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Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Thanksgiving 2018 (some of the best articles ever!)

Thanksgiving is a celebration of colonization.  Let’s acknowledge the movement of decolonization and reeducation happening right now in our country. 

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Settler Privilege
Peggy McIntosh first popularized the concept of white privilege in her now-classic 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The impact of her essay was due at least in part to its clarity and readability; it broke down into a list of easy to understand ideas why white people have unearned advantages in society based on their skin color. Not that it was necessarily easy for white people to accept that they are in fact “more equal” than others, but the essay opened up a conversation that has gained serious traction in our social discourse, especially now when racism is on full, unobstructed display in this Trumpian moment.    

People who do not have ancestral connections to Native communities are all either settlers or immigrants. People with ambiguous “Native ancestry,” like Elizabeth Warren, are so disconnected from whatever Native roots they may have had that they can no longer be considered Native. Settlers are people whose ancestors who came to acquire recently dispossessed Indian lands, such as recipients of the homesteads of the nineteenth century and earlier land speculators. Immigrants are people who came later to cash in on the benefits of American citizenship that didn’t necessarily include land (but might have if they came with enough money to invest in American land). Most are settlers (also “colonizers”) or immigrants by choice, with the exception of Blacks who are descended from slaves who were settled here without their consent.

Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege Is So Hard to Talk About
Settler fragility stems from settler privilege, which is similar to white privilege in that it is systemic, structural, and based on white supremacy, making it difficult to identify. Only in some ways, settler privilege is far more covert and cunning. The reason is because of the ubiquitous ways the US is normalized; that is, the US settler state is the “water we swim in.” US citizens of all races and ethnic groups have been indoctrinated their entire lives with messages designed to foster a sense of national pride and belonging in the making of what has been called an “imagined community,” which always occurs on Indigenous lands. Their citizenship and their very identity are taken for granted without critical consciousness about the US’s contradictory foundational structures and narratives.

Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools (this got 500 shares on my fb page)
Sample Letters to Send to your Child’s School
Resources for Educators and Families to Teach about Thanksgiving & Native Peoples in a Socially Responsible Way
Children’s Books about Native Peoples, Cultures, and Traditions

A Native Perspective on Thanksgiving
I have been following the struggle of the Native American community since the seventies. Several times, I even traveled Plymouth, Massachusetts with activists from the International Action Center (IAC) to familiarize myself with the native perspective on Thanksgiving, in particular. We visited the Wampanoag tribe (the People of the Dawn), a community that is indigenous to the Plymouth area.

During this trip, I met Moonanum James, a co-leader of the United American Indians of New England (UAINE). He explained that for Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a joyous holiday. Among other things, the UAINE is known for founding the National Day of Mourning, which falls each year on Thanksgiving Day, as a way of protesting the holiday. The origins of the Day of Mourning date back to 1970, when Wamasutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, was invited by Plymouth town officials to give a speech on Thanksgiving Day, but when officials read a copy of it before the ceremony, they told him it was prohibited. That’s because he had planned to speak at length about the violence that occurred against native peoples.

Today, the UAINE march around the town of Plymouth to protest the continued misrepresentation and commercialization of their history. In 1997 they won a court case against the town of Plymouth, which had arrested and pepper-sprayed demonstrators, including children and elders. As part of the settlement, there are plaques acknowledging Native history, including one plaque which is placed on display where King Phillips’ head was on display for two decades, as well as an educational fund to teach children in schools about native history.

Jaqueline Keeler, of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage says Thanksgiving is really “a U.S. celebration of early arrivals in a European invasion” that culminated in the death of up to 30 million native people.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker Posted on Facebook 11/18/18
A Thanksgiving letter
Dear America,
Here we are at this time of year where you pretend to love us Indians. You celebrate a fictional story of Indians welcoming your bedraggled ancestors who came to our shores uninvited, at least rightly claiming that we saved them from sure starvation. Squanto was your hero, a man who turned against his own people for his own benefit and whom the colonists desperately held onto anyway. Still, you tell romantic stories of how Squanto saved your people and give that as evidence for the Indigenous peoples fictitious warm welcome of people who cared nothing of the fact that this was a populated land. For centuries they told more tall tales about how this was a virgin wilderness, a land free for the taking, divinely inspired by what appeared to us as a vengeful, mean god, a god we did not recognize as the benevolent creator we knew.

