I was in seminary, in the early 1990’s, when progressives began seriously questioning “Columbus Day” and the narrative of Manifest Destiny. That early response to the American Indian Movement was an attempt to correct the American story.

To remind you, Columbus never set foot in what is now the United States. He stumbled on Cuba and the islands of the Caribbean when he misjudged the location of China by half a world. Not a discoverer, it would be more accurate to say that his mistake began the European theft of an entire continent and the genocide of millions of its indigenous people.

That was not, however, the story I was taught in my good liberal education.

We will celebrate Thanksgiving in a week. Most well educated, middle class folks now understand that the story of the generous Indians welcoming the Pilgrim and Puritan “settlers,” teaching them how to plant the fields already cleared and carefully tended by native communities…most of “us” know that that narrative is part of a convenient justification for massive theft of land, dislocation of native peoples and genocide.

Columbus Day has been changed into Indigenous Peoples Day for progressives. The work of deconstructing that colonial enterprise is on-going. The history of the US is part of the broad story of European colonialism from which the entire globe is struggling to recover. The current version of America First, Make America Great Again, is only the latest attempt to hold both the truth and change at bay.

I confess that as a progressive, an African American and a Unitarian Universalist, it takes real effort to hold this truth. Many of us have wrestled with the legacy of slave owning Unitarian Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson also made the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the first huge movement toward Manifest Destiny. The purchase was from France, not from the indigenous inhabitants. The Louisiana Purchase was a transaction between colonial powers.

I also fear that naming slavery as America’s original sin may mask the equally grave sins of the theft of land, relocation of whole peoples, cultural eradication and genocide.

Even multiculturalism, the current “gold-standard” progressive vision, can function to make invisible the Native American story. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US (Beacon Press, 2015) offers this analysis:

“Multi-culturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multi-culturalism [which]…emphasized the ‘contributions’ of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. … But this idea of the gift-giving Indian … is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources.”

Dunbar-Ortiz argues that multi-culturalism helps sustain our vision of a “unitary nation, albeit now multi-cultural.” The outcome is that a version of Manifest Destiny remains intact and a clinging to American exceptionalism remains justified.

I consider myself a learner, not a teacher in this conversation. We struggle to find a narrative about who we are, as a nation, in which we all see ourselves. The gift we are offered resides in the Native American voices that need to be centered, along with others, in our story.

We have taken beginning steps at First Unitarian with the adoption of the statement recognizing our debt to the original peoples on whose land we live and worship. We are moving into deeper relationship with the descendants of those peoples today, the Front Line communities, especially around environmental justice issues. We still struggle to find a narrative about who we are, as a nation, in which we can all find ourselves.

This Thanksgiving, I hope we can be thankful for the many blessings of our lives. I also hope that we can at least remember and name the privilege in which we live as a result of our national origins in the colonial enterprise.

We give thanks but we also bear responsibility.

“We the people” includes not only the descendants of the colonial settlers, but also the descendants of the indigenous peoples who live on, of enslaved Africans, colonized Mexicans and later immigrants from south Asia, the Pacific Rim, south America, the Caribbean and Africa as well. We will become exceptional only to the extent that we can imagine and create a pluralistic society that points us all toward liberation.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Bill