Thanksgiving in Bruges

My part of the presentation was only five minutes but I get nervous when I have to present and I get more nervous when I have to present in Dutch, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the two day conference that I had coming up. I work as a researcher in the Netherlands and my supervisor wanted me to help with a student presentation at a conference in Bruges, Belgium. Around 400 people from the Netherlands and Belgium attend the Dutch language conference, most of them policymakers, so it’s a good place to get some attention for our research. But it also meant two days of making small talk in Dutch, which gets tiring. I’ve been in the Netherlands for almost ten years now. I became a citizen one year ago today. I can function fine, but my Dutch is better on some days than others and I’m never quite sure what kind of day I’m going to get.

In addition to the conference itself, there was also a conference dinner at the end of the first night, a Thursday night that also happened to be Thanksgiving. I’m used to working on Thanksgiving, but I didn’t want to spend my Thanksgiving evening struggling through a Dutch language dinner.

Normally I go to a Thanksgiving dinner in Amsterdam with my partner. An English language bookstore hosts an event in a dining room above a café. They supply the turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce and everyone who attends brings something to share for dessert. We’ve gone enough years now that we usually recognize some familiar faces. I’ve skipped a few years too and not done anything in particular for Thanksgiving. In those years, my partner has noticed that I end up feeling a bit sad the following weekend, so I try not to treat Thanksgiving as just another workday.

The reason Thanksgiving is important to me is rather specific, although not specific to me. A month ago, I met up with a childhood friend at a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore. We had run across each other online, not having spoken with each other since he moved away from Duluth when he was 12, over 30 years ago. I was attending a conference in Washington D.C., so we took the opportunity to have dinner. We had been friends from a church that neither of us belong to any longer. Our charismatic church leader believed it was against God’s will to celebrate Christmas. Or Easter. Or birthdays. Or Halloween. So one of the things we talked about that night was how Thanksgiving is still the most significant holiday for both of us. It was the only holiday we celebrated with family members who were not a part of our church, and no one outside of my immediate family was in the church.

I remember one Thanksgiving in particular where we drove from Duluth to my uncle’s house in a small Wisconsin town on the south shore of Lake Superior. We had Thanksgiving dinner with a dozen or so family members from my dad’s side of the family. We played Scattegories. My grandparents were still alive. When I think of Thanksgiving, it’s the feeling of that particular night that comes back to me.

Some thirty years later, I realized my upcoming Thanksgiving in Bruges was likely to be a lonely one, so I decided to see if I could skip the conference dinner and do something Thanksgiving related. I searched online and found one event: a dinner for 75 Euros hosted by a couple of local business owners from the U.S. at hotel in the city center of Bruges. That’s more than I usually pay for a dinner but it also seemed to be my only option, and one that I was actually a bit curious about. Who else would pay 75 euros to spend their Thanksgiving in a hotel banquet hall in Belgium? I bought a ticket for the dinner to get an answer to that question. And made some plans for the night before the dinner to explore one of the main themes of Thanksgiving: colonialism.

I’m not thrilled that the holiday that brings up the strongest associations with family for me is the one that comes with the most baggage. I didn’t grow up believing in Santa Claus but I suppose I did believe for some time that when European settlers first came to the U.S. and needed some help, they turned to their indigenous friends who shared some food with them and everything worked out just fine for everyone. The reality can be hard to process, but living on the continent where most of the colonizers started occasionally gives some opportunities to better understand it. I’ve never been to Plymouth rock, but some of the passengers who were on the Mayflower started their journey across the ocean in Delftshaven, about two miles from where I live now.

I’m not a descendant of anyone who was on the Mayflower and that particular story never meant much to me. But I am now much closer to the birthplaces of people whose names I always knew as a child but never actually thought of as people. For example, Father Louis Hennepin, of Hennepin Avenue fame in Minneapolis, was born in the small Belgian town of Ath, a short distance outside of Brussels. If I took a bit of a longer route to Bruges, it wouldn’t be so difficult to stop by on my way to the conference.