Your ancestors have used these stories of their own perceived superiority to justify their plunder of our lands, the raping of our women, the killing of our babies, the wholesale slaughter of our people, and now the trauma of those of us who have survived the carnage. They wove it into a legal system that still undermines our ownership, yes ownership, of our lands based on the fictitious doctrine of discovery, in which (white) Europeans imagine themselves supreme based on their colonizing religion. Yet most of you dont even know that this is the foundation of your country, and if you do know it, you continue to justify it in a million different ways so that you can feel righteous about living on a land so violently appropriated in the name of your god whom you worship at the altar you call democracy.

Well, your ancestors were squeamish enough about killing us all off so that a small fraction of us could physically survive. They needed us as a foil against their own tyrannical, despotic relatives across the sea, as people to look toward for what true freedom and liberty actually looked like, even while they simultaneously reviled us for that freedom.

Even though you look at us now and say you love us, you respect us, and what a shame it was your ancestors did what they did to us, you were never completely comfortable with our survival. The few of us who survived the American holocaust fought like hell in countless ways and now our numbers are growing. We have attained a measure of power in your institutions of capitalism and so-called democracy. We are reclaiming our languages and cultures against the never-ending onslaught of your vampire culture. We are not going away.

We are the mirror to your own broken souls, exposing the ways your humanity has failed and has failed so extremely that all life on the planet is now on a death spiral, thanks to your supposedly superior culture. Our very existence is a reminder of your hubris, your own unrelenting grandiosity. We may all go down together in this sinking ship, but it is we who have been here since time immemorial. It is we who understand the spirit of the land and who know how to live in a relationship of respect for it. It is our ancestors whose spirits peer through the veil of time and space, undoubtedly in sadness for what you have done to our homelands. We will continue to survive despite you.

There is no thanksgiving here for you. There is only thanks taking. We are not here to make you feel better about your death culture. For this we do not apologize. It is YOU who must get over it, and make things right, not us.

Just my two cents worth as a surviving member of Indian country.

Thanksgiving Promotes Whitewashed History, So I Organized Truthsgiving Instead
An essential part of decolonizing Thanksgiving is to start educating our children with the authentic history of this country. A book that re-examines basic “truths” about Thanksgiving in an educational context is Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years. Considering that much of the Thanksgiving mythology is based on sharing food, it is ideal to discuss the importance of Indigenous first foods or food sovereignty with our children as well. The book Four Seasons of Corn: A Winnebago Tradition discusses the traditional process of growing and harvesting corn, de-commercializing what we eat, and promoting culturally appropriate foods and agricultural systems of North America. Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools is a quick read where more resources are listed; it even has sample letters that can be sent to your children’s school concerning problematic Thanksgiving activities.

Decolonizing Thanksgiving And Reviving Indigenous Relationships to Food
Consider the Nations who tended fruit and nut trees.  Imagine the gardens of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers that were the ecological knowledge of the Wampanoag- the very knowledge that saved the pilgrims from starvation. Consider the songs, the kinship, the lineal seed keepers, and ceremonies that guided Indigenous cosmologies, landscapes and people. Those sacred commitments left no person hungry or without medicine or without worth.   And now, understand the deliberate effort of colonizers to disconnect Indigenous people from our relationship to our traditional and ceremonial foodways- relationships that made us whole.  Understand the traumas of forced relocation, of slash and burn campaigns from Haudenasaunee territory to Canyon de Chelly, our hunting grounds deforested, waterways damned, and our individual and communal indigeneity gradually outlawed. Consider the settler adage that “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”  Now fast forward to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, 486 years after the first attacks on our being, and consider that it has only been forty years since we have “legally” been allowed to restore our commitments to these lands. Forty years.

At Plimoth Plantation, Shedding Light On The First Thanksgiving
Every year, Plimoth Plantation holds a series of pre-Thanksgiving Harvest Feasts, with 17th-century recipes and dining customs. There are spoons, but no forks - some dishes are eaten with 3 fingers on the right hand. Men sling their napkins over their shoulders.  All the dishes are all based on 17-century English recipes with things that were available in New England at the time. In addition to mussels and turkey, there’s a native corn pudding, stewed pompion (or pumpkin), and a pottage of cabbage, leeks and onions.

