The Thanksgiving Story as told by Roger Ebsen

I learned this story from Oren Lyons, Onondaga chief, who I saw interviewed by Bill Moyers in a PBS special. I guess this is now more my story than that if the Onondaga and I am responsible for any variance from the traditional story for which I have great respect. This is my elaboration of their wonderful story.

A long time ago, two thousand or more years, a stranger came to the people, the clan of the Indians of the Northeast. Strangers were very, very, unusual because the people all knew each other. This stranger was regarded as something special, sort of as a God, it was as if he had a light around him, a special kind of power. He spoke to the clan chieftan and told him, I want you to call a council meeting of the chiefs of the Six Nations and tell them that I have a message for them from the Creator. So the chief called his brothers and the council was held that next day. This stranger, who they called The Peacemaker, then delivered his message. "I have been sent to you to tell you about the way of life and how to live. My message is very simple. There are only two instructions. The first instruction is to give thanks."

In those days there was so much about which to be grateful. The tribes and families were all together. There was peace among the people. The people were healthy. The people were happy. The people were connected to and guided by spirit. There was amazing beauty in the environment in which they lived. Game for hunting was abundant, and the fishing was so good that in two or three days they could catch enough fish to last for a year. Life was so abundant and good. They understood thanksgiving. Thanksgiving became a way of life for the Indians, a daily spiritual practice as they understood that all life is known through a connection with Spirit. For indigenous people Thanksgiving is not something to celebrate once a year, but an attitude and celebration for every day. We may have to look a little harder but our blessings are there, if we only make it a practice to look.

The Peacemaker told the people, first, to make a thanksgiving everyday. "The second instruction is to enjoy your life," he told them. "Creator gave you life to enjoy, so enjoy it. Your life is a blessing, a gift. Do not allow yourself to be concerned with small things, to suffer unnecessarily. Creator wants you to be happy ~ to enjoy the beauty he has surrounded you with; to enjoy the gifts of food and sex and laughter; to dance, to sing; to enjoy your history and your culture; to love each other; to love yourself; to locate the joy that he installed inside of you and to stay connected to this."

It is as if enjoying your life was a way of praying, of giving thanks, of respecting yourself and the environment. The Peacemaker delivered his simple, but powerful message, and then he disappeared. The people were given the message of the way of life and how to live and they have passed this message down from generation to generation. The way to live is now embedded in their culture, in their traditions, in their daily life, in their dreams and in their collective psyche.

It’s all so simple. Give Thanks. Enjoy your life. I have adopted this into my own personal philosophy. I always add my own third instruction. We "middle class Caucasians" must always gild the lily, must always mess with perfection, must always complicate things. We just can’t seem to keep it simple. So, anyway, I always add my own third instruction. It is, "there is no third instruction. That’s it, pure and simple. This is how to live. FIRST GIVE THANKS. THEN ENJOY YOUR LIFE."

Happy Thanksgiving, whatever day it is.

Roger Ebsen

Excerpts from the dialogue between Bill Moyers and Oren Lyons, Onondaga Chief

LYONS: …A long time ago when we first began…the Peacemaker, we call him the Great Peacemaker came among us. He was a messenger. He brought a message, the Great Peace. It was our second message. We were brought a first message which was long prior to that. The message of How to Live. The Way of Life. And everybody learned that message. And then somehow prople forgot, and there was warfare.

MOYERS: That’s and old story, too.

LYONS: Yes, this is a human story about human beings. And so then the Peacemeaker came with the second message: the Great Peace, the Great Law. Same word for both. And he changed the minds of all the wise men who at that time were leaders by strength and force. And he stepped in and changed the whole process to deliberation and consensus. It took a long time…[much more to this story which has to do with the employment of a clan mother who chooses the leader, because …"woman would recognize the importance of peace…like Mary in the Christian tradition…"]…

LYONS: I mentioned the second message which was the Great Peace. Now, we had a thrd message. The third message came around 1799…after the Revolutionary War [a time of great turmoil]…We had a third message from Ganeyodio, whom people call Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake was taken on a journey, for four days. And during that time he was shown the future, what was going to happen. And then he was given instructions on how to deal with the white man, instructions by the four protectors, from the spiritual side of our life. They told him what was coming. …This story [is] told every year in every longhouse across the Six Nations [of the North-Eastern Clan].