This wouldn’t be my first visit to the birthplace of someone who I was more familiar with as a Minnesota place name. I came across the location of Hennepin’s birthplace while preparing for a trip to St. Germain Laval earlier in the year. This town of 1,200 in rural southern France was the birthplace of Daniel Greysolon Sieur Du Luth, the person who went to the future site of my  hometown of Duluth for a couple of days in 1679 and had the place named after him about 200 years later. When I entered St. Germain Laval, I immediately came across a sign directing me towards “Espace Greyzolon Duluth,” a community center named after him. There was something surreal about seeing a name so familiar in a place so decidedly unfamiliar. But of course there wasn’t anything surreal about it. I grew up surrounded by towns and streets and lakes and rivers named or renamed after people from Europe and I was in Europe, in the hometown of one of those names. I had dinner at Le Cheval Blanc, the volunteer-run restaurant that serves locally grown organic food from the ground floor of Sieur Du Luth’s 17th century childhood home. They don’t get a lot of visitors from Duluth and were kind enough to give me a tour of the house. And for about two months after that trip, when I saw anything about Duluth, not only the city came to mind, but also the person. Standing in his living room gave some sense of reality to someone who I had always known as a cartoon-like figure holding a curled up map like a hotdog and pointing out from the top of a pillar near the entrance to my mom’s office at UMD. Suddenly he seemed a bit more like who he was: a specific person who came over from France to support a claim on the indigenous land where I grew up. Being physically present in a space that really hadn’t changed so much in the 400 years since Du Luth lived there gave another layer of meaning to a name that’s in my Dutch passport as my place of birth. It made me curious about the hometowns of other familiar names, and I decided I would visit Hennepin’s the next time I found myself in the area.

The night before the conference, on the way to Bruges, I left my bag in a locker in Brussels and started my short round trip out to Ath. I arrived around 7 p.m. Most of the shops were closed and the streets were pretty quiet. Approaching Hennepin’s street, I noticed I was on Rue des Récollets. The Récollets were a Franciscan order that began in the 16th century. Both Sieur Du Luth and Louis Hennepin, who became friends in Belgium before meeting again in what would become Minnesota, were lifelong members. The Pope dissolved the group in 1897, so I was surprised to see the order live on here as a literal connection to one of its better known members.

There was a small monument in the form of a water pump on Rue Hennepin. On the top was the inscription, “To Louis Hennepin, who discovered the Mississippi in 1680 and was born in Ath in 1640.” The plaque on Sieur Du Luth’s house says he discovered the headwaters of the Mississippi. Leaving aside the ‘discovered’ misnomer, neither of these plaques are correct. Europeans had known about the Mississippi long before either of these two men but did not find its source until long after. I suppose giving a European credit for something related to the Mississippi is an easy way to explain why they are being honored while sidestepping any discussion of what they were doing. These plaques aren’t so different from UMD’s own at the base of the statue of Sieur Du Luth, the only other figure on campus honored with a statue other than a ground-level anthropomorphic dog. The plaque there reads, “Daniel Greysolon Sieur Du Luth (1639-1710) for whom the city of Duluth was named.” Given that no one actually knows what he looked like and nothing on or near the statue says anything about what he did, the educational purpose of his statue is a bit lost on me. I walked past it hundreds of times as a kid and I never really had any questions about it, but its only message – Duluth is named after Du Luth – doesn’t really invite reflection.

I did have some questions about the Hennepin pump and its location. One of those questions – does the pump work? – I only thought to ask after I had left. The other I had while I was there – what is the connection between the monument, the street and Hennepin? Was the monument placed against the side of his former home? I didn’t see myself coming back to this small Belgian town anytime soon (although I still do kind of want to try out the pump) so I decided to put my 15 words of French to use and ask some of the people walking by, ”Is this the house of Hennepin?”

When I visited the hometown of Sieur Du Luth, that strategy had worked quite well. Every single person I interacted with knew where his house was. And they knew he had a city named after him. They just didn’t know where it was. Somewhere in Canada is as close as anyone got. While they thought of Sieur Du Luth as a real person, they didn’t seem to think of the place named after him as a real place. It only existed as an abstraction. Which is quite different from the city named after him, where the place is real enough to everyone but the person is not.