The Harvest Feast is an approximate re-creation – with some 20th century concessions – of how the Pilgrims’ may have celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621. The familiar holiday we know today wouldn’t get that name for another 242 years. But the idea of pausing each year for a day of thanks and reflection has endured ever since.

11 Thanksgiving 2018 Charity Ideas & Ways To Give Back This Holiday Season
Giving back can be as simple as making a monetary donation to an organization that's working to make a difference. If you're in a position to do so, give some funds to an nonprofit organization or other agency that's getting serious work done on an issue you care about. Do some research on your own and use a third-party site like CharityNavigator.org to help you find a super legit place to give.

Why These Native Americans Observe A National Day Of Mourning Each Thanksgiving (video)

The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday
The first official mention of a “Thanksgiving” celebration occurs in 1637, after the colonists brutally massacre an entire Pequot village, then subsequently celebrate their barbaric victory. Years later, President Washington first tried to start a holiday of Thanksgiving in 1789, but this has nothing to do with “Indians and settlers, instead it’s intended to be a public day of “thanksgiving and prayer.” (That the phrase “Merciliess Savage Indians” is written into the Declaration of Independence says everything we need to know about how the founders of America viewed the Indigenous Peoples of this land.) It wasn’t until the writer Sarah Josepha Hale persuaded President Lincoln that the Thanksgiving holiday was needed and could help heal the divided nation that it was made official in 1863. But even that was not the story we are all taught today. The inspiration for that was far more exclusionist.

Native Women Tell the Real History of Thanksgiving (video)
“It was a brutal, brutal genocide that took place, and each Native person that’s here is a survivor of that genocide”

100 Ways to Support—Not Appropriate From—Native People
THIS IS SO RELEVANT. For those of you "get over it" folks, just remember, we have no other place where our story should told but on these continents; other people (dominant culture) controls our narrative and we have limited ways to present counter narratives (the TRUTH); and more people know us through stereotypes than by accurate cultural and historical information, among other things. "Let’s start with 100 ways you and yours can be allies toward to the Indigenous peoples of this continent—our ancestral land." 

Unlearning the Doctrine of Discovery
The doctrine of discovery was a Christian invention which justified dispossessing indigenous peoples of their land, parceling it out among emerging nation-states, and turning it into private property for settlers. In this framework, indigenous peoples are left with either extermination or assimilation.Besides merely saying “sorry,” what would it mean to concretely repent for the doctrine of discovery? What would it look like to act against it? The truth is that undoing the doctrine of discovery would destabilize our entire western legal tradition. Our society is organized around private property and various claims to national territory which have discovery as a foundation. Take away discovery and society as it is currently built falls apart.

Grief at Thanksgiving: Gratitude with a grain of salt
I’ll go ahead an acknowledge the giant turkey in the room, Thanksgiving can be the pits for people who are grieving. Many of the values, traditions, and messages associated with the day, like warmth, comfort, gratitude, and family togetherness, can feel in direct conflict with a grieving person’s actual reality. If you are grieving, you probably know what I mean by this. Although you may be hesitant to admit it in the face of all the festivities, the ’30-Days of Thankfulness’ challenges on Facebook, and Charlie Brown and his dang pumpkin. But you’re amongst grief-friends here, and it’s okay to admit that you’re feeling just a little (or a lot) less grateful than you’ve felt in years past.

400 years later, natives who helped Pilgrims gain a voice
Plymouth, Massachusetts, whose European settlers have come to symbolize American liberty and grit, marks its quadricentennial in 2020 with a trans-Atlantic commemoration that will put Native Americans’ unvarnished side of the story on full display. Organizers are understandably cautious this time around. When the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing was observed in 1970, state officials disinvited a leader of the Wampanoag Nation — the Native American tribe that helped the haggard newcomers survive their first bitter winter — after learning his speech would bemoan the disease, racism and oppression that followed the Pilgrims. But the emphasis is on highlighting the often-ignored history of the Wampanoag and poking holes in the false narrative that Pilgrims and Indians coexisted in peace and harmony.

