Thanksgiving, Trust, and Tryptophan
Contemplating Simple Lessons on the Economic Importance of the First Thanksgiving
Over 400 years have passed since the “First Thanksgiving” in 1621, which equals just as many years of tragedy and mourning by indigenous peoples. While the historical anomaly of the shared meal has become a central tradition of American culture, our dense soup of gratitude and mourning can be a lot to digest.
Thanks to Indigenous wisdom and generosity, the Mayflower folk narrowly avoided the cannibalistic fate of their predecessors in Jamestown just a few years earlier. Yet the relational wounds of genocide and slavery still eat away at us, while political enmity tears us apart. Stunting cultural evolution, trauma and a tribalistic focus on scarcity have caused a sort of cultural cannibalism, leaving indelible scars on the country.
During a similar moment back in 1863, to unify a nation torn apart by civil war, President Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official holiday to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.
Amidst the urgency of economic, environmental, and emotional crisis, can we reignite the urgency of healing political enmity and try coming together across the proverbial Thanksgiving table?
How can historical inquiry and our best intentions for peace and regeneration help us reconcile our fear and mourning with an overarching sense of abundance, trust, and gratitude?
From Potlatch to Potluck
The first Thanksgiving of 1621 was destined to become the quintessential American holiday of sharing abundance. A traditional Thanksgiving or Friendsgiving potluck celebrates this tradition as each small individual dish contributes to the community abundance. Potluck, or getting the luck of the pot, is purportedly a British hand-me-down.
While its Native American counterpart, the potlatch, carried far more cultural and economical complexity, since 1621 western settlers have adopted, adapted, and even attempted to destroy the original meaning and purpose of the Native American potlatch. The potlatch was a core socio-economic ceremony where different kinship groups came together to share abundance, show off wealth, and often destroy excess accumulation. Yet, as a critical component of modern civilization, this ceremonial destruction of accumulated wealth became denigrated and even for a time outlawed in Canada and the United States.
Over four hundred years later, we gather again at the table for another Thanksgiving celebration. As prices and political division continue to inflate, how might we harness the humility of the holiday, and consider how much our actions have been influenced by incentivized hoarding rather than honoring?
Foundational aspects of the potlatch tradition include celebrating the continuous abundance of nature, care for the group through wealth distribution, and the relational economic ties of reciprocity, gratitude, and trust. Is it possible to reconcile and resurrect these important economic pillars of indigenous society amidst the conditions of the current economy, marked by converging crises of nature, inequality, hoarding, blame, and mistrust? Is it possible that indigenous economic paradigms might have something to teach us about what our economy is really about and how we might reawaken the emergence of economies that are in harmony with the planet and each other? In other words,
Can Indigenous thinking save the world?
This is the question that Tyson Yunkaporta, an Australian Aboriginal author proposes to answer in his 2021 book, Sand Talk. He says, “ Indigenous Knowledge is not about the what, but the how…It is about process, not content. Your culture is not what your hands touch or make — it’s what moves your hands.”
Can Yunkaporta’s insights from Australia apply to the Americas, as we attempt to reconcile a holiday of generosity with a legacy of genocide?
While many indigenous people consider Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning, most Americans associate the holiday more with shopping than with the spirit of its potlatch origins. While both traditions share the goal of keeping the economy moving, Native American economic ecosystems, like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were also designed to tend to the importance of long-term sustainable relationships between groups.
As Yankaporta suggests, rather than emphasize the particles of stuff our hands can touch, the potlatch distributed or destroyed stuff, emphasizing the relational bonds that moved, like waves, between people.
The Wampanoag, who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corns, beans, and squash, and fertilize them with fish, made a decision to allow this group of starving foreigners, who came with women and children, to survive.
In the Massachusett language, the name for the eastern shoreline was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light, or the Wampanoag (Mann, 2005). These people had a complex history as protectors of the shoreline, and had suffered greatly from previous attacks and disease. A Smithsonian article, Native Intelligence, goes into great detail about the complexities and tragedies of Indigenous societies in the area, asserting ultimately that their sophistication wasn’t enough to save them.
Yet, if we want to cultivate a culture of thanksgiving, perhaps there is more to understand about the relational sophistication of trust. How was it reinforced by the potlatches and symbolized by the wampum? Perhaps old patterns of giving thanks and growing gratitude can still be salvaged from the legacy of atrocity and genocide.
Trust
On the risk-trust continuum, to increase trust is to reduce risk. The most logical method of reducing one’s personal risk has traditionally been to build up the strength of one’s community. This is the basic premise of a gift-based economy, which is not merely a quaint relic of indigenous economies around the world, but also a consistent presence, both measured and unmeasured in our modern economy. For example, giving money to family and community members is not a tax deductible donation. This act of remittances accounts for a greater transfer of wealth than all charity combined. Families who can care for one another not only feel loved, and build a sense of joy and connection, they also tend to look out for each other in the future. This speaks to the adage, “stronger together.” Economic strategies like demurrage, used by Grassroots Economics, naturally decays and returns wealth to where it is most needed can help us to build a sense of human family.
Economies can be designed to reflect the natural patterns of life and strengthen communities. We can value building trust rather than rewarding risk, and learn to experience abundance more than fearing scarcity.
As our individual risk is reduced, bodies can relax and the ability to trust increases.
The ‘risk-trust continuum’. Risk= particle/matter, Trust=wave/relationship
Yet, within the operation of most of our current economy, risk is high. Future “securities” are designed to be high risk investments. Securing ourselves means ensuring we will have access to money in the future, which in turn means collecting and growing financial assets in a cycle of perpetual one-directional growth: upward toward my speculative dreams, and out and away from those who need a means of exchange.
