When Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in 1940, he hoped to create a counterpoint to “God Bless America.” Tenuously religious, and with communist sympathies, Guthrie thought Irving Berlin’s patriotic melody was a little too smug.
So in the original lyrics of his famous folk song, Guthrie sang: “One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple/ By the Relief Office I saw my people/ As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if/ God blessed America for me.”
The lyrics ended up less jaded; he renamed the snarky “God Blessed America for Me” to “This Land Is Your Land.” But Guthrie’s intent remained. The song has been a populist anthem for the Left.
Now it’s not “woke” enough. Writing for the Smithsonian’s Folklife magazine last month, Mali Obomsawin argued that the song is jarring to Native Americans.
“These lyrics shake me up like a soda can every time I hear them,” she wrote, and “as a Native person, I believe ‘This Land Is Your Land’ falls flat.”
The problem, Obomsawin writes, is that the song disregards Native Americans.
“In the context of America, a nation-state built by settler colonialism, Woody Guthrie’s protest anthem exemplifies the particular blind spot that Americans have in regard to Natives: American patriotism erases us, even if it comes in the form of a leftist protest song,” she wrote. “Why? Because this land ‘was’ our land. Through genocide, broken treaties, and a legal system created by and for the colonial interest, this land ‘became’ American land.”
Obomsawin, a young musician whose band has just signed onto the same label as Guthrie, laments the poor representations of Native Americans in schools, pop culture, and political discourse. She has a point. But Guthrie may not be her best target.
By critiquing Guthrie’s song, Obomsawin misinterprets his vision, one of unity between classes and peoples. The original lyrics of the song also contained these lines: “As I went walking I saw a sign there/ And on the sign it said ‘No Trespassing’/ But on the other side it didn’t say nothing/ That side was made for you and me.”
None of that matters, though, she argues, because those lyrics are gone and the patriotic themes are all that people remember.
“Most messages tend to be distorted or selectively (re)interpreted as they travel through time — but without Guthrie’s self-awareness, the song’s provocative gesture becomes merely patriotic,” she wrote. “If social justice activism aims to include Native peoples, it must be open to the critique of patriotic rhetoric.”
Yet what listeners need is not an arraignment of “This Land Is Your Land,” but a lesson on its history. Hundreds of years after the fact, the U.S. cannot change the way it treated Native Americans. But it can acknowledge a shared heritage, ensuring not to infringe on native cultures through current policies. To that end, Guthrie’s song is an important reminder. If you live in America now, this land was made for both you and me.
