Getting honest about gratitude
The subtle art of telling the f*cking truth about our wealth and good health.
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Note: This is a reflection on my experience navigating Thanksgiving as a white person descended from European immigrants. When I use the pronoun ‘we’ I am either referring to my family or white people generally. Any calls to action, wishes, or statements I offer here are directed at white people who identify with my experience. I acknowledge not all my readers identify as white, and some of those who do may hold intersectional identities with complex family histories that do not easily align with the white experience I’ve written about, nor do all my readers live in the US. I am an expert only in my experience; I do not intend to tell anyone else how to heal their ancestry or practice antiracism. I offer my reflection with the intent to inspire healing in whatever shape or form that may be. All are welcome here. And, this reflection may not be helpful to everyone. Okay, if you’re still with me, let’s dive in.
We used to pretend, now we ignore.
We were taught Thanksgiving was about Native Americans and Pilgrims coming together in peace. Publicly, that narrative has crumbled, and this is good. We are closer to the truth: many indigenous people call the fourth Thursday in November National Day of Mourning.
So we adjusted our tradition. In my family, Thanksgiving has become a sort of harvest celebration. We prepare potatoes, squash, beans, and salad from our gardens. It’s a feast of abundance where we reflect on our gratitude for the visible and invisible ways we are supported.
We stopped believing in the story of Thanksgiving and started believing in the practice of gratitude.
We reasoned that by focusing on what we’re grateful for, we would turn a dishonest holiday into one about appreciating family, friends, and our good green earth. We thought, gratitude can’t hurt, it only heals. In our troubled world, a little light could go a long way.
We were wrong.
By turning Thanksgiving into a simplistic holiday about giving thanks, I believe we’ve bypassed our spiritual duty to repair the historical violence of settler colonialism and the ongoing systemic oppression of Black and brown bodies that has given us, white people, much of what we declare we’re grateful for.
To appreciate good health and financial security as a white person, without recognizing the historical and contemporary inequities that support such prosperity, is to perpetuate the harm we wish to heal from.
Healing requires confronting truth. Our history, as a nation and as white people, is full of painful, messy truths. When we ignore the truth because we are afraid of the grief we’ll find there, we continue the legacy of harm.
This Thanksgiving, I’m telling the truth about my family history. I’m breaking the cycle of ignoring the truth in favor of gratitude.
190 years ago, my ancestors, James Jennings and Nancy Mulroy, left Ireland for North America. They fled hardship at home for the dream of newfound freedom and prosperity. I imagine they were grateful for the opportunity to begin again, but their choice to make home on stolen land required them to ignore the truth, which is that new life was made possible only by stealing life from someone else. Freedom by means of genocide is false freedom.
They ignored truth in favor of gratitude and progressed up the social and economic ladder. Their white skin gave them protections they didn’t earn and this unholy advantage allowed them to accumulate land (stolen) and wealth (stolen) that they passed down to the next generation. They were good Catholics, so they counted their blessings at the dinner table each night all the while suppressing the grief that settled in their hearts and hid beneath the table. Blessings are not blessings when they come at the cost of someone else’s freedom and dignity. Being grateful for what has been unfairly given, without resistance, is to consent to oppression.
From 1886-1893, my great great grandfather, Thomas Jennings, served as Federal Indian Agent to the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. Federal records document letters from Menominee leadership calling for Thomas to stay in post because he was a decent man who reduced violence on the reservation and advocated for the Menominee’s right to fair pay for the lumber being stripped off their land. My family takes pride in this evidence of Thomas’ good nature. Just like we do with gratitude, we focus on the goodness he displayed in an otherwise dark time in history.
Thomas Jennings may have shown respect to the Menominee people, but what is painfully true, and more important, is that he chose to work on behalf of the federal government’s effort to subjugate the Menominee people by destroy their land, culture, and customs. He advocated for their fair compensation while he actively supported the destruction of their sacred forests for profit. He believed in education, which at that time meant ensuring the proper staffing and funding of St. Joseph’s Indian Industrial School, a Catholic boarding school.
