This Thanksgiving, Are We Celebrating Cooperation or Genocide

Anyone at least my age remembers participating in Thanksgiving Day pageants in elementary school. In these pageants, some of us would dress like pilgrims, some like Indians (always an inaccurate term, now a distasteful one too), and some would even dress as turkeys. We would sing songs and perform little skits which all designed reinforce the American mythos of a cooperative relationship between Native Americans and early settlers of the "New World." Though the holiday (which was made an official by Abraham Lincoln, undoubtedly for political purposes) had been intended to celebrate the cooperation between the Plymouth Colony and the Wapanoag tribe, the holiday was often connected to Christopher Columbus who we were always taught had "discovered" the New World. In fact, in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the same day the U.S. celebrated Columbus Day.

Of course, this myth has come under fire in the past couple decades as well meaning folks have asked whether or not we ought to be celebrating the fact that an imperialist European force crossed an ocean and subdued a continent full of people. For this reason, I was surprised to see my sons come home from day care the other day with construction paper headdresses rather like the ones I remember making for our Thanksgiving pageants. Of course, I also noticed that the headdresses were altered from those that I remember, as if they were hiding what they were. Instead of cutouts of feathers, the headdresses were adorned with cutouts of hand prints in yellow, green, and blue. They combined feathers with our old technique of drawing turkeys.

These, along with the general spirit of the season got me thinking. How should well meaning people view Thanksgiving? How should we view our early history as a nation? Were we heroes in search of religious freedom, or wicked imperialists bent to grabbing as much land as we could, at the expense of those who already lived here? Is either of these views accurate or fair?

Certainly, the myths of my childhood are inadequate. It will not do for me to celebrate Columbus (since we have connected these events in our perception of cultural history) for discovering a "New World." How can this be when millions of people already lived here. To do so requires that we take a decidedly Euro-centric view of history. Only Europeans matter, and only their exploits are worthy of history.

But might the other extreme be lacking as well? Should I refuse to celebrate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by those Imperialist Europeans from whom I descended and who are ultimately responsible for my being here? I would argue that this view also involves assumptions that are both Euro-centric and inaccurate.

This view, in most of its forms, seems to assume a benevolent population of Native Americans who were bewildered by a European understanding of land ownership and who were ultimately overcome by superior force. This view positions European settlers as pirates (Vonnegut used this term explicitly) but it also seems to position Native Americans as romantically naive, almost childish people who lived off the land, to which they believed they belonged.

This view is every bit as racist as the first. It ignores the richly complex sociopolitical milieu of the Native American tribes living on the east coast in the seventeenth century. It ignores the complex relationship and the history of the relationship between early settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Wapanoags, the tribe if the "first" Thanksgiving.

A well nuanced explanation of the history of early settlers and their relationship to those people already living in the Massachusetts Bay area can be found in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. His book provides wonderful historical insight as to how the events we talk about at Thanksgiving actually occurred, who the people involved were, and what their relationship was like. Through this book, we gain a better sense of what we ought to regret, and what we ought to celebrate.

The first generations of settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were far from being conquistadors looking for cities of gold. Instead, they were half-inept sailors sick and weary from a long voyage. They might have resembled illegal immigrants who have just crossed the Arizona desert more than a well armed force of confident Europeans. For their part, the Native Americans living in New England were certainly not romantic nomads quietly living off the land. Instead, they were farmers in permanent settlements. They lived on close proximity to other tribes and were thus politically savvy, engaging in land disputes and forging treaties, much like those is crowded Europe.

When colonists first arrived on Massachusetts Bay, they were hardly conquerors ready to subdue a bunch of disorganized natives. In fact, it seems likely that, had the Wapanoags wanted to, they could have pushed the settlers back into the sea. When fighting did begin to break out, it was localized. The first (and most important) major conflict came with King Philip's war, decades after the settling of Plymouth. Philbrick describes the ultimate cause of the war in this way:

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century. . .the attitudes of of many of the Indians and English had begun to change [from that of a spirit of cooperation and cohabitation]. . .Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This first war was much more evenly matched that one might assume. By this point, Native Americans had been able to acquire the same weapons as the settlers, and King Philip (the English name adopted by Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanokets) was well educated and often dressed in expensive clothing he bought in Boston. On the other side, one of the chief agitators (perhaps accidentally) of the war was a Harvard educated Native American Christian named John Sassamon.

The point is, The breakdown of diplomacy between early settlers and Native Americans was hardly a one sided affair, and it is hardly accurate to think of early settlers as marauding invaders sacking the villages of unsuspecting natives. Instead, two groups who had one lived in cooperation had begun to want to push the other out. So, with a more nuanced view of how things really were, how are we to think about and celebrate Thanksgiving?

Without a doubt, the policies of the young United States toward Native Americans was deplorable. The evils of the White Man's Burden, western expansion, and so on should not be minimized, and certainly should not be celebrated. And it may be impossible to separate entirely these travesties from our early history as settlers. But the spirit of cooperation between Native Americans and settlers which allowed Plymouth to survive can and should be remembered and celebrated. As Philbrick points out:

For a nation that that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

Without a doubt, much of the history that follows these first years is tragic and shameful. As greed and hatred are common to all mankind, tragedy and shame mar all of human history, not just that of this country. But this first generation of settlers shared with us the dream of a cooperative utopia, and though they were sick and poor, that dream was very nearly realized because two groups who did not know each other, could not speak the same language, and had no reason to trust one another nevertheless shared with one another. Thanksgiving, then, may and should still be celebrated as a picture of what could have been--a picture of what still may be.

Brecht, Alienation, Reality TV

I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.

When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.

European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.

Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to
communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote

The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.

The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.

So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?

I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.

Actor and Audience:
In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.

Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.

Space:
The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.

In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.

Un-Alienation
This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.

The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.

In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.

The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."