Thanksgiving: Appropriate or Appropriation?

One of my last family Thanksgivings in 2005

Growing up, I looked forward to Thanksgiving more than any other holiday, for it was the one time each year my entire family gathered. My mother and father’s siblings along with all the cousins would descend upon our house and mayhem would ensue. My mom worked for days, if not weeks, in the kitchen preparing, and all the sisters brought some sort of side or offering. As a kid, I recall loving the event because I always had a delightful story to tell afterwards. There was the one year my cousin Nathan ate my sister’s goldfish, he was only two, and another time, a decade later, when my cousin David and twentysomething Nicole danced with our grandmother Marian to “Shakedown Street” all three of us totally drunk on wine and the joy of life.

In my thirties, it became clear that my mom was growing tired of hosting the event, so my husband and I took over the feast. There were many missteps, especially when it came to the turkey. One year, my husband got it so wrong, the bird was five hours late, all the appetizers were gone, and everyone was drunk beyond belief (see picture above). We are of Polish descent, after all. I also remember our hosting days with great fondness for there were little ones, the cousins’ kids now playing with one another. The bonfires were always epic, my father would spend all fall creating his pyre and my husband did the same. We’d stand out in the Chicago area winters, buzzed on wine, coffee, and too much pie, turning like pigs on the roasting spit, to make sure our asses didn’t freeze.

We haven’t celebrated a Thanksgiving like that in fourteen years, since Walt and I moved to California. Once we got here, the celebration changed up—my parents and sister would come to California for Thanksgiving and Walt’s mom and dad joined us for Christmas. While this new development created many fond memories, it never compared to the tradition we’d left behind when we relocated from the Midwest to sunny, but still very cold at Thanksgiving, California. When my family arrived for Thanksgiving 2019, I remember very clearly having a sense that it would be the last one I’d host here. That something else was taking shape as my sons went off to college. I told my parents this before they arrived. That spring, covid-19 hit and then in August 2020, the house burned. I was right, that was the last Thanksgiving we’d celebrate here. And now that we’ve decided to return to the property in tiny homes, it’s unlikely we’ll ever host that holiday on this land again.

This Thanksgiving, it will be just Walt and our son Jackson. Our California friends all have family to visit, yet my own family can’t come here because covid-19 still makes traveling large distances tricky for the elders. My youngest son doesn’t feel like flying across the nation from Philly for a two-day event. In the end, we are just three. We have no tradition and I must admit, I feel lost and displaced, which is what we’ve been since the house burned. Yet perhaps we’ve been displaced these past fourteen years, away from the Midwest chasing the California gold rush. Between the real estate market and Zoom’s IPO, you’d say we’ve done well, so why not pack up and move back home. But what is “home?” Where do my people actually come from? I could say the Chicago area, but half my aunties and one uncle live in the Quad Cities, near the Mississippi River and my cousins are spread out across the nation. If I go back further, many of my relatives from my dad’s side lived in Chicago, but also Michigan. My mother’s family mostly lives on the East coast.

Where am I from?

This has come up a lot for me this past year, not only because I lost my physical home, but the fact I’m turning 50 has something to do with it. Standing on this land I can’t seem to leave I wonder, how can I be so bonded to a place that my people don’t even hail from? None of my cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, live in California. Moreover, as I look for ways to heal the land, I receive messages from every direction that as a white person, I can’t possibly know what to do and that to figure it out, I need to draw on indigenous wisdom. I agree with this sentiment, yet in the same breath am told that to truly embrace their techniques for listening to the land and receiving guidance from the elders, would be cultural appropriation.

Is it appropriation to study the native plants of these lands and ask those who have retained knowledge how to best aid the land after a fire? There’s much confusion in the various circles out here on how to go forward. Do we leave the land alone? Do we plant seeds with native grasses and flowers to aid in the soil’s renewal? Do we inoculate our swales with mushrooms to help with erosion and remove toxins from our soil? Are there shamanistic techniques I can use to develop a deeper relationship with the land? Is any of this appropriate? Or since this land isn’t really mine, should I leave and head back to the Midwest, for let’s be honest, land ownership is nonsense, no matter how many papers we produce that say we bought it. Yet can I own land in the Midwest? Isn’t that also appropriation? Where is my body appropriate?

The one thing that survived the fires on our land, other than the chickens, were the honeybees. For me, this has been my starting point. I’ve been a bee guardian for a decade and their presence after the fire has been a source of hope for all of us. Through meditation and dialogue with nature, I’ve come to understand that this land is to be an apiary, and one of the main reasons we’re going with tiny homes on wheels is the minimal impact they have on the landscape. Less cutting into the soil, less materials for the construction, and less square footage also means less stuff to burn into the soils, should the worst happen again. Those who once lived on these lands before the Europeans claimed to own them didn’t live in single-family foundation homes filled with all of their prized possessions. It was working with the bees that this idea came to me. Every time I return here, I sit with them in my mourning chair next to the goat’s grave and tell them what’s happening. Then I close my eyes and listen to their buzzing, losing myself in their purposeful hum as they go about their business of making love to the flowers.

