took a big deep breath.

Because this level of bad — at least in my worldview — this level of bad is what I have always felt. This level of harm, this web tying my own body to the origin myth of this crooked and poisoned project of a nation. I have always known this. We could say it is from being downriver from child abuse, this innate feeling that we are wrong and bad, this shame. Maybe it’s just that. But what feels more true is that this personal level is just a part of it, and that my whole life I’ve been feeling the wrongness of these original sins, tugging on me, there, unseen by the others around me, and the white people I know as a whole.

It was actually a big relief, to see out from the lying, evading cloaks of whiteness to see the truth, to see my specific inheritance.

For a couple of years now, I have just not celebrated Thanksgiving. Even when I didn’t know about my own family, and that we had that feast to celebrate the murder of Wampanoag, I have resisted and squirmed about the holiday for years. Sometimes family obligation (including my large extended Palestinian American family, who like so many, say to me “we just focus on being grateful for what we have”) has taken me in. But since I learned the real story it makes my stomach turn.

When I found out about my specific lineage participation, it was like I could feel the holiday “celebrations” about to happen, and for a moment I could feel all the other descendants of those people. All of us in our houses, doing dishes, turning on ovens, buying huge packages of things. Stirring gravy. I could feel then our bodies chewing, pulling turkey apart with our teeth, swallowing big lumps of mashed potatoes, of pumpkin pie. Televisions on, I could feel us sliding the uneaten food off of our plates into plastic garbage bags. The stupor of our bodies.

And it occurred to me: this meal, is a ritual.

The mythic friendly meal with “Indians and pilgrims” may be imaginary, but this actual meal, that all of us are actually eating, every year, same time, same foods…this is not imaginary. This is a huge ceremony. A ceremony that binds us, as many ceremonies of consumption do, to the thing we are feasting, binds us into a story that has power.

The Thanksgiving meal, for white Americans (the only ones I can really speak for, the only thing I speak to here) is a ceremony of loyalty, of participation.

We are taking into our bodies the lies of that myth, and we are swallowing our allegiance to the untruths about who we are and what we are doing here. We eat to numb the pain, the pain of clarity that the winter season always brings, whether we drown it out, or not.

We eat to show that we are grateful for what we traded for our humanity. We express gratitude for all the stolen things we stole. We bend ourselves to feel lucky for being the makers and takers of this mess.

We are doing magic with this ritual feast. And it is a magic that feels perverse, tilted, noxious.

When I realized my body’s direct connection to this thing, I knew for certain that I could not partake in this ritual ever again.

I had already been avoiding the holiday, but now — now avoiding wasn’t enough.

What could I do to engage with it?

For years I have also been thinking about where to put my energies on the holiday itself. There is talking to my white family and white friends, yes, I have been focusing on that. Reading and sharing indigenous responses and narratives, yes.

But when I felt my body connected to those settlers, at what they would call Plymouth, I saw something else: I have a direct line to that moment. To that origin myth. Can I learn to tug back on that cord, if I have always felt it tug on me?

What if I could use that connection, to reach into the hearts of all the white family I don’t know, but who come from that same, shared, passage, that same narrow entry into this land and this chapter of our story.

They will all be chewing, they will all be swallowing.

What if I can turn the ritual from the inside?

What if there is a backdoor ceremony, that I can do?

What if I can use my power, that line, that tug, what if I can send some magic there, to infect the thing with awakening? With love? With resource, to face the painful truths?

And thus, my own ceremony was born.

I thought especially, last year, of any of my relatives, particularly white people descended from those same individuals who were part of Plymouth, who had voted for the orange man. For each one of them holding that immigrants, or black people, trans people, terrorists, are the source of their pain. That something outside, others, besides our own trauma, keeps us from freedom — they talk about freedom, we talk about liberation.

And I used a turkey dinner to whisper the truth in their ear.

(Yes it is a joke that this long article is the prelude to a recipe…because if you are someone who looks up recipes online, you know what it is! And though I write this as a recipe, it is not meant to be really instructive, or teachery. I am an imperfect person and on this internet of intense projected morals I am not pretending to have any final answer. I make this all as I go along and I share here with love and respect.)

Recipe for a Thanksgiving Ceremony

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, prepare the meal.

Roast whole or part of a turkey (with thanks and prayers).

Make stuffing from a bag.

Bake sweet potatoes until soft.

Buy or make dinner rolls.

Cook cranberry sauce.

Boil green beans.

Mash potatoes.

Stir gravy.

Bake or buy a pumpkin pie, whip cream.

Make it all, before putting the kids to bed on Wednesday night. They ask what all the food is for, and you tell them it’s for the spirits to go and heal the people. (In this recipe, and my actual life, our children are accustomed to explanations of this nature)

Then, pull out the fire pit, and make a winter fire in the yard, or in the wood stove if you have one. It will need to get hot.

