Doug Stanhope observed in his Netflix comedy special Beerhall Putsch that American Thanksgiving NFL games are the crescendo of the politics of the white settler “rage boner.” He observes that the festival of day drinking and proxy violence is inextricable from the uncovering of pre-Enlightenment male sexuality, in which being up for penetrating more things and people just makes one more of a man. He ties America’s system of racial oppression to “straight” white men sexualizing the lycra-clad bodies of black men on a football field, “as though they are in a glass case in a whorehouse in Phuket.”
Canadians are routinely confused by this routine because it suggests that something is going on during American Thanksgiving that our October Thanksgiving has nothing to do with. Uncomfortable as it is, Stanhope’s routine directs our attention to the importance of American Thanksgiving as the most important moment in the American patriotic calendar. More so than Christmas, Easter or any import from the Old Country, Thanksgiving defines the American nation and its moral order.
Growing up in Canada, our civic nationalism informs us that our Thanksgiving is a month earlier than America’s because winter comes a month sooner here and that it is essentially the same festival, some nonsense celebrating a successful harvest. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let us begin with the official difference. Edward VII had a bit of a health scare in the late nineteenth century. Our British imperial Thanksgiving celebrates his survival from scarlet fever or something. I have not spent thirty seconds bothering to look up the details because that is kind of the point. So, let us be clear that Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates a forgotten child of Queen Victoria surviving an illness nobody knows or cares about, at least officially. Back in elementary school, they told me it was a “harvest festival” that was globally universal. Consequently, Canadian Thanksgiving is an anemic and confused event, the last free Monday for Upper Canada’s bourgeoisie to visit their oversized cottage in Muskoka.
I think I realized the true power of American Thanksgiving when it was revealed to me that the most decadent and confused TV event of Carter-era America, the Star Wars Holiday Special (a show narrated mainly in Wookie with no subtitles, featuring musical numbers by Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship) was not, in fact, a Christmas TV special. It was a Thanksgiving special. American Thanksgiving, one must understand, is a four-day weekend every year. Some years, Christmas is a three-day weekend, some years, four. But Thanksgiving is four days every year. And, unlike Christmas, it is unfettered by Protestant continence and discipline politics; it is a truly Bacchanalian festival based around day drinking, overeating and, as Stanhope reminds us, temporary suspension of both liberal and evangelical theories of male sexuality. It is a classic Bakhtinian carnival.
The story that sits at the heart of this carnival is the story of the Pilgrim Fathers being helped out by indigenous people when they ran out of food in the winter and Indians supplying them with squash, beans and corn to survive the first New England winter. Later, the Pilgrim Fathers would express their thanks for this by murdering the indigenous people, abducting and raping indigenous women, destroying their farmhouses and fences and stealing their land.
Thanksgiving celebrates the classic rapist interpretation of being invited up for a cup of coffee. “Of course they agreed to all the rape, murder and theft when they gave us that spaghetti squash,” the thinking goes. By thanking indigenous people for their consensual generosity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Americans excuse themselves for every subsequent act of rape, murder, theft and genocide. And on Thanksgiving, they gather to celebrate the racial hierarchy of their state not by saying “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” but, instead, “thanks for dressing that way and letting us know you were up for this gangfucking.”
Until the twenty-first century, Canada has lacked a ritual or celebratory enactment of American Thanksgiving. In this way, we have been inferior, guilt-ridden and confused colonists.
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Enter the territorial acknowledgement.
1992 and the Five Hundred Years of Resistance (“It would take nation of millions to keep us down”) campaign coincided, I argue elsewhere, with the emergence of Third Way politics in Western Canada in the governments of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt. It was in these governments of austerity, QuaNGOs and other monstrosities that “progressives” began to seriously innovate and build what would become the identity politics of the twenty-first century. It is in this decade that the first “territorial acknowledgement” performances began in BC and spread east.
Because mainland British Columbia, west of the Rockies, was seized based on the Australian terra nulius doctrine, we do not violate treaties here because we never signed them in the first place. The absence of treaties meant that we operate on the “unceded territory” of various First Nations. And in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics as we put our province on display, some enterprising members of the urban indigenous underclass realized that they could market a service to progressives: welcoming them to their unceded territory.
So, in twenty-first century BC, a new kind of political performance emerged: a progressive organization would pay an indigenous person a few bucks to “welcome” their meeting to the unceded territory of… one or more First Nations. The names hardly mattered, nor did whether the member of the urban indigenous underclass was a member of any of those groups. The point was that progressives could feel that they had a kind of legitimacy others did not, that they were somehow addressing the problem of colonial oppression through a ritual speech act and the movement of very small amounts of money.
I might still be on side with territorial acknowledgement if it had stayed that way instead of converging with American Thanksgiving. Today, not just at progressive gatherings but increasingly at gatherings of all political stripes, especially state-sponsored ones, not just in BC but throughout Canada the “this is the traditional territory of [fill in the blank]” speech act is universalizing.
The thing is that we are such frugal colonizers that we have begun cutting indigenous people out of the act. Today, at most gatherings, we welcome ourselves to the territory we have stolen. We acknowledge that it is someone else’s and then pat ourselves on the back for having noticed. The idea of shelling out $150 to a member of the urban racialized proletariat to be part of our act of triumphant yet appropriately guilt-ridden liberal conquest is too much of an inconvenience. So we commend, thank and welcome ourselves, leaving more money for the very small finger sandwiches and bulk Yellow Tail shiraz in the catering budget.
In this way, Canada has finally discovered the true meaning of Thanksgiving. We have realized that it is not about the survival of our imperial overlord’s child. It is about saying “thanks for giving us the thing we stole from you after raping you and beating you up.” In this way, the territorial acknowledgement has transformed from an act of minor entrepreneurship by marginalized people into the linchpin of modern, Canadian colonial discourse, the ultimate celebration of the conquest.