This desire to plant an apiary led me to take permaculture courses to develop the most sustainable environment for the insects of my heart. Imagine then, my sadness when one of the instructors began to discuss how bad the European honeybee was for native bees. Suddenly, I was yet again destroying an ecosystem when I thought I was doing what was appropriate. Creating an apiary was an impulse I thought I received from the land. Again I wonder, is there anywhere on earth where my body and my instincts are appropriate?

I recently had my DNA analyzed and lo and behold, I’m 99.7% Slavic, mostly Polish. My people hail from Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Slovakia. All of my grandparents were born here in America, but their parents came over from the Old Country in the early 1900s. I’m the third generation born here. I’ve begun looking into my history, led by this question of appropriation, but also finally, after five decades of living, wanting to know where I come from. I was closest to my paternal grandmother, Marian, because she lived the longest, my mother’s parents had passed by the time I was five, and she talked the most. Being a sucker for a good story, I loved nothing more than listening to her. Her husband, Joseph, was a kind man, but I’m not sure if he ever even spoke to me. I only remember him nodding and smiling. They both knew Polish, but didn’t teach their children the language, yet once a year we’d meet Grandpa Joe’s sister, Irene, at the Warsaw Inn near the city and I remember her ordering in Polish. Like most families who immigrated here in the early 1900s, they thought it appropriate to leave their customs behind and assimilate into the American culture, thus I know extraordinarily little about Poland, but a lot about Marian’s experience as a child being told to be “American.”

What does it even mean to be “American?” Is it only appropriate for me to wear jeans, hoodies, and Lululemon, drink Starbucks, Budweiser, and Coke, and stare at my phone all day? Sounds like me in my twenties, but that’s not who I am now. When I look at my great-grandparents pictures taken at Ellis Island, I see a colorfully dressed people. They were excellent at needle work, farming, and dancing. I think of my great-grandfather with his young wife and his own 95 y.o. father crossing the sea at the turn of the 20th century. America had already conquered the natives, had already fought a bloody civil war to end slavery. Why did Antoni come here? Because his own lands were occupied by other nations at the time and he wanted a chance for freedom. Should he have known what price had been paid for the American dream? Could he have known the genocidal history of America before he risked everything to get on that ship?

Something we modern humans do is use our current culture to judge our ancestors of the past. We also lump everyone into groups based on our color and gender. These techniques are simplifications of what it means to be human. We each carry so much in our genetic code—as ancestral medicine writer Daniel Floor writes, “Each of our bloodlines includes thousands of years of human history, with plenty of time spent as oppressor, oppressed, and every other configuration.” As I dig deeper into Slavic culture, I’ve discovered many aspects of my people that I carry with me, even though my own family sought hard to be “American.” Like the people of Poland, I too love colorful clothes, embroidery, knitting, and spinning, and damn I can dance. The peasants of Poland always kept a beehive or two in their flower gardens and they still have medicine women living in their hills called “Wind Whisperers,” despite thousands of years of Catholicism. Moreover, I learned yesterday that bee-shamanism, an evolution of the Melissa cults of the ancient Greek and Minoan era, proliferated in the Slavic world, Lithuania in particular, in pre-Christian times and is still active.

The honeybee, eh?

Sometimes I feel like Velma in Scooby Doo, trying to discover the ancestral lineage that still lives within my cells, collecting clues along the way. Or following breadcrumbs through the forest of my lineage. I’m just getting started, yet already I see that the place my people come from isn’t as important as the capacity I carry within my heart and soul. I can’t move to Poland and be home, that too would be an appropriation of something that isn’t true. I live here, in America, as it is called in this moment in time. However, I can follow my instincts forged by my lineage, as well as learn from those peoples indigenous to this land in order to move to our next incarnations together—the land that was once a forest needs help becoming a meadow and the woman who was once a mother needs help becoming a keeper. Not quite a crone, I haven’t earned that title yet, but not a mother or maiden. Something different, something new now that we live so much longer. All of us are changing—people, plants, animals, and planet—melding, mixing in this global culture we are forging, right now, as we live together on this beautiful speck of a planet in a cosmos so vast, our minds simply can’t imagine it.

This will be the quietest Thanksgiving yet in my life as Nicole, but we have set the goal of having a place in Chicago by this time next year, so we can host the family once again. I’m not sure how many cousins, aunts, and uncles will be able to make it, but we’ll do our best to get as many to gather as many as possible. It’s been a long time and all of our parents are all getting older. They are the elders now, nodding and smiling at the grandkids, in the midst of the mayhem we call family.

This then is what I give thanks for—a rich cultural renewal where we bring all our ancestors have to offer to the table to create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.* I hope all of you find a way to connect with your families, both the living and the dead, and discover the many aspects of your being from the past as they relate to what’s needed right now, so that we can create a future that honors the planet and all the peoples, co-creating together.

*stolen from Charles Eisenstein’s book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.