Russel Albert Daniels said he remembers growing up with great memories of “celebrating Thanksgiving in a very American way,” until he got into his teens, and realized that his family — who have Indigenous backgrounds on both sides — had assimilated into mainstream Utah culture.
Kerry Cesspooch, a member of the Northern Ute Tribe, calls Thanksgiving “just a calendar terminology to celebrate something that we’ve always done” — to get together with family.
And Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who grew up with a “very Americanized” mom in Park City, called Thanksgiving one of “those weird American holidays that doesn’t make a lot of sense. … We don’t just give thanks for our families on Thanksgiving. We give thanks to our families always.”
These three Indigenous people with Utah ties have perspectives of Thanksgiving that are more complex than the romanticized idea with which the holiday is often associated — Native Americans and America’s early European immigrants sharing a meal together.
Here, they talk about how notions of Thanksgiving are tied up with identity, art, the media, history, culture and — of course — food.
Digging into the media’s narrative
Every year, right around this time, Daniels starts getting a certain kind of email.
He usually gets half-a-dozen to a dozen of them, inquiries from media outlets who want to talk about his “Indigenous perspective,” or to use his photography from “Indian country.” The requests arrive in October and November, around Indigenous People’s Day and Thanksgiving.
“At first it was always flattering,” said Daniels, who is Dinè and Ho-Chunk, a photographer, writer and artist who lives in Salt Lake City. “After a while, you realize why [it’s] only happening this time of year. You realize that it’s a performance.”
That performative aspect is particularly irksome, Daniels said, as someone who is hired year-round by organizations for his identity and cultural expertise. Notably, the email requests usually come with an expectation that Daniels and other Indigenous artists will not be compensated for their work.
Media organizations, he said, treat Indigenous perspectives at this time of year as a box to check off, so they can seem diverse but not commit to full-time, engaged reporting on Indigenous communities.
Daniels said he got an email from “a major news organization in the country” on the day before Thanksgiving last year. The outlet had neglected to plan Indigenous coverage ahead of the holiday, and contacted him at the last minute to ask if he could photograph whatever he had planned for the holiday. The outlet, he said, promised to pay him a day rate for his work.
“It’s the nature of how a lot of mass media works,” Daniels said. “It’s not to say this major news organization doesn’t do plenty of reporting in Indian Country, but they wait until the last minute. It’s disheartening and not very genuine.”
Daniels has photographed his mother’s side of the family — which he describes as the “Mormon” side — for Thanksgiving. In general, though, there’s a knowledge gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, he said.
“We need to come to this understanding about what happened in our past and our responsibility of going forward,” Daniels said.
In spite of what Daniels calls a “reckoning” the country experienced in 2020 — with the Black Lives Matter protests and other conversations about race and inequality — he said a lot of coverage of “marginalized communities is often still a performance.”
Daniels described many news stories about Indigenous people as “hollow,” because they don’t discuss “actual material redress” — such as conversations about land return, honoring tribal sovereignty, or, as he put it, “when there are no corrections of things that have gone wrong in Indigenous communities.”
“The job of journalism is to offer a connection between the past and today when we’re talking about Indigenous groups,” Daniels said. “It needs to help non-Natives reflect on their own path and their unique responsibilities in the present.”
In Utah, Daniels said, there should be more coverage of stories some historians have chronicled about the enslavement of Indigenous children by early Mormon settlers. Daniels said that in his own family history, a paternal ancestor, Rose, was captured and trafficked north before being “legally sold to polygamist Mormon settler Aaron Daniels.”
Prompting conversation around historical narratives is part of Daniels’ work, and it’s crucial, he said.
“Now we’re at a point where we’re actually having conversations about what [Thanksgiving] means,” he said. “We have the right and the sovereignty to change the meaning.”
The importance of having conversations
Conversation is an important element in Gregg Deal’s home — a side effect, he said, of his work as an artist, activist and “disruptor.”