MOYERS: What did the protectors say to Handsome Lake?

LYONS: The central message is that there’s going to be a deterioration and a falling away of life as we know it. Handsome Lake was shown things in vignettes [which detailed the deterioration and degradation of the environment which we are now experiencing.] …

Well, as he was being told about these things that were coming, he aked, "What is the hope?" And the answer was that it’s up to each generation to see that it doesn’t happen in that generation.

MOYERS: So the vision received was that destruction, environmental destruction, could come in each generation. But each generation is charged not to let it happen.

LYONS: Yes, actually the hope lies in the intensity of the life of that generation….

…the instruction given to the chief [is] that when we sit in council for the welfare of the people, we counsel for the the welfare of [the] seventh generation to come. It should be foremost in our minds. Not even our generation, not even ourselves, but those that are unborn. So that when their time comes here, they may enjoy the same things that we’re enjoying now. I’m sitting here as the seventh generation because seven generations ago, those people were looking out for me. Seven generations from now someone will be here, I know…

…I believe that all discussion between human beings is about morality. We have good and bad in us and we must strike a balance at all times. The balance is what’s important. Your conduct should reflect a balance. For us, this is what the great tree of peace is, the spiritual center.

MOYERS: When the Peacemaker came, he planted a tree of peace.

LYONS: the Great Peace, the Great Law, is a spiritual law. He said, "when you become afraid or when you become weak or when you are not able to carry on, it’s the spiritual law that will stiffen your spine." He said, "that’s where your strength is. So you must make your laws in accordance with those spiritual laws. And then you will survive." He called the council, the Council of the Good Minds. So that’s what he set up and he asked the nations to come forward and cast away their weapons of war. We now do away with warriors . And we do away with the war chiefs. And in their place we plant the Council of Good Minds who will counsel for the welfare of the people. He said, "I shall not leave you defenseless.

And that’s why this peace is so foremost in our minds. He said the three principles will be peace, equity and justice ~ and the power of the good minds. And when your people think that way and everyone has the same position, then being of one mind is the greatest power there is…

[Before] the pilgrims landed, freedom was rampant in America. All the nations here were free. The native people, I mean. Everybody was equal. There was a great society here, if you want to call it that. All people understood about freedom. They were masters of freedom….We’ve been here a long time, you know, thousands of years. We were people who sat under a tree for a long time talking about things. About society. About law. About rules here. None of it written down. Everybody understands…

We had a process of peacemaking and peacekeeping…and there were many confederations…

MOYERS: Do you subscribe to the opinion of some researchers that some of the people we call the Founding Fathers were affected directly by what Indians were dooing and thinking?

LYONS: Oh, yes. They were affected very directly. The Wampanoags met the Pilgrims. There was a great leader by the name of Massoit. And Massoit made saw to it that there was peace between the two….

…Indigenous people talk family all the time. The basis of our politics is family….one of our young people said that spirituality was the highest form of politics.

MOYERS: What do you take that to mean?

LYONS: Well, I go back to the center tree of peace, the spiritual center. That is the highest form. That’s what everything has to come around. Because it is what we call the great law, the common law, the natural law. The law says is you poison your water, you’ll die. The law says if you poison the air, you’ll suffer. The law says if you degrade where you live, you’ll suffer. The law says all this. And if you don’t learn that, then you will suffer. There’s no discussion with this law.

There’s no mercy in nature. And there’s very much something that people should understand, that you suffer in direct ratio to your transgressions against the natural world. The natural world will prevail. You know, human beings are still a biological experiment as far as the world’s concerned. We’ve only been here a short time….We are literally a part of nature…Our leaders, our spiritual guides [told us that]…we must respect the earth.

MOYERS: …exactly what do indigenous people, Indians, have to offer the rest of us?

