When Celebrating Holidays Feels like Celebrating Erasure: A Reflection

By Elizabeth Silkes

Originally published July 9, 2024

The skies are overcast with a slight drizzle when I wake on July 4. Beyond taking time off from work, I have no special plans to celebrate the day. This has long been my practice, evolving over the years from an initial stance of personal questioning of official holidays, to professional interrogation of
whose stories are missing in holiday narratives, to public advocacy in support of reconsidering our holidays in acknowledgement that contested histories, when explored collectively, can advance understanding across difference.

It was already my practice but deepened when I read Frederick Douglass’s words from his July 5, 1852, address at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”. Douglass decries the hypocrisy of celebrating the founders’ professed ideals of
freedom even as they perpetuated the enslavement of human beings: “The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

It was already my practice but deepened in February 2007 when I learned my daughter’s public elementary school in New Jersey closed for President’s Day but not for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It was already my practice but deepened in the fall of 2021 when I learned my son’s progressive middle school in Connecticut marked Columbus Day on their calendars but not Indigenous Peoples Day, and the following year when I learned his new, more progressive school marked neither holiday, avoiding exploration of these histories by holding space that day for “Fall Holiday”.

I grew up in the deep south, an Emmylou Harris red dirt girl in Alabama. My family celebrated the 4th of July like everyone around us, with hot dogs on a charcoal grill, fresh peaches and vanilla ice cream, and a sunset drive to watch fireworks launched from the top of Red Mountain. Once home
again, my brothers and I lit sparklers and held them aloft, laughing and running around the backyard in circles as cicadas buzzed and lightening bugs blinked, suspended in the heavy air around us.

In celebrating Independence Day with hot dogs, tri-color bunting and spectacles in the night sky, we become players in a national mythology of exceptionalism. The hard edges of our past are buffed to the point of being unrecognizable. This is not unique to the United States, of course, it is a global phenomenon of revisionist stories, markers and memorials, presidential decrees and official holidays designed to turn the page on histories of horror that have never been acknowledged, much less
redressed.

We must ask the question — at what cost do we celebrate erasure?
This is a moment of profound polarization and rising extremism worldwide, the cusp of a presidential election in the U.S. that could forever change our democracy, when a recent survey shows nearly 4 in
10 Americans would accept some form of authoritarianism and one third are not averse to political violence. But there is a ray of light shining through. In this moment, I am energized to be part of a nascent but burgeoning movement towards a national narrative grounded in truth in all its complexities, a rising chorus of collective acknowledgement that the cost of erasure is simply too great.

Transformation in our understanding of our history and its role in our present is taking shape through the commitment of nonprofits like mine, courageous individuals, and determined communities who are not only questioning but actively correcting the historical record, from entries in school calendars and textbooks to stories shared in museums and national parks.

One needs only spend time at Bosque Redondo Memorial in Fort Sumner, New Mexico or the Heard Museum’s Away from Home exhibit in Phoenix to understand the brutality of the Manifest Destiny doctrine that is embedded in our country’s Thanksgiving narrative. These sites make essential truths
visible through stories of wrenching, intergenerational trauma caused by the forced displacement and internment of the Diné (Navajo) and Ndé (Mescalero Apache) people from their traditional homelands and by the systematic abuses inflicted on Native children at Federal Indian boarding schools.

Any holiday would be well spent at these sites, or one might consider Juneteenth from the perspective of exhibits at the International African American Museum in Charleston or a Thanksgiving exploration of the new Baaj Nwaavjo I‘tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a holiday than lifting up truth, however grim, because grim truth well examined leads us to its corollaries — compassion, resilience and prevention — which together serve as the foundation for a flourishing future.

Now that’s something to celebrate.