Dating : Love In our New World

This Thanksgiving (Native Heritage) holiday was a strange one for sure.

As the pandemic health experts recommended, many of us celebrated solo, away from our families.

I spent this Thanksgiving with my dear friend Kurt in New York City. We youths did the solo thing in city away from our families, which seemed sad at first, so we tried to make the best of it. We decided to dive deep into American history and the question:

What was the first thanksgiving actually like? Was there even a gathering?

Kurt is a journalist and art critic, but unbeknownst to me, he’s also become an an expert historian on Northeast Native and Colonial American history. He seems to have read every book on the topic and studied every document from the period; the native verbal histories, the deeds, the diaries, everything (he’s been writing a screenplay on the topic for the last twelve years, hence the OCD historical deep dive). And on top of Kurt’s insane journalistic ferocity for digging down into historical details, he is also perhaps the most fabulous and animated orator I’ve ever heard.

So, Kurt narrated the history of several of the plausible “first” Thanksgiving gatherings in the most beautiful and captivating detail. We recorded it, but that won’t be available until the screenplay comes out — sorry for creating reader blue balls. What I can share now is what I learned from Kurt’s beautiful historical account.

What I learned,

was that for a brief time, perhaps a few decades, there was some element of teamwork happening between the the Native American tribes and the European colonists in their respective regions, a lot of whom were religious or economic refugees and dissidents clinging onto survival. For a period, the European and Native cultures were learning each other’s languages, hunting together, teaching each other about innovations in their technology, trading art and goods, and they were getting married and having mixed-race babies! Of course, a lot of these relationships were highly problematic and the byproduct of often violent socio-political realities. What must be taken into account, especially through the lens of Thanksgiving, is the notion that we were getting along and thriving in some ways, but it didn’t last.

We all know how history played out.

Distrust, competition, Smallpox, a few bad apples, and the cultural habit of letting scuffles escalate into wars lead to the unfortunately annihilation of the Native population in the Northeast. We’ll never know the full depth of the wisdom, art and culture that was lost, but we do know that it is a tragedy.

While listening to Kurt’s historical account, I couldn’t help but notice what an opportunity the colonists and Native Americans had to nurture the cultural melting pot that they were living in. You wish you could go back in time and just tell them, “Hey, work together instead of killing each other! Your cultural differences are a gift, not a curse.” But alas, time travel is still not available.

What we can do today is learn from our history.

I couldn’t help but notice that we are suffering from the same struggles today that the colonists and native populations faced in the 1600’s, just with different details. We still have war, economic uncertainty, religious persecution and dogmatic hypocrisies, and a climate-fueled refugee crisis unfolding on multiple shores. We still have systemic racism in almost every country. We still have deadly pandemics and we still have a propensity to let cultural friction escalate out of control.

My main take away from this Thanksgiving history and reflection was, we still need to work on our collective human diplomacy so that we can create a beautiful melting pot of harmonious humanity. Yes, we must reckon with the sins of the fathers and our bloody past, but we can’t innovate if we’re busy fighting each other in the present. Optimizing diplomacy between all of our unique cultures on global, national and local levels should be our top priority as a species.

But let me be frank for a moment, and I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but pointing the finger at one culture for being racist isn’t going to solve the problem. Just blaming the other group is not enough, that’s what the early colonists and Native populations did. “The French stole our trade routes, no the English did, no it was the Iroquois! He gave me Covid, I mean Smallpox. Burn down Main Street, I mean their village! Eye for an eye!”

The eye for an eye philosophy didn’t work then, and it’s not working now. They were having the wrong conversations, and so are we today. Instead of pointing our fingers at each other, we need to embrace the idea of becoming students of culture so that we can learn learn to love our neighbors for how different they are from us and cherish our differences. Let’s stop building emotional and physical walls and instead focus on how we can make every human feel welcome and celebrated for their unique talents anywhere they want to live, as long as they are contributing and not harming “the village.”

I recognize that I sit in a seat of privilege as a white girl of European decent in the United States. I recognize that it’s maybe not my place to have this conversation, but I think we must have these conversations, and on a global level. My motivation is I just want humanity to do better. I want us to inflict less suffering on each other, and embrace each other with more respect. I want us to up our cultural immersion and diplomacy game.

When my starving ancestors fled from Ireland for New York, they also dealt with racism as the must unwanted immigrants of that time. When I visited a refugee camp in Greece last year I saw the local Greeks treat the Afgan, Syrian and Iraqi immigrants with complete racist hatred.

Same story, different piece of land, different century.

Who knows when Americans might have to flee, or any of us? I don’t think anyone ever thinks that they’re going to be a refugee until they are one. What we do know is that climate change will fuel more immigration, and we need to figure out a better, more humane, more logical way of dealing with it. I think it starts with embracing our cultural differences.

Now that humanity has become reacquainted with the notion of a global pandemic, we have entered into a new chapter of history. We realize now that we are still completely susceptible to viral pathogens capable of stopping all our systems in their tracks, while facing the ramifications of accelerating climate change and the residual trauma of systemic racism. We also just realized that for some of us, we can work remotely anywhere on Earth as long as the wifi is strong enough. This means acknowledging and supporting members of the workforce who do not have access to this privilege, wherever we nomads land. The way we maneuver through space and engage amicably with others, has never been more important.

Let’s learn from our history and build a truly New World,

that embraces cultural differences and open but responsible borders. Let’s lose the hate and fear and embrace love for our neighbors. Let’s make mixed race babies, people! It’s good for the human genome and raises our emotional intelligence and collective immune systems. It’s time to let love flow in this New World that we’re in. Let’s do it right this time.