We can make this world what we want it to be. Instead of forcing schoolchildren to partake in embarrassing Thanksgiving plays based on ugly stereotypes and colonial fiction, Native speakers and historians can come and educate them about Native culture. We can use this day to teach history, rather than hide it. We can feed the hungry and shelter the houseless, and fund and advocate for Native causes and organizations. We shouldn’t celebrate genocide, but we can honor those who were killed, elevate Native voices, and embrace that spirit of generosity that Indigenous people shared with the Pilgrims. Perhaps the holiday, like this country, can be salvaged. We are still fighting for our Treaties to be honored, for our human rights, and for our survival. Natives live with historical trauma, crushing poverty on Reservations, a lack of adequate health care, racism, police brutality, voter suppression, little representation, an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and toxic pipelines being forced through our lands, among other pressing issues. There are still Natives who host family meals during this season, but that is because we’ve always held harvest feasts, long before the Pilgrims’ arrival. It’s become a way to honor our dead as well as protest the continuing racism and tyranny that we are being subjected to even now. To many Natives in the United States, Thanksgiving is a reminder of the genocide of millions of the Indigenous ancestors and the theft of our lands because of colonialism. Since then, Natives and their allies continue to gather on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day to commemorate a National Day of Mourning. That night, another AIM leader, John Trudell, returned and painted it red. American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means also spoke, and other AIM members boarded a replica of the Mayflower and later buried Plymouth Rock in dirt and refuse. He then led a protest on Cole’s Hill near Plymouth Rock, close to a replica of the Mayflower and a statue of the Wampanoag leader Massasoit. Frank James (Wamsutta), Wampanoag, gave a speech that discussed the suffering his people had endured after the arrival of the Pilgrims, and said that while many consider it a day of celebration, to this country’s Indigenous, it was a day of mourning. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower landing, Natives took back Plymouth Rock. The legislation now awaits a Senate vote.Īs Malcolm X said of the Black experience in the United States, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. It is an appropriations bill, but it includes an amendment that would stop the Interior Department from taking the Mashpee Wampanoag’s land. A federal judge found the Trump administration’s decision “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered them to reconsider. In spring 2020, just as the Mashpee Wampanoag were getting hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration moved to disestablish their Reservation, threatening their very existence. The Indigenous people who helped the Pilgrims aren’t being oppressed anymore. They still inhabit Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island, are a federally recognized Tribe, and have about 2,600 citizens. The Mashpee Wampanoag people who first encountered the Pilgrims were subjected to centuries of disease, starvation, and war, but they survived. The Indigenous people who interacted with Pilgrims are extinct. An official “day of Thanksgiving kept in all the churches for our victories against the Pequots” was proclaimed by Massachusetts Bay governor William Bradford in 1637, and it was meant to memorialize the slaughter of about 700 Pequot men, women, and children. Pilgrims and other European invaders warred with the Wampanoag and other local Tribes after they settled in. The origins of the holiday’s modern name are actually quite grisly. Harvest feasts were a tradition that Natives had observed for time immemorial, so it is Native generosity that is the basis for the Americanized idea of Turkey Day. While Pilgrims did share a meal with the Wampanoag people, it wouldn’t have been possible without their Native teachers, and it wasn’t called Thanksgiving, either. Thanksgiving was the name of the harvest feast Pilgrims and Indigenous people shared. We were originally taught to use many resources, remembering to use them with care, respect, and with a mind towards preserving some for the seven generations of unborn, and not to waste anything.” Myth As Wampanoag Nanepashemet said, “We have lived with this land for thousands of generations - fishing in the waters, planting, and harvesting crops, hunting the four-legged and winged beings and giving respect and thanks for each and everything taken for our use.
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