Ready a table, with a cloth you can burn. Here you will lay the food.

Take all the food out of the oven, and we lay it on trays on our little coffee table.

Hum and sing, and hold hands, until you can feel that the older ones are with us. The memories of a time before our sin snowballed.

The ones who lived through ice age, through rising waters.

Who knew mountains and rivers as their intimates, as family. Their toughness and love rising up through all the numbness, all the forgetting. They never give up on us.

When you can feel their eyes dancing in the firelight, when you can hear their murmurs and laughs with you at the table, by the fire, put your hands on the food, and begin to cast.

Set in your inner sights, the meals of all the relatives who will be eating tomorrow, who still believe the lies, and who still believe in pushing our trauma through the bodies of others as some mechanism of rescue.

As you touch the food, call to all the foods in all of their refrigerators and ovens and freezers and in the grocery stores where they have not yet bought it — call to those foods and let them become tied in this ceremony to the food that your hands touch.

Pray that the body of this turkey joins and fills the bodies of all the turkeys eaten tomorrow, with clarity and truth. With courage, to perceive.

Pray that as relatives chew and eat and swallow potatoes and gravy, that they chew and eat and swallow new capacities for meeting the reality we inherit with honesty and reverence. Humility thick in their throats.

Pray that the green beans will join with all the green beans to bring the grief, to awaken that longing to know who we truly are, can be, and come from, not this twisted folklore of the cursed. We can cry healing tears.

Pray that we will wake up, more and again and again, to this world and how the illness shaping it lives in our blood, our breath, extends from our fingers.

Pray as we eat the bread rolls, we will find in ourselves the parts of us from beyond this mess, that we will feel into our bones the resource of our old, old ancestors, to anchor us as we move into the frightening waters of facing what we have become, what we have done, as a family, as a people.

Pray that the cranberry sauces everywhere will carry sharpness and beauty, inspiration, to show us that we might hold the keys to leaving this nightmare, and joining the rest of the world in remembering how to be human. That we can unlock ourselves from this original prison of forgetting.

Pray for tenderness with the butter, love with the cream, that we will be filled and filled, as our bellies fill with food, with the will and devotion to face what must be faced. Out of love, as we love our children. For we will do best by them, being honest.

Pray that our intestines are filled and stuffed with the desire and recognition that we must give the land back. That we must repair in all the directions we have harmed. That we have work to do, work that only we can do, as the inheritors.

Pray that as our blood will absorb the nutrients, we will absorb the truths and stories that people of color, and especially indigenous people, have been saying all along. The truths that even our own ancestors, even if long ago in snow drifts and by waterfalls, knew. How to be a human in this world. What directions to go. What is needed from us.

Pray that we will know we are here to do this, that we can do it together, that we can do it with love, and that it must, must, must be done.

Until we turn towards this work, with open and full hearts, may this food carry a fire into you. An itch. Not an itch that will make you pull the trigger on someone else, no; an itch from inside that only truth will resolve. An itch until we do better.

The guns will fall from our hands and we will stop, stop, stop killing others.

The pain will be met in our hearts with love and we will let the lie of white supremacy die, let it fall into the waters.

This food will carry into your blood awareness that you can be something, without white supremacy. That a deeper part of you is important, and that we can let that falsehood fall.

With this fullness, we will learn how to STOP.

Your hands teach the food which bodies to send to, the foods reach across themselves in some kind of magic across prairies and cities, mountains. Into the kitchens all over, all over, where unknown relatives will cook and cuss and laugh and do whatever else they will do tomorrow.

When the food tells you it’s done, take off your hands. Covered in potato and stuffing.

Catch the old ones’ eyes, make sure they are still here, helping. Now is the sendoff.

Take this dinner in the cloth, and place it in the fire.

The fire carries it up and out and across and you can feel for an aching moment who we are as a collective, us, our people, us who hate ourselves so deeply that we must enact it on everyone else continually, our hatred.

And the fire brings love.

Brings us capacity also to face it all. To begin to mend.

By the end of this ceremony you are exhausted, and like many good rituals, you may feel like you have no idea what happened.

So watch the fire in silence, watch orange embers, watch the stars above, wishing always at this point that you could remember the old old ways, wishing you had a grandmother sitting next to you, who sees the same world you do. The losses loom large. What we traded to get here. The losses we forced on so many others.

Sit with the grief, until the fire dies. Getting up, legs stiff, wash your hands of the now-cold pumpkin pie and gravy, body shaking from the cold or from the magic come through.

And give thanks, for this chance, this life, for the small and pulsing possibility of repair.

I have learned from so many amazing elders and teachers over the years. In this piece the concepts of dirty pain, and pushing trauma through other bodies, are from Resmaa Menakem, that I learned from reading My Grandmother’s Hands.