A National Day of Mourning

This U.S. holiday isn't what you think it is. Please stop reinforcing the lie.

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” — Les Nessman, WKRP in Cincinnati.

It’s a gorgeous morning here in Southern Colorado. The sun rose a short while ago, reflecting pink off the snow on the Rockies. The sky is clear; it’s supposed to be sunny and cold all day. My goats, especially the elder with arthritis, seem grateful yesterday’s snow has passed.

Today, like every day, I give thanks for this land, and for the people who stewarded her for generations before my ancestors arrived here from Europe.

In Denver, my husband’s family is celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s important for my mother-in-law to be with her kids, to share food (our family’s love language) and time and laughter. Thanksgiving for them is more the excuse, than a reason in its own right. When my belle mere says for her it’s just a day to give thanks for all she has, all she’s survived, she means it.

But I can’t, and do not, celebrate this holiday, because I don’t believe we can choose what holidays mean to us. I don’t think an individual can decide what a collective reinforcement of national mythology means.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of Native people who celebrate Thanksgiving for the same reason. Neither they, nor my family, buy into the lie. My mother-in-law, husband and I have all been arrested with the American Indian Movement protesting Columbus Day. My sister-in-law marched for many years with the All Nations Four Directions march, also co-organized by AIM, and expresses her solidarity with indigenous peoples in countless ways.

But for me, staring down month 15 of the Palestinian genocide, today is a day of mourning: for the thousands of humans Israel has murdered, and continues to murder, in Palestine and Lebanon, and for the millions of indigenous people the United States has murdered and continues to murder in North America.

I first began to see, really see, the genocidal foundations of my own country only after living in Palestine for 2 years in the ‘90s. Pathetic, I know, but then, so is public education in this country. In Palestine, I saw a people exiled, in many cases, from their ancestral lands, their villages and the villages’ names wiped from the map. I watched settlers attack the Palestinian people, call them “savages,” kill them with impunity. I saw farmers, shepherds and goatherds who cared for the land like a beloved tending 2 millennia-old olive trees, maintaining centuries-old terraces. I saw a nation squeezed into smaller and smaller areas, making do with less and less, but still acting with such generosity toward the stranger. I saw children killed for no reason. I saw a legal system created by an alien government decide it was completely within the law to do all of these things.

And I saw a brave and steadfast people resisting their own extermination.

I thought, “I’ve seen this somewhere before.”

On my return to the U.S., I knew I wanted to work in defense of indigenous peoples, but had no idea how. A job with the American Friends Service Committee in Denver gave me the priceless opportunity to meet, be befriended by and develop alliances with a brilliant bunch of folks from the Shawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Muskogee, Chickasaw, Osage, Pawnee, Lenape, Kanaka Maoli, Mescalero, Anishinabe, Haida Gwaii, Taino and Lakota nations.

I studied, read, watching everything I could find; listened to anyone who would speak to me (even when I hated what they had to say); prayed with Lakota friends in ceremony; and marched with everyone against racism in Denver. Standing in the way of a celebration of genocide, I was arrested 3 times, jailed once, convicted once (of “refusing to follow a lawful order.” Guess who decides what's a “lawful order”).

It was during those years of activism I came to learn why for many indigenous peoples, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning.

From kindergarten on, I was taught Thanksgiving is when Native people and European settlers broke bread together in peace.

This founding myth is essential to the American lie. We Europeans came in peace. Ergo, we were welcomed and fed. Everybody lived happily ever after. The End.

This fairy tale flies in the face the entire history of this hemisphere.

For those of you not from this country—and some of you who are—this myth is best summarized by the National Museum of the American Indian.

“The "First Thanksgiving" is often portrayed as a friendly harvest celebration where Pilgrims and generic, nameless Indians came together to eat and give thanks. This story is a myth that was sparked in the mid-1800s when English accounts of the 1621 harvest event resurfaced and fueled the American imagination. Romanticized paintings and stereotypical images of "Pilgrims" and "Indians" celebrating the "First Thanksgiving" became part of the national nostalgia and Manifest Destiny sentiment as the United States pushed west.

“Sarah Josepha Hale, an influential editor of a magazine called Godey's Lady's Book, led a campaign for a national Thanksgiving holiday, and the "First Thanksgiving" myth played into her agenda. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving in November to celebrate gratitude and unity amidst the turmoil of the Civil War. In the decades that followed, the "First Thanksgiving" myth and the national holiday evolved into a foundational, national story reinforced by memorials, holiday marketing, literature, and school curriculums.”

Wow. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here, and you all have a football game to watch. Let me do something completely novel and, after sharing a brief personal anecdote, turn things over to the experts: indigenous people.

Somewhere I have a photograph of myself from kindergarten or first grade, dressed in a paper fake “headdress” dancing around a fake “fire” made from pieces of wood in a classroom. Everything I read online tells me my experience was ubiquitous among American children.

