Thanksgiving’s two timelines

Integrating narratives in our bodies through collective healing, a practical example

For some of us, Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday.

On one hand, it holds a timeline of warmth, gratitude, and family coming together. Even though some of that can come with its own challenges, there's a general feeling of comfort, cozy food, shared laughter, and taking time to reflect on what we're grateful for.

But alongside this is another timeline, one that pushes us to reconcile with a part of our country’s history that’s violent, genocidal, and has led to the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their languages, cultures, and traditions. 

This holiday, more than any other, invites us to look at this specific part of ourselves as a collective: how our country and the Western World has historically treated Indigenous peoples; the impact that this form of development and imperialism has had; and ways this type of policy and impact still continues to this day.

The Thanksgiving myth is in need of a reboot

The clear dissonance between these timelines creates a split for many of us. We end up swinging hard in one direction or the other. 

Maybe one year we lean into the Hallmark Card version of it all, suppressing the painful reality, keeping our eye on the pumpkin pie. And then the next we swing fully in the opposite direction, drenched in the weight of it all, feeling hopeless and heavy. 

The cultural myth of Thanksgiving just doesn’t hold water for a lot of us anymore. We’re at a crossroads with it, narratives-wise. 

But just like with any crossroad, it’s not enough to merely recognize that we’re here, we need to do something about it to move forward. And part of that something is collective healing.

Integrating timelines, in our bodies

Collective healing, in this case, helps us integrate these narratives by processing all the material related to our shared history, traditions, and emotions that comes with this holiday. We unearth wisdom within what we feel that guides the formation of a new narrative; one born from hard truths, as well as the things we want to preserve and build on.

‘Narratives’ are often understood to be something cerebral; stories of the mind. But when it comes to forming narratives about collective wounds—such as Western society’s relations with Indigenous people—we need to include the body in our work. We need to build narratives that reverberate in our chests, feel in our feet, and are held up by our bones.

By creating intentional space for the shame, anger, and grief tied to our country’s legacy of colonization, we process that energy through our bodies so it can reveal things to us—about our values, visions of the future, what we want to carry forth. By learning how to sit in the tension of things, we build our capacity for difficult truths. We become stronger and better able to bear it all, to not look away, and to nobly embody it.

We also do this collective healing work by asking ourselves: what things do we want to build on and magnify? What parts of our current version of Thanksgiving are worth keeping? Perhaps it’s the practice of gratitude, connection with family, the way food connects us with the land. What ways are people using this holiday to redress injustice and support Indigenous self-determination that you are inspired by and want to try?

Whatever you arrive at is yours to do so. They’re narratives and practices you can bring into your own life and your family’s, in big and small ways. You are co-creating shifts in our collective consciousness by doing so. It’s what I believe it means to be a change maker these days.

Moving a little closer to wholeness

The invitation in this collective healing work is to process and integrate collective wounds so we can move a little closer to wholeness.

Carrying around unintegrated parts of our collective puts us at risk of being driven by our blind spots; by parts of our collective consciousness that aren’t properly integrated into our present-day collective narrative, therefore are harder to see and recognize when they persist.

Looking at the ails of the past doesn't make us any less worthy of being who we want to be as a society. If anything, it makes us stronger and better able to do so.

The tension we feel in this holiday gives us an opportunity to do social change work through our own hearts and bring it into our homes. Sometimes things like this can be written off as small or meaningless, but they’re not. They ripple out, in subtle and concrete ways, in more way than one.