“Making sure that my children have the tools to think critically about things like Thanksgiving is paramount not just for their own identity and obligation to our tribal community, but to their survival as Indigenous children,” Deal said.
They are tools, Deal said, his mother didn’t have. She attended Skyline High School in Salt Lake City, where she “really struggled,” he said. Deal characterized her as “very Americanized.”
“A lot of Native folks in that time and place [the ‘50s through the ‘70s] identify differently, depending on how they grew up or where they grew up,” Deal said. “The critical thought you see around things like this now sets a new precedent for these old American traditions.”
Deal said he grew up welcoming Thanksgiving in the same way the Park City ski resorts welcomed the opening of ski season. There was never any talk of pilgrims, but just a moment to gather together, he said.
“There’s this interesting thing where Native people tend to know a lot about these things, because oftentimes they end up having to be the expert in the room,” Deal said, “but knowledge ends up becoming a really important tool for the survival of Native people.”
In his household now, he said, the Deal family still does big dinners, especially because it’s a tradition for his non-Native wife. But it’s accompanied by “conversations that sort of undermine the ‘spirit’ of Thanksgiving” that’s been made popular.
It’s important, Deal said, for non-Natives to understand the origins of Thanksgiving and “that the story of Thanksgiving that had been told now for hundreds of years is not correct.”
Specifically, he said, “in terms of the context of the entire thing — [it] isn’t about just the meal. … How did they come into having a meal? How did they come into learning about harvesting things?”
And, he said, it’s about “understanding that pilgrims are part of this group that set a precedent for how colonists would engage Native people.”
Complicated, fluctuating relationships
Kerry Cesspooch has lived her entire life on the Uintah and Ouray reservation in Fort Duchesne, Utah. Celebrating Thanksgiving there, she said, has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember.
Beyond being a date on the calendar, she said, the holiday reinforces things her family has always done. “As Native people we always get together and find reasons to feast, to go out into nature and give thanks,” she said.
Cesspooch, who is also a traditional artist, said that in their community, they usually have a powwow, where visitors from other reservations come to visit. “It’s a gathering of Native tribes,” Cesspooch said. “We have singers who sit at drums. … There’s a prayer, dancers who will put on their respective regalia.”
Each of the dances, Cesspooch said, has an origin story. “There’s a male and female counterpart, and tiny tots to elders all participate in this dance,” she said.
Thanksgiving is a way for Indigenous people to reconnect, she said — especially after they weren’t allowed to gather because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indigenous populations in Utah were hit particularly hard during the pandemic, with 12,395 cases among Utah’s American Indian and Alaska Native population, and 136 deaths (as of Nov. 10), according to Utah Department of Health and Human Services data.
Nationwide, according to one study, life expectancy among Indigenous people dropped by nearly five years.
Cesspooch said that, for as long as she can remember, Thanksgiving has been about the gathering of all of her father’s 14 siblings — a huge party of aunts, uncles and cousins.
“From then to now, my life experience in Thanksgiving, it’s all been about turkey, fried bread, stuffing, and who’s coming … and getting ready to go dance at the powwow.” Her favorite dish is a speciality of hers: “pink stuff,” an ambrosia with a secret twist.
Cesspooch said she also acknowledges the flipside of the holiday — the origins of how Thanksgiving came about, and that she believes “Anglo-people don’t really like to hear about [it] because there’s a stigma to that.” Back then, she said, the Native people were there to save pilgrims from the brink of death and starvation, so people should “give thanks, too, to the Native people who helped you survive.”
Every Indigenous person’s relationship to the holiday is personal, Cesspooch said, and it’s also generational. The way she experiences the holiday and her identity is different from how her kids do, and you can’t lump all those experiences into a monolithic viewpoint, she said.
“[We’ve all] had to adapt to the changing of time and what our generations have come up with,” she said. “Today’s generation seems to be more vocal about their opinions, what they like or dislike.”
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