The blog NativeHope does a great job explaining the problem with this.

“The mainstream version of the Thanksgiving story paints a picture of courageous Christian settlers braving the perils of the New World and, with the help of some friendly Natives, finding a way to make a new life for themselves. In the days around Thanksgiving, many educators focus on this happy story, helping students make American Indian headdresses out of construction paper and holding Thanksgiving reenactments in their classrooms.

“Very few teachers realize that construction headdresses and school re-enactments create a generalized stereotype that Native Americans all wear the same regalia. These school activities also encourage young students to think it is okay to wear culture as a costume. This makes it difficult for students to recognize the diversity of Native American tribes and leads students to believe it’s okay to mimic Native American traditional wear without having an understanding of its spiritual significance.

Dennis W. Zotigh (Kiowa/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo/Isante Dakota Indian) encapsulates the true story of the European invasion of the Americas by recounting a brief biography of Tisquantum, better known in American folklore as “Squanto.”

“Around 1614, when he was perhaps 30, Squanto was kidnapped along with others of his people and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to Malaga, Spain, where they were sold into slavery. Monks in Spain bought Squanto, shared their faith with him, and made it possible for him to find his way to England in 1615. In England he worked for shipbuilder John Slany and became proficient in English. In 1619 Squanto returned to his homeland by joining an exploring expedition along the New England coast. When he arrived at the village where he has been raised, all his family and the rest of his tribe had been exterminated by a devastating plague.”

The Pilgrims (who weren’t called Pilgrims until the 19th Century, but never mind) built their first settlement on the ruins of Squanto’s Patuxet village, now renamed New Plymouth. In the first year, more than half of them died. Those who survived did so by eating corn from abandoned fields, raiding villages for stored food and seed, and robbing graves.

In 1621, the Wampanoags took pity on the clueless settlers. They sent Squanto to teach the Pilgrims “how to plant corn by using fish as fertilizer and how to plant gourds around the corn so that the vines could climb the cornstalks. Due to his knowledge of English, the Pilgrims made Squanto an interpreter and emissary between the English and Wampanoag Confederacy.

“In the fall of 1621, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, decided to have a Plymouth harvest feast and invited Massasoit, the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Federation, to join the Pilgrims. Massasoit came with approximately 90 warriors and brought food to add to the feast, including venison, lobster, fish, wild fowl, clams, oysters, eel, corn, squash and maple syrup,” because not only did the Wampanoag take pity on us and help us survive, but they had tremendous self-respect and generosity.

And how did the Pilgrims repay this help and generosity?

“On May 26, 1637, near the present-day Mystic River in Connecticut, while their warriors were away, an estimated 400 to 700 Pequot women, children, and old men were massacred and burned by combined forces of the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Saybrook (Connecticut) colonies.”

What followed were centuries of massacres, enslavement, intentional and unintentional mass murder through disease, the making and breaking (by the U.S.) of every single treaty with an indigenous nation, the ethnic cleaning of Native peoples, their torture and murder by settlers and soldiers, the outlawing of their spirituality followed by appropriation of their spirituality, imprisoning them in concentration camps called reservations, imprisoning their children in boarding schools to “kill the Indian, save the man,” sterilizing their women (until the 1980s), stealing their children and adopting them out to white families, poisoning their lands and waters, imprisoning them for crimes they didn’t commit, turning a blind eye to the rape and disappearance of indigenous women, and creating and strengthening a system, based on the doctrine of Christian discovery, which made all of this completely legal.

A Day of Mourning

Organized by the United American Indians of New England in 1970, the fourth Thursday in November (Thanksgiving) is recognized as the National Day of Mourning for Native Americans and their allies.

Many people gather at Cole's Hill in Plymouth for an organized rally and day of mourning on Thanksgiving. Here’s what they have to say about this choice to mourn:

“Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”

Like the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the ongoing genocide in the Americas deserves much more than a day of mourning.

Did you know Black Friday is supposed to National Native American Heritage Day? And how do we celebrate it? Buy prostrating ourselves on the altar of America’s one true god: capitalism.

Why not begin the process of indigenizing yourself to this land today? Take a break from greed, consumerism, gluttony. How many pumpkin pies does one need to eat in one’s lifetime?

Fast, or at least spend time today in prayer and reflection. Consider it a sort of goyish Yom Kippur if you will, because God knows we have a hell of a lot to atone for. You didn’t really want to have to make polite conversation with your homophobic aunt and your racist cousin anyway. I just gave you an out that you can also use to guilt-trip your families. Win-win.

After all, Zotigh beautifully wrote, “to the original people of this continent, each day is a day of thanksgiving to the Creator.”

Indeed, we have so much to be grateful for.