As I prepare for the Thanksgiving
holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time's spiritual
significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge
what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday
as a time of remembrance - historical and familial.
Historically, I am reminded that for many Native
Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather
a National Day of Mourning, remembering the real significance
of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and
genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed
with European settlers.
I am also reminded of my Two-Spirit Native American
brothers and sisters who struggle with their families and tribes
not approving of their sexual identities and gender expressions
as many of us do with our families and faith communities.
"Yes, there's internalized homophobia in every
gay community, but as Native Americans we are taught not to like
ourselves because we're not white. In our communities, people
don't like us because we're gay," Gabriel Duncan, member
of Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits (BAAITS), told the Pacific
News Service.
And consequently, many Two-Spirit Native Americans
leave their reservations and isolated communities hoping to connect
with the larger LGBTQ community in urban cites. However, due to
racism and cultural insensitivity, many Two-Spirits feel less
understood and more isolated than they did back home.
But homophobia is not indigenous to Native American
culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of
colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits
may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.
"Homophobia was taught to us as a component
of Western education and religion," Navajo anthropologist
Wesley Thomas has written. "We were presented with an entirely
new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models
and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate
roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation,
our nations no longer accepted us as they once had."
Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans'
acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual
identities. They were revered as inherently sacred because they
possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual
qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a "universal
knowledge" and special spiritual connectedness with the "Great
Spirit." Although the term was coined in the early 1990s,
historically, Two-Spirits depicted transgender Native Americans.
Today, the term has come to also include lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and intersex Native Americans.
The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America
from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their
dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice
of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual
rights of Native Americans.
And the Pilgrims' animus toward homosexuals not
only impacted Native American culture, but it also shaped Puritan
law and theology.
Here in the New England states, the anti-sodomy
rhetoric had punitive if not deadly consequences for a newly developing
and sparsely populated area. The Massachusetts Bay Code of 1641
called for the death of not only heretics, witches and murderers,
but also "sodomites," stating that death would come
swiftly to any "man lying with a man as with a woman."
And the renowned Puritan pastor and Harvard tutor, the Rev. Samuel
Danforth in his 1674 "fire and brimstone" sermon, preached
to his congregation that the death sentence for sodomites had
to be imposed because it was a biblical mandate.
Because the Pilgrims' fervor for religious liberty
was devoid of an ethic of accountability, their actions did not
set up the conditions requisite for moral liability and legal
justice. Instead, the actions of the Pilgrims brought about the
genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an
annual national celebration of Thanksgiving for their arrival.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush ironically
- if not ignorantly - designated November as "National American
Indian Heritage Month" to celebrate the history, art, and
traditions of Native American people. As we get into the holiday
spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the
Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World.
On a trip home to New York City in May 2004, I
went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to
view the UNESCO Slave Route Project, "Lest We Forget: the
Triumph Over Slavery," that marks the United Nations General
Assembly's resolution proclaiming 2004 "The International
Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition."
In highlighting that African Americans should not be shamed by
slavery, but instead defiantly proud of our memory of it, I read
the opening billboard to the exhibit that stated, "By institutionalizing
memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory
of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized
and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience,
we respond to our duty to remember."
It is in the spirit of our connected struggles
against discrimination that we can all stand on a solid rock that
rests on a multicultural foundation for a true and honest Thanksgiving.
And in so doing, it helps us to remember, respect, mourn and give
thanks to the struggles not only our LGBTQ foremothers and forefathers
endured, but also the ongoing struggle our Native American Two-Spirit
brothers and sisters face everyday - and particularly on Thanksgiving
Day.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial
Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe is a religion columnist, theologian,
and public speaker. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate
from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia
University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church
before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as
a Ford Fellow. Reverend Monroe’s “Let Your Light
Shine Like a Rainbow 365 Days a Year - Meditations on Bible Prayers"
will be out in June, 2008. As an African American feminist theologian,
she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible.
Her website is irenemonroe.com.
Click
here to contact the Rev. Monroe.
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