Hennepin, however, appeared to be of less interest in his hometown than Sieur Du Luth. I asked six people and none of them had ever heard of him even though all of them were on the street named after him. That wasn’t necessarily a big surprise. Du Luth doesn’t seem to have much competition for notoriety in his hometown. Ath has the Parade of the Giants, a yearly festival dating back to the 15th century in which costumed people accompany giant figures with papier-mâché heads on a march through town. It was listed as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO in 2008. And then delisted in 2022 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement because of a character first added to the parade in 1873 called ‘the savage,’  a stereotyped representation of an indigenous person from the Caribbean performed by a white person in blackface. Some of the information about Hennepin written here comes from an article in an Ath newspaper letting their readers know about a surprising connection between the Black Lives Matter movement and Ath: George Floyd was murdered in a county named after a person born in their city. But even with the delisting, the way the parade is described on a large informational sign in the city center suggests the city is still quite proud of it, or at least more so than it is of Louis Hennepin, who just has a most likely non-working water pump off on a side street. Even in his lifetime, Hennepin wasn’t so popular. He consistently made things up, including writing grossly stereotyped depictions of indigenous people for his European audience. He told so many lies about his exploits and the people that accompanied him on them that he ended up being banished from France and dying in Rome, so I suppose it makes sense that people around town might not talk about him much anymore, even if his influence might still be reflected in their parade.

I left Ath with a similar feeling as when I left Du Luth’s hometown. Hennepin shifted from a place name to a specific person, a person from a small Belgian town who came over to where I grew up to convert people he knew nothing about to Christianity and support European claims on their land. And something about how out of place I felt in their hometowns gave me a sense of how absurd that was. But these claims were taken seriously and were used to force a series of sales, trades and treaties that eventually led to the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Nelson Act of 1889, which led to ownership of a farm within the boundaries of the Fond du Lac reservation by my Scandinavian great grandparents. My grandmother grew up there. When she passed away, my cousin inherited the large painting she had on her living room wall by a famous Ojibwe artist. I never had the chance to ask my grandmother what that painting meant to her. I have a small framed copy of it in my own living room. I’m not quite sure what it means to me, but after visiting these places I find myself trying a bit harder to answer that question.

We have a family tree that was created some years ago by a distant Norwegian relative. I used to only follow the branch from my great-great grandfather to me and my sister. But now that I live in Europe, I find myself thinking more about the other nine branches made up by his brothers and sisters, and the more than 200 Norwegian names that lead off from those branches. Whatever was happening in 1890s Norway, only one of those ten siblings moved across the ocean to a state that was just over 30 years old, becoming a part of the fraught relationship between existing European settlers, the local indigenous population, and many, many other new immigrants.

I’m now living not so far away from where my great-great grandparents started. I was curious who else would be celebrating U.S. Thanksgiving with me on this side of ocean. Given that Bruges is a tourist destination, I assumed my dinner would be with wealthy U.S. families on a fall vacation. I assumed wrong.

When I arrived, I was assigned to one of the circular tables near the center of the hotel’s rather simply decorated banquet hall. Going counter-clockwise from where I was sitting, these were the people that I met that evening:

To my right was a woman in her 60s from Italy who worked in Bruges but still had a house on Lake Como somewhat near George Clooney’s villa. In her 20s, she had married a man from Ohio and during their brief marriage, she had two children in Cleveland before returning to Europe. Both of her daughters now lived in the nearby city of Diksmuide but were not present at the dinner.

Next to her was a husband and wife in their 30s from South Carolina. The husband had been an exchange student in Antwerp a decade earlier and had always wanted to return to Belgium. He had recently accepted a position as associate professor at the University of Ghent. This was their first Thanksgiving outside of the U.S.

The woman directly across from me seemed to be in her 50s. She was the only one at the table from Bruges. Her Belgian father went to college in California and then joined the U.S. army, serving in Korea. She was not easy to talk to. When she sat at the table, I asked, “And what brings you here to Thanksgiving dinner in Bruges tonight?”