When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of "Civilization"
Listed, some of the most aggressive acts of genocide taken against indigenous Americans.

Don’t Trash Thanksgiving. Decolonize It 
But we don’t have to reject the holiday completely. We can, and should, decolonize and reinterpret it. The fact is, there is no one event from which the holiday is derived. And around the world, other countries such as Canada, Liberia, Netherlands, the Philippines, and Germany celebrate their own Thanksgiving on different days.  Some historians have documented that the tradition came to the New World with the settlers. Some say the holiday was secular. Others say it was religious. It has been observed on various dates throughout history.

In the late 1700s, George Washington declared November 26 a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. Seventy-four years later, Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November to celebrate the Union’s military successes in Civil War. And in 1941, FDR signed a resolution changing the date from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday of the month.  Since then, many have chosen to replace the traditional celebration with ones that honor their sociopolitical or familial beliefs.

In some households, Pilgrims and “Indians” are never mentioned. Traditional American history is never mentioned.  The day is about spending time with family, and of course the culinary delights prepared by the matriarchs of our families.  My family would stand in a circle holding hands. We’d each share what we’re thankful for. My paternal grandmother would then pray and bless the food.  For some it’s about giving thanks by giving back to those who don’t have families to spend time with, or a meal to eat. They go to church, visit hospitals, nursing homes, shelters, food pantries, or folks on the streets in their communities. Some sponsor dinners for families who are experiencing financial challenges.

“On [this] holiday we sit down with a simple bowl of rice (which two-thirds of the world population would have been happy to have) and we made lists of all the things and people we’re thankful to have and to know.”  Ultimately, within our families and communities and schools, we should stop, reinterpret, and repurpose traditions that are harmful, either in theory or practice.  I learned from my elders that when you know better, you should do better.  As we enter into this holiday, let’s acknowledge the movement of decolonization and re-education happening in our country.  We can observe and celebrate with our families in ways that honor those who the day originally dishonored, and those who continue to struggle under oppression.

As A Native American, Here’s What I Want My Fellow Americans To Know About Thanksgiving 
If I didn’t find my community, my Native family or my traditional support, I’d get swallowed up by colonialism. I realized the holiday was lifted on some imaginary pedestal as a joyous day of peace between two worlds, when historians know the truth to be much more violent.      So what could I do, or bring to my family, that would reclaim the day in a way that was both healing and power-giving?   The first time I attended the Alcatraz Sunrise Ceremony in San Francisco was in 2017. The Sunrise Ceremony is a special event organized by the Muwekma Ohlone people of San Francisco and other Bay Area Natives, to come together as a community in the darkness of Thanksgiving morning and partake in the reclamation of the holiday for our surviving people. There is always a large, warm bonfire in the center and a circle of relatives and guests that surround it.

10 Native Activism Organizations to Show Your Support This Thanksgiving

When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’
The Gnaddenhutten Massacre
Battle of Tippecanoe
The Creek War
Forced Removal
Mankato Executions
Sand Creek Massacre
Custer’s Campaigns
Wounded Knee
Resilience

The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday
Every November, I get asked an unfortunate, loaded question: “You’re a Native American—what do you eat on Thanksgiving?” My answer spans my lifetime. But our families lived something different. My great grandfather helped fight off General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, alongside other Lakota and Cheyenne, not even 100 years before my birth. I think about my great grandfather’s lifetime, being born in the 1850s—toward the end of the genocides that began in the 1600s across America, and stretching into the subtler but still damaging years of assimilation efforts we have endured since. He saw escalating conflicts between Lakota life as he knew it and the ever-emerging immigrants from the east. He witnessed the disappearance of the bison, the loss of the sacred Black Hills, the many broken promises made by the U.S., along with atrocities like the Sand Creek and Wounded Knee Massacres. He saw his children attend the boarding schools where they had their hair forcibly cut and were punished for speaking their languages. I wonder what he thought about the Thanksgiving story.

How to Support Indigenous People on Thanksgiving
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmdmb8/how-to-celebrate-thanksgiving-on-stolen-land?utm_campaign=sharebutton&fbclid=IwAR0_9pGvvLJDwMiL0TVmYuSrbxhB9ZBEI55Yxwn9BziRkybjEo33aV3MmWI
Here are some ideas for what to do