LYONS: Well, first of all we have a long perspective. We’ve been in one place a long time. We’ve seen the sun come up at the same place many hundreds, thousands of years. And we have a familiarity with the earth itself, the elements. We know about them. And we know what it is to enjoy them. The ceremonies, which are as ancient as we are, carry forward this respect. Our children are bit sat down ad taught about what’s good and what’s wrong. They see their grandfathers or they see their fathers or their grandmothers going to ceremonies. And they say, "So that must be the right thing to do. The old people do it. Everybody does it. That’s good." So they do it and they learn in the process. "The thanksgiving, what is it for?" "Well, this one is for the maple, the chief of trees. We’re giving a thanksgiving for the maple." "Good. Let’s respect the tree. We must respect all the trees." So respect is learned through ceremony as a process. It’s an old one. Thanksgiving comes as a natural way of being. It’s part your life. It’s not something that you do occasionally. It’s something that you do all the time. And that’s how the process has been passed down. So we have the wellsprings of knowledge, about places that only aboriginal people would know. Because we’ve lived here. We have intimate knowledge of what’s there. And when people are destroyed and languages are destroyed, you destroy that knowledge along with it. Indigenous people may have the long-term thinking required for proper context.

MOYERS: Context being…

LYONS: Life as it functions in the cycles and the great cycles of life, our cycle of being born and going back to the earth again. As the tree, there’s a sapling and it grows to full being and then falls. As it goes back to earth again, and the spring comes and the summer and the fall and the winter. And it comes again. The cycle is endless; it’s endless as long as you protect the cycle. As long as you participate in the cycle, as long as you honor and respect it. Then it will continue. But it doesn’t have to.

MOYERS: You said a moment ago that the tree of peace is still here, in Onandaga.

LYONS: Spiritually, yes. It was a spiritual tree to begin with. You know, again, people are so literal. It’s hard at times to have a discussion with people who think in linear terms, because they say, "We’ve come to see the tree." And you tell them, "It’s a great tree. It reaches to the heavens. You can’t see it. We can see it. It’s there. And it’s very real." As we were told, sometimes the most real things you can’t see.

MOYERS: You’ve said on other occasions that there has to be a spiritual change if we are going to face these environmental issues. What kind of spiritual change?

LYONS: We don’t preach here in this, our country…we don’t proselytize. As a matter of fact, we try to protect what we have from intrusion. And yet at a meeting that was held with the Hopi back in 1969 when we sat there with many Indian leaders from around the country, spiritual leaders, they talked about these young people who were sitting on our doorsteps every day when we got up. They had come from all over…to learn something from us. And we said this is a very strange phenomenon…that our white brother’s children are now coming…wanting to be part of us.

So one of the Hopi elders said, "Well, we have a prophecy about that. It is said that there would be a time that they’re going to come and ask a direction. Maybe this is what’s happening." …under discussion…it was agreed that we would work more directly with them. How much can be imparted is hard to say. But the "isms" of this world-communism, capitalism, all of these "isms"- are really quite bereft of a spiritual side.

MOYERS: But the reality of human nature keeps intruding on your stories and philosophy.

LYONS: Well, what Indians are about, first of all, is community…They’re about mutual support. They’re about sharing. They’re about understanding what’s common-common land, common air, common water. Common-and for all.

We’re spiritual beings. Each one is a spiritual being with great power. And every once in a while you have a manifestation of this…Each of us is capable of, has within us, this great spiritual power. So around the earth, you have all these spiritual beings and they have options.

MOYERS: You and I can go this way or that way.

LYONS: Every day’s a discussion, isn’t it? There’s nothing for sure. Every day as you get up, there’s going to come to a point where somebody is going to tempt you or try to influence you. This is what happens every day, so every day you have to make small and big choices all the time.

MOYERS: What sustains you?

LYONS: My belief in the people, my belief in the ceremonies, my belief in the earth, and I’m really kind of optimistic.

MOYERS: Vaclev Havel said recently that hope is a state of the spirit, a state of the soul.

LYONS: …people are interested in the spiritual side of things. I believe that there’s a real grounswell of people wanting to understand that there’s more to life than what the media moguls…put forward. That there are other values ~ the old values ~ the ancient values ~ the constant values ~ and they are the ones that have to prevail and will prevail. And I think what we’re feeling now is people beginning to respond and they’re saying, "The leaders are trying to catch up to the people these days. The people are moving so fast ~ and the leaders are behind them.

MOYERS: My wife and I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, "If the people will lead, the leaders will follow.

LYONS: Well, that’s what is happening. The Six Nations have been lucky to have leaders of principle who do their best, quite simple people but quite profound in their belief, who are steadfast in the face of everything. [One thing to remember] is that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.

MOYERS: Even a chief?