Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett Price returned to Boston Public Radio on Monday, weighing in on the whitewashed history of Colonial America and the first Thanksgiving. Their conversation was inspired by writer Brett Anderson’s latest New York Times piece, "The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year."
"I think we’re at a place now where we can tell the truth, and I think we need to,” Price said. “The Thanksgiving narrative as we know it — with the kumbaya moment of the indigenous, First Nation folks and the colonialists sitting at the table of quote-unquote ‘brotherhood’ — was a farce."
He added, “the reality of this was a narrative of disease, a narrative of dehumanization, of genocide, of dispossession. And so I think we should be able to tell the truth in this season.”
Monroe concurred with her All Rev’d Up co-host, reflecting on the layered history of persecution against American Indians over the past nearly four centuries.
"We’re in this moment of religious freedom,” she noted. “Pilgrims came here because of religious persecution … at the expense of Native Americans, and I think that what we’re realizing from the founding fathers, at least to this president, [is] that there’s been a kind of" anti-Native American sentiment.
Rev. Irene Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist, the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Emmett G. Price III is a professor and executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Together, they host GBH’s All Rev’d Up podcast.