She replied, “What is this? Why all the questions? My story is so boring. You don’t want to hear my story.” She opened up a bit as the dinner went on, providing the basic outlines of the story described above. And then she took out her phone and showed the last picture she had taken: a framed photo on her living room table showing her father in his U.S. army uniform while stationed in Korea, a picture she must have taken before leaving the house in order to show these strangers at Thanksgiving dinner.

Next to her were two French women in their 40s, probably a couple, who had driven from Lille, a French city on the Belgian border, to be there. Their connection to the U.S. was never clear. I suspected that one of them did not speak English because she never said anything. The other seemed to really like Hollywood movies and brought up the concept of the American Dream multiple times. They were both dressed a bit oddly, wearing clothes with the general form of business attire but with bright mismatching colors and handsewn patches.

The man next to them was born in Mississippi and lived there until he was six, when his Belgian parents decided to return to Brussels. He seemed a bit uncomfortable, like he really wanted to belong at this Thanksgiving dinner event but also felt very strongly that he did not. I think I picked up on this almost immediately from all the times that I went to Dutch King’s Day celebrations in San Francisco in the years after my Dutch exchange program. Because both he spoke French as a first language, the French women next to him started speaking to him in French. He responded immediately, “I would prefer to speak English.” I got that. He didn’t pay 75 Euros to spend an evening speaking French at Thanksgiving dinner. I found his accent, or the variability of his accent, kind of fascinating. At first, he seemed like just some guy from some hard to pinpoint region in the U.S., but then sometimes whole sentences would slip into an unmistakably French accent and then at other moments he would have an almost cartoonish Southern drawl. I’m not sure he ever felt at ease with us. The woman next to him asked him a few questions about Thanksgiving and I could tell he was closely monitoring the reactions of the people who had lived most of their lives in the U.S., as though we were an exam committee that might fail him.

And then me, the guy from Duluth at a Dutch language conference in Belgium. I was also asked about how I ended up at Thanksgiving dinner in Bruges or more specifically how I ended up living in the Netherlands. I get this question a lot and I always answer the same way: I grew up in Minnesota. My final year of college, I went on a year-long exchange at the University of Utrecht (in the Dutch city where I just learned Hennepin published the second of his three books). Over Christmas break, my best friend came over to visit for two weeks. His missed his flight back to the United States and ended up staying on the floor of my room for the next six months. When my exchange program ended, I went back to the U.S. He stayed in the Netherlands, supporting himself by thatching straw roofs on older homes. He had worked briefly as a software developer in Silicon Valley and one day during a work break, he offered to help fix a guy’s computer. That led to an IT job with the European Space Agency that he still holds today. In the years that followed, I started coming back over when I could and staying with him, until I finally decided to make the move myself. I enrolled in a Dutch master’s program to be eligible for a visa that gives people one year after graduation to find job in the Netherlands. Ten days before my visa expired, I started a job. I’m now a Dutch citizen living in Rotterdam. My best friend is also a citizen, living in Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and two kids.

The story is true, but there is a lot that I leave out. I always say I’m from Minnesota but I didn’t move from Minnesota to the Netherlands. I moved from Minnesota to Oklahoma when I was 13 after my mom became involved with a Vietnam veteran with signs of PTSD. He rather quickly isolated me and my sister from our family in Minnesota. When I left home, I wanted nothing more than to get out of Oklahoma but felt unsure about returning to Minnesota. I tried. For a year after my exchange program, I worked for the Hennepin Theatre Trust selling tickets at the State Theatre on Hennepin Avenue, right in the heart of Hennepin County. I made some friends, but I didn’t feel comfortable reaching out to any family. At the end of the year, I applied for a master’s program in human geography at the University of Minnesota. At the same time, I applied to teach English in Japan. A few months later, I left for Japan.