Potlatches, similar to the European jubilee, served the purpose of establishing limits on hoarding through the periodic redistribution of wealth and destruction of accumulated assets. The potlatch was a core socio-economic ceremony where different kinship groups came together to share abundance, show off wealth, and often destroy accesses of accumulation. It was officially banned from 1884–1951 by missionaries and government agents who considered it “a worse than useless custom.” It was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to ‘civilized values’ of accumulation.[21] (Wikipedia)
An article published in 1938 by H.G. Barnett, called The Nature of the Potlatch, written while the potlatch was officially banned, describes values that mirror some we are familiar with in our modern economy, such as the desire to display wealth. In Western culture, this “conspicuous consumption”, while rampant, is pejorative. Yet describing the potlatch, the anthropologist H.G. Barnett supposes:
“Virtue rests in publicly disposing of wealth, not in its mere acquisition and accumulation.
While it might serve as a great social status boost to display one’s wealth, it was only a source of esteem if the display was for purposes of redistribution.
Accumulation in any quantity by borrowing or otherwise is, in fact, unthinkable unless it be for the purpose of an immediate re-distribution….He therefore makes an expenditure of wealth in accordance with the esteem in which he is held or wishes to be held; that is to say, in accordance with the status he holds or presumes to acquire. This is rather a close measure of his own self-esteem, or will tend to become so, for he cannot long support his own self-esteem in the face of the dis-esteem of his fellows”
Barnett continues with his prosocial point about what upheld hierarchies in a potlatch economy:
Accumulation in any quantity by borrowing or otherwise is, in fact, unthinkable unless it be for the purpose of an immediate re-distribution….He therefore makes an expenditure of wealth in accordance with the esteem in which he is held or wishes to be held; that is to say, in accordance with the status he holds or presumes to acquire. This is rather a close measure of his own self-esteem, or will tend to become so, for he cannot long support his own self-esteem in the face of the dis-esteem of his fellows”
Esteem was held according to the good you can do for the collective, rather than the “cargo” you’ve successfully acquired for yourself. Interesting.
Can we design our economy to enhance relationships and trust, while decreasing distance and risk? The cryptographic “trustless” societies that are attempting to address these issues are missing the point. Technology is a tool. Essentially it is more “stuff” that our hands do. Is it in service of the waves of relationship we can trust are always there, or of the particles we can’t predict?
Thanksgiving shows us how relationships between white cultures and Indigenous cultures might have been, and therefore also hints at what could be. As European culture borrowed heavily from the Iroquois Confederacy to establish the governmental checks and balances American textbooks boast, could Indigenous economies also influence our emergent economic design?
As we enter into the week of Thanksgiving with everything just a tad more expensive and politically tense around the table, what can we learn from Indigenous cultures? Particularly, what can we learn about economic redesign that, rather than hoarding and infinite growth, incentivizes peace, prosperity, regeneration, and wellbeing for all?
Tryptophan
The Gratitude Cycle of a Gift Economy
Giving is a virtuous cycle. The act of giving validates our own wealth. The fallacy of modern economies, however, lies in seeing value in the object rather than the relationship. We think the more we give the less we have, whereas in truth, giving proves having. And the more we give, the more we have. This essential truth was manifested by the potlatch, a ceremonial metaphor to reinforce reciprocity as the best measure of economic wealth and health.
As we gather this year in gratitude with our closest relations, how does our gratitude feel? Is it the kind of gratitude that is based upon what I have while others do not?
Or is it the type of awe-inspired gratitude for a life that is essentially defined by relationships, and moves us, from deep within our bones, with a desire for service toward that life and toward our fellow human?
Humans have more needs than food, water, and shelter. Our highest human needs are also essential. The human needs for belonging, relatedness, and respect are not easy to meet the way we have structured our competitive consumer society toward individualism, isolation, and self-interest.
The inability to meet fundamental psychological, social, and spiritual human needs creates a chronic source of stress and an unidentified well of need that manifests in the easiest straws to grasp: material consumption. Our deeper human needs are often invisible to us because we turn a blind, overwhelmed eye. It is better to just be grateful for our food and shelter, our physiological needs. Sometimes meeting the psychological, social, and spiritual needs, seems like a luxury. Not seeing our values as core needs that must be met is part of the problem.
Joining a local community exchange, like a time bank, church, food co-op, or a parent or schooling cooperative are all effective ways to meet these fundamental human needs for purpose, connection, and a greater sense of security, mitigating the chronic stressors of Economic Trauma.
As we gather this year in gratitude with our closest relations, let us think about how our gratitude feels. Is it the kind of gratitude that is based upon what I have while others do not?
Or is it the type of awe-inspired gratitude for a life that is essentially defined by relationships, and moves us, from deep within our bones, with a sense of service toward that life and toward our fellow human?
Humans have more needs than food, water, and shelter. Our highest human needs are also essential. The human needs for belonging, relatedness, and respect are not easy to meet the way we have structured our competitive consumer society toward individualism, isolation, and self-interest.
The inability to meet fundamental psychological, social, and spiritual human needs creates a chronic source of stress and an unidentified well of need that manifests in the easiest straws to grasp: material consumption.
Feeling gratitude for life and relations drives awe and a bone-deep motivation toward generosity and service. Further, the act of generosity has been shown to trigger oxytocin release. The happy chemical of being in love is the real gold we are all looking for.
Wishing all a satisfying cascade of oxytocin to go with the tryptophan and turkey this holiday season
