ISLAND VOICES
Thanksgiving with natives, both here and on the Mainland
By H.K. Bruss Keppeler
Honolulu attorney
Today, as most of us sit down to a "traditional" Thanksgiving Day feast, we'll be reminded of the legendary meal shared by the Pilgrims and the natives of the land they had settled.
In fact, few of us will be allowed to forget it, with all the Thanksgiving turkey specials touted in the supermarket ads. Inevitably, the ads will contain visions of beautifully roasted turkeys and Pilgrims and Indians and heavily laden tables.
Those images will refresh memories of the history of the very beginnings of the United States of America, the stuff of history classes in school. We'll be reminded that the Founding Fathers of the United States, who followed the Pilgrims in history, understood that the natives of the lands contained in the original 13 colonies had a special relationship to those lands and to the colonial governments. Thus, the United States Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation before it) would contain strong provisions recognizing the special relationship the new nation was to have with the natives.
We are told that the Pilgrims felt a special affinity for the natives with whom they shared that first Thanksgiving feast. In fact, the natives had saved them from starvation and that's why they were giving thanks. As for the Founding Fathers, it may have been more a matter of practicality. They couldn't simply ignore the natives and, to their credit, they couldn't declare (as other Europeans had done earlier) that the natives were less than human.
Instead, they recognized that the new nation must honor the special relationships with the natives established earlier by the Pilgrims and others and must establish the same sort of relationships with other native groups as the new nation they were forming grew.
Thus, the framers of the U.S. Constitution included the so-called Indian Commerce Clause in their august document. It states: "The Congress shall have the Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes. ... " (Art. I, Sec. 8).
Why "Indian"? Why "tribes"? The Founding Fathers called them "Indians." Actually, Columbus first called them that, but remember he thought he'd reached India. The natives knew they weren't "Indians" and probably wondered why these newcomers were calling them that. Also, the only natives the Founding Fathers knew were organized into what the Founding Fathers called "tribes."
However, as the United States grew, the leaders of the fledgling nation would find more and more natives on the lands subsumed by the new government. The Founding Fathers could not have imagined the kind or diversity of the natives their descendants would encounter. A Mohawk has little in common culturally with a Cherokee.
The Founding Fathers probably could not have conceived of an Eskimo as being an "Indian" or his village as being a "tribe." Eskimos are of a completely different ethnic stock and were not organized into "tribes." Yet, as America grew, each of the native peoples were "recognized," under the Indian Commerce Clause, as the aboriginal peoples of the lands taken over.
Here in Hawai'i, our "traditional" Thanksgiving feasts might well include foods that the Founding Fathers would never have dreamt of bringing to the groaning board: lup cheong, sushi, kim chee, adobo, poi. Here also live a group of natives of which the Founding Fathers would have no concept. They aren't "Indians" and they didn't have "tribes," but they are the natives of this land. As the Eskimos before them, they deserve to be recognized as such.
By the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with the overthrow of the multiracial Kingdom of Hawai'i. That's a very separate issue. But, it does have everything to do with the Indian Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the native people of Hawai'i ... and that first Thanksgiving Day.