In the years that followed, I moved around a lot. I figured if I wasn’t anchored by family or anything else, I might as well be somewhere interesting. I was living in a trailer on a wildlife refuge when I decided to move to the Netherlands. In the decade since, I’ve reconnected with my family in Northern Minnesota. Last year, my partner of nine years finally met my extended family (she’s from a country Trump had on his travel ban list, so it took a while to get her into the U.S.). She enjoyed Duluth. She liked getting her hair done at A Touch of Plasch, seeing deer alongside Chester Creek, and meeting a lot of people much more friendly than she was used to. She didn’t care for the hills so much. And not having spent much time in the U.S., she thinks of it as a place with a messed up healthcare system where people work long hours with few vacation days, spending a lot of time in their cars because neither transit nor cycling tend to be very good options. I can’t say that I see it all that differently. I’m not sure how well I would readjust to living in the U.S. and I’m not sure my partner would adjust at all. So we’re here. A place where we do our best to be at home even if some would rather that we left. A few months ago, the far right party gained the most seats in parliament on an anti-immigration platform. Which makes the politics here not so different from the present politics in the U.S., other than that over here, I’m the immigrant.

That’s the part of the story I didn’t tell. And I imagine everyone else at that table had a quite a bit they also kept to themselves. But whatever our stories, we all seemed to have one thing in common: a desire to connect with some idea of the United States that is deeply intertwined with an idea of family. I’m not sure we all got our 75 Euros worth. We participated in the tradition of Thanksgiving but our status as strangers seemed to underscore the absence of our families.

We all left shortly after dessert. I walked out of the hotel into a relatively warm late fall evening in the center of Bruges. The hotel was in a car free part of the city and the streets were full of people enjoying the good weather. Even a small group bunched together in sleeping bags under one of shop awnings were laughing at a shared joke as I walked by.

I came to an intersection where I saw a family photographing themselves in front of an old cathedral, and this suddenly brought to mind the two photographs that my cousin had sent me via Whatsapp a few hours earlier. The first was a picture of Lake Superior she had taken that morning while out for a walk. I had shown it to the people at my Thanksgiving table. The lake looked so enormous and cold and seemed to do a better job than any of my stories of giving some sense of where I was from. The second photo I kept to myself.  It was of my aunt and uncle with my cousins, all gathered around a Thanksgiving table in a small Wisconsin town about an hour outside of Duluth, wearing ridiculous hats for the amusement of a three year old with a purple unicorn horn strapped to her head. It was a nice night in Bruges but it felt so far from Thanksgiving dinner in northern Wisconsin.

And thinking about family led me back to something that happened on my train to Belgium the night before. A family of four from the U.S., sitting in facing seats in the row behind me, were talking with each other animatedly. At first I thought it was a mother with her three children – two older boys and a girl. But the mother’s voice was too young with hints of a southern European accent coming through every now and then. When the older boy ran past me to check-in with a man and woman farther down the train car that looked remarkably like him, I realized she must have been an au pair looking after these kids.

The sky had turned a rather incredible shade of pink and one the kids asked the au pair if she had ever seen a sunset like it before. She said she had lived through over 10,000 sunsets but had never seen one quite like this. The kids started trying to figure out exactly how many times the sun had set in her life. As she helped them with their math and gave them gentle reminders to not forget the leap years, it became clear that she got along with them quite well. They would get really excited and loud about some nonsense and she would wait until it had gotten a bit too out of control before reminding them to be quiet, which they then did in what seemed more out of embarrassment than obedience.

When we approached the station in Brussels, I stood in the aisle with a line of people waiting to exit the train. The girl, who looked about seven, closed her eyes and started slowly moving her index finger from the top of her forehead to the bottom of her nose again and again. The two older boys started making fun of her for being a weirdo to which she replied very calmly, “I find it very calming.” And then the au pair closed her eyes and started making the same motion, moving her finger slowly down to the end of her nose several times before affirming, “You’re right. It is quite calming.”  And as I made my way out of that rather crowded train in Brussels to go see Hennepin’s water pump, these three siblings from the U.S. continued their journey across Belgium with their au pair, all four of them sitting silently with their eyes closed, moving their index fingers from their foreheads to the tips of their noses.

I had been thinking about people who stay in same place that their family has lived for generations and people who leave and make their home elsewhere. But walking back to my hotel room that Thanksgiving night, I realized those aren’t the only possibilities. Some people move through the world with family. And some people find themselves always looking for, but never quite finding, some place that feels like home.

Note: While this story is based on real events, elements and characters have been modified, composited, or fictionalized so as not to represent or reflect any specific individual.