This is a story about Thanksgiving

This is a story about Thanksgiving. 

On a warm June morning in 2006, less than 24 hours after I graduated from Wesleyan University in central Connecticut, I got in my 1996 seafoam green Nissan Sentra with my dad in the passenger seat and started driving out to Gallup, New Mexico. 

I think I had five days to get there before my training for Teach For America began. There were somewhere around 35 of us in my corps, as I remember, and we were a crew of mostly liberal arts grads from around the country ready to learn how to lead classrooms of kids who had, for the most part, grown up listening to their elders’ stories of Indian boarding schools. 

W was president; it was a weird time. Our experiment of launching our careers was also a weird one, in which none of us had the language to really articulate the colonial history we were perpetuating as a bunch of mostly white folks coming to New Mexico to educate Natives. We were annoyingly woke before it was a term, obviously all ready to vote for Obama three times if we could have.

I quickly latched on to a blonde graduate of Kenyon college and offered her a spot in my car to go to the summer-long training institute in Houston, Texas together. We listened to Kanye and chill EDM CDs as we made the ride down (she lives in Durango now and we’re still dear friends). I don’t remember most of my training, but I do remember that we had one session where we read an article about the “invisible backpack” of privilege many of us carried, and some combover haired guy from some other corps broke down and started crying; he’d never thought about that before. I rolled my eyes in Wesleyan. 

When we returned to the New Mexico corps headquarters in Gallup at the end of the summer, I learned I’d be teaching 8th grade language arts at a school that was about thirty minutes north of Gallup, on the Navajo reservation proper, in a public school like any other public school. I’d live in subsidized housing on the school campus that the district owned and rented to teachers. I had really wanted to teach high school English and have my Michelle Pfeiffer moment with actual teenagers, but 8th graders sounded close enough. 

TLDR, yes, my students gave me absolute hell the first day. And the third, fourth, and probably tenth. They called me “white lady” nonstop. They were 98% Native; the only white kids I taught were other teachers’ kids. Our teaching staff was maybe 50% Native at most. My classroom was under enrolled; I think my biggest class was maybe 20 students. There was a Bureau of Indian Affairs school down the street, a relic of the boarding school days, that was also publicly funded and under enrolled. A common discipline strategy of both schools was to expel kids to the other school, then do it again, treating children like boomerangs for someone else to pick up. It was so dumb and eternally damaging. 

After about a month of teaching or so though, something clicked. I was only six years older than one of my oldest students who’d been held back time and time again, had a DIY tattoo from juvie, and wore all black every day, but slowly, even he started to vibe with me. His name was Jerry. I remember his smirk when he handed me some writing assignment that actually kicked ass. 

We read everything; a ton of Langston Hughes, whatever. I fundraised to build a classroom library and brought in any books from college I’d hauled cross country with me. Some kids were at 3rd or 4th grade reading level so there was lots and lots of Captain Underpants (comic books are awesome). We had beanbags. I rolled in the TV and DVD player and force fed them my DVD of Clueless (my favorite movie) to learn how to analyze plot; they moaned and basically called me the whitest human they’d ever met and started saying “as if” all over school. I didn’t really care what they read and wrote or how they read and wrote, I just wanted them to fall in love with reading. They did, a lot. 

They told me about their language’s demise, how it’d been washed out of their elders’ mouths with soap. Their grandparents would welcome me into their homes but wouldn’t set a damn foot on school property. They taught me rez ball; I suck at basketball so I told other teachers we were gonna challenge the kids to floor hockey one day at an assembly, because I was good at that. I beat them, no mercy. I slowly learned to be more (not fully, but more) introspective and honest about what I was doing there, the white saviorism of it all. We built trust. Kids whose parents worked or who didn’t feel safe at home started hanging in my classroom after school. 

As November neared, my two TFA roommates and I, all of us white, started thinking about Thanksgiving, the irony of it all given where we were and why we were there. We decided to own it and host. My dad, with whom I had a really complicated relationship and fought a ton on the roadtrip out (mostly about money, mainly between him and my mother, a dialogue I’d shut down for good on that trip) came out. We opened our doors to as many people as we could fit in our home, setting up tables and chairs I think we borrowed from one of the schools. One of our Navajo colleagues came and brought blue corn mush, a traditional Navajo dish. My roommate Rebecca made a phenomenal turkey. The whole day was warm, it was kind, it was real, it was delicious, and it was perfect. 

My dad had taken a lot of credit thus far in my life for things for which he wasn’t really present (like most of my high school and college career), but that day, he just smiled with real pride and admiration. With my two roommates, I’d done the thing I was going to do for the rest of my career, eventually culminating in local elected office: name the fuckery of American history and society and also find my place inside it and build community within it despite it all. 

After eating a few of us did what we often did, and took a walk out to the edge of the mesa – on which our weird little Leavittown of teacher housing sat – to watch the sunset. All I ever needed and still need to do to love this country is to take a walk on its dirt. 

Every single one of my kids ended up making it through 8th grade and on to high school that year. Standardized tests are overall ridiculous, but my kids soared on them that year (results which an old, white, low key fascist of a social studies teacher later said was because my students thought I was hot; another theme that carried through the rest of my career thus far around gross older men). 

I moved away from the rez and to Denver a couple years later, after my TFA commitment was done, and after I realized I had no business taking up space on that land. But my students and I stayed in touch, made a lot easier by their underage accounts at the time on Facebook. Last year one of them invited me to his PhD in English graduation at Denver University; I’d attended one of his readings at Book Bar when it was still open on Tennyson St. 

Thanksgiving is messy; always has been, always will be. But once I got settled in our home in Edgewater, a small city just outside of Denver, I committed to hosting again, to turning an ugly corner of this imperfect democracy into a place to build connection and togetherness. Our home is small but our doors are always open. I blast “Crowded Table” by Highwomen while I cook now, and tell my husband that if my City Council campaign had a walkout song, that’d be it (the chorus’s lyrics: “I want a house with a crowded table / And a place by the fire for everyone/ Let us take on the world while we're young and able / And bring us back together when the day is done”). 

I still inhale books, mostly by interesting people versus about them (I’ve always been a memoir and fiction girl), and continue to have those “well, sh*t” moments when I realize the remaining white saviory edges of how I show up. I continue to get better. I have a really good turkey recipe I’m proud of. I look at my menorah and shabbat candlesticks while the turkey cooks and think about Palestine, not a parallel to the colonialism in this country (we are not litigating this now, please) but a place about which I also have responsibility to be honest and active in my advocacy for kindness. 

At the end of the day, I’m Jewish, and when we Jews don't know what else to do, we cook a hell of a meal and feed whomever is in our reach. That’s what I'm here to do, always, and it’s what I’ve been here to do since I was a 22 year old starting to figure it all out in a dusty, beautiful little corner of New Mexico. 

To you and yours, may you all have a safe and meaningful holiday, and may all our tables be a place of connection and kindness. The road ahead is uncertain, but we’ll always have bread to break together. At least we will in my home, and in the community I’m here to fortify, and everyone is welcome to come and stay as long as they’d like.