This Truthsgiving, I'm thankful for European settlement

Cranks come out of the woodwork ahead of every holiday to tell the masses they're celebrating the wrong thing or wrong to celebrate anything at all. Cynical liberal publications dutifully spin off the cranks' latest insights, which are inevitably just old envies and prejudices repackaged for new audiences.

We're told Christopher Columbus is genocidal; the Fourth of July is a celebration fit only for jingos, sexists, and racists; Christmas is environmentally ruinous; and Father's and Mother's Days are hurtfully exclusionary to the reality-averse. Thanksgiving enjoys no exemption.

In its ritual exhibition of late-November ingratitude, the Nation ran a two-stage article by failed Democratic congressional candidate Chase Iron Eyes and Sioux chef Sean Sherman explaining why Americans should either "decolonize" Thanksgiving or replace it with "Truthsgiving."

It is critical to decolonize the day, Sherman suggested, because Thanksgiving's roots are "intertwined with colonial aggression." His preferred decolonized substitute apparently has blessed roots that managed to grow for millennia without absorbing blood from the intertribal wars, slavery, and human sacrifice the Americas were home to prior to European settlement.

According to Sherman, decolonization "means centering the Indigenous perspective and challenging the colonial narratives around the holiday (and every other day on the calendar)." It also apparently means "resisting the dominance of colonial influences."

A decolonized Thanksgiving is apparently one where we racialize our gratitude, resist the urge to give thanks for the myriad gifts handed down to us from settlers from Britain and Europe, and adopt a "clearer lens" to see that anything capable of inspiring pride in post-17th-century America isn't worth celebrating.

Iron Eyes underscored in his argument for canceling Thanksgiving that we can be thankful so long as we're thankful to the right people. "Give thanks to the Native nations who created the world that we inherit today," he wrote.

Iron Eyes' talk of inheritance and Sherman's call for selective remembrance prompted me to think about the world we actually inherit this Truthsgiving and those to whom we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude but are now asked to discount.

More than for property rights, the free market, and the wheel, this Truthsgiving I'd like to express my gratitude to the decentered settlers for their gift of the written word and a functional alphabet, which enable cranks to air their grievances but also preserve Indian languages and traditions for the benefit of future generations.

I am thankful for the settlers' science — the European origin of which the late sociologist Rodney Stark noted was the result of Abrahamic peoples' belief in a rational God whose creation was likewise rational and therefore replete with discernible truth — which has extended Indian and European lives alike and provided us with dominion over a wilderness once worshipped.

I am thankful for the salvific faith settlers brought over to the New World, which not only affirms human beings' inviolable dignity, the eternal love of God, and the promise of life after death but has informed the culture, customs, and ethic that have helped make America the envy of the world.

I am thankful for the imported rule of law, which spares us all from the tyranny of chieftains and the impulses of the mad mob.

I am also thankful for a society prototyped overseas that is so accommodating and tolerant as to put up, year after year, with blood libels and putdowns from its many beneficiaries.

Iron Eyes concluded his argument with, "Let's tell a different story by dropping the lie of Thanksgiving and begin a Truthsgiving."

Instead, let's drop the lie that European settlement wasn't, at least in the long run, an absolute blessing and acknowledge that the imperfect cast of characters responsible for the society we've inherited don't need our condemnation or praise but rather our understanding and thanks.

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