This is a brief telling of a long and messy history full of nuance and complexity. I do not know what my ancestors thought of the methods this nation used to form it’s borders. But I believe to participate in such a violent history, one must sever themself from the truth in their heart in favor of the lies in their mind. The lies which told stories of progress and uncivilized people and a hierarchy of human worth. One must simply be grateful for what they have been given without examining the means by which is was obtained.
We can do better.
I, Ryan Grist, am a descendent of settler colonialism. I did not chose to steal the land I was born on. But my ancestors profited off of stolen land. I did not invent whiteness. But I benefit from systemic oppression. (And I am harmed by it too, because it is a trauma that lives in my body).
I have been strategically over-given to. Much of what I’m grateful for has been unfairly handed to me at the cost of someone else’s opportunity to live a free and full life. I inherit the ugly choices of my (and our) painful history.
As one brilliant thought leader suggests (I think it was Isabel Wilkerson but I can’t say for sure), white people should think about their responsibility to this inheritance the same way they think about home ownership. When you buy an old home, you become the caretaker of someone else’s poor decisions. If the contractor points out the flaws in the basement’s support beams, you don’t take it personally. You take responsibility and make a choice about how to correct it. Our task is to repair our homes so that they are welcoming and safe for everyone that enters. (I acknowledge home ownership is maybe not be the best metaphor in the context of a discussion about stolen land and structural inequality, but I find it helpful in discussing responsibility for historical violence, so I will set aside the contradiction for now).
I am immensely grateful for my life. I’m grateful for everyone that came before me because without them, I know I wouldn’t be here. But I refuse to continue to ignore the grief, the delusion, the violence, and the insanity that got me here. To declare gratitude for my good life without grieving the path my ancestors and this nation took to get me here is to bypass the healing my heart and this land and its people yearn for.
Ultimately, I believe gratitude serves to remind us of our profound interdependence with all living beings. It is a human technology designed to bring us closer to the love we have for each other.
To practice gratitude without telling the truth about our history, I believe, is a disservice to our quest for true connection as well as a harmful continuation of the legacy of our ancestors who refused to honestly examine what they were up to. If we are not actively working to resist oppression, we are enabling its existence.
Today, resistance for me looks like telling the truth about my family history at the Thanksgiving table. It’s an inadequate, contradictory, imperfect effort to heal, and it counts. I invite you to join me.
One year ago, I knew very little about my history. I am grateful to my grandma for researching and writing down her family story, for my Aunt Mary for maintaining it, and for my mom for inspiring me to begin it’s retelling.
You may not have such an easy place to start, but you can always begin with a question and a commitment to face truth with love.
Where do my people come from? What trauma did they carry with them?
Whose land was this originally? Where do they live today?
What am I afraid to learn?
What do I value? How can I practice that value in relation to my history?
What am I a commitment to?
May we extend our gratitude to all those who model solidarity and truth-telling.
May we express gratitude for the Black, brown, and indigenous spiritual warriors who live their commitment to collective liberation and after decades of historical harm, invite us into the movement with the fiercest of compassion.
May we show gratitude for our ancestors that resisted, and may we extend a healing hand to those who caused harm.
May we have the courage to face our history with clarity.
May we tell the truth to set us free from the delusions that separate us.
May we reclaim our hearts in our history.
May we cherish our lives by fighting for others to live.
May we tend to the messiness with clean pain.1
Your neighbor on this journey,
Ryan
Inspiration
This article provides a beautiful example of a Jewish American engaging in the courageous work of telling the truth about her family’s history. Her advice:
“Be very clear about why you’re writing the story you’re writing and tell as big and wide of a truth as you can, but also be compassionate, be kind, lean towards the love you have for your family.” - Rebecca Clarren
This is about a love, connection, and belonging, after all.
A resource for ancestral recovery
We can’t do this alone. Consider joining me in taking Before We Were White: and ancestral recovery course.
Clean pain is a concept offered by Resmaa Menakem in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.