Freedom From Want (Reprise)

This post originally appeared in November of 2015.

Every American has seen this picture, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” published in the November 1943 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

To some, it’s a joke. The perfect white family (perfectly white) are all smiles as they prepare to carve the bird. Dad is wearing his tie for the occasion, but mom has on her sturdy print dress and practical apron. Rockwell frames the iconic moment of American thanksgiving as a family snapshot, with uncles and aunts, kids and cousins, just leaning into frame, all sharing a laugh–probably about last thanksgiving. The dog ate one of the pies; mom forgot to turn the oven on, so dinner was really late.

Yet, the 1943 context for “Freedom from Want” is war. Look at the meal. It is paltry by comparison to many American Thanksgiving meals today. A few sticks of celery, pickles, and jellied cranberries are all that accompany the rich roasted turkey at the illustration’s center. There might be something more exotic beneath the lid of the silver server in the foreground, but I bet it’s potatoes.

Where are the candied yams, the marshmallows, the heaping plate of green beans, corn, store-bought dinner rolls, the Readi Whip? That would come after the war. In 1943—with everything from butter to tires being rationed—this was indeed a great meal. This is what the young men and women who would normally be at the table in peacetime were off fighting for.

Another important context for the illustration is an essay of the same title by the Filipino farmworker-turned-activist, Carlos Bulosan. The editors of the Post asked Bulosan for a piece to accompany Rockwell’s painting. For Bulosan, the Thanksgiving feast brings to mind laborers like himself, who harvest the crops that adorn the holiday table. “So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us,” he explains, “so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.” Tough words. Hard to wash down with gravy and stuffing. For the everyday worker in the fields, “It is only when we have plenty to eat—plenty of everything— that we begin to understand what freedom means.”

But what does this have to do with repatriation? Actually, more than you’d think. With the exception of marshmellows and whipped cream in a can, the iconic dishes of the middle class American Thanksgiving are indigenous to the western hemisphere. Thus we pause this week to remember and to repatriate the foods native to this hemisphere—unadulterated and sustainably grown and harvested—to the late-autumn feast.

“Indians” are there too, they’re just (as Philip Deloria would say) “in unexpected places.”

When Bulosan makes his pitch for better treatment of the working poor, he does so as a immigrant whose faith in America is based in a kind of second-hand manifest destiny: “Our history has many strands of fear and hope that snarl and converge at several points in time and space. We clear the forest and the mountains of the land. We cross the river and the wind. We harness wild beast and living steel. We celebrate labor, wisdom, peace of the soul.”

The cleared forests and leveled mountains are Indian land and they no longer produce the corn, beans, and squash—the wild turkeys, venison, and waterfowl—that furnished the first Anglo-American Thanksgiving table.

Even as he pleads for justice for the worker of the fields, Bulosan elides the primal scene of want—Native peoples standing in ration lines.

Corn fields set ablaze by the troops of “freedom.” Mountains ground down for precious metals, uranium, and coal.

But this post is not intended as a “gotcha” moment for Carlos Bulosan and Norman Rockwell, nor an indictment of giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. It is a plea for the repatriation of our indigenous foodstuffs and their former land base to a state of sustainability.

Contemporary Native American communities are  showing us the way. In Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation is engaged in developing its own Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI), a constellation of “local and traditional foods initiatives on the Settlement. MFSI has two main focuses: Education and outreach around food system control; Development of sustainable local farms and farmers.” Among the Meskwaki Nation’s traditional foods: maple syrup.

The MFSI is joined by hundreds of similar organizations across the hemisphere. Northwest Indian College (NWIC)  at Lummi Nation near Bellingham, Washington hosts a Traditional Plants and Foods Program. This program “is a long-term general wellness and diabetes prevention program that recognizes the therapeutic value of traditional foods and medicines.” It features  gatherings “hosted by many tribal communities,” as well as “educational resources, tribal community workshops, and more.” [http://nwicplantsandfoods.com/our-programs]. At the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota, Anishinaabe peoples have established the White Earth Land Recovery Project in order to “facilitate the recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage.” [http://welrp.org/]

Wild rice from the Ojibwe lakes of Minnesota; maple syrup from Ojibwe and Meskwaki “sugar bush;”

mesquite beans on the Tohono O’Odham lands of Arizona and Sonora; acorns the Pomo harvested on California’s great Oak savannas;

wild caught salmon from the northern watersheds the Tlingit have fished for a thousand years.    These are the harvests for which we should give thanks and work to ensure their lasting place in our world.

Finally, this repatriation of indigenous plants and animals is one way to address the cruelties of the “freedom” and “want” nexus that Bulosan pointed out so many years ago—not only for the working poor, but also the middle class Euro-American descendents of the family Rockwell depicts in his painting.

We can return this hemisphere, this Indian country, to some semblance of its fecundity and health, but we must do so together—the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers, suburban generations with alphabetic acronyms, Native Americans in the lower 48, Kānaka Maoli of the Hawaiian Islands, Native Alaskans near the Arctic Circle. The earth has grown much smaller (and hotter) since Rockwell painted “Freedom from Want” and we know perhaps better than he and Carlos Bulosan the consequences of inaction. Instead of “clearing” the indigenous lands and peoples, we should embrace both it and them.

Santee Sioux intellectual and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. foresaw the choices we now face, and the role of indigenous communities in solving them:

When the Indian considers the modern world, . . . he sees it being inevitably drawn into social structures in which tribalism appears to be the only valid form of supra-individual participation. The humor becomes apparent when the Indian realizes that if he simply steps to the sidelines and watches the rat race go past him, soon people will be coming to him to advise him to advise him to return to tribalism. I appears to many Indians that someday soon the modern world will be ready to understand itself and, perhaps, Indian people (“Custer Died for your Sins,” 226).

Deloria wrote this in 1969, and while the word tribalism may seem outdated or dangerous to some who associate it with extremism and fundamentalism, for Deloria it was quite the opposite. It was the way humans gathered together for companionship and preservation long before there was anything like nationhood and its oxymoronic pursuit of freedom at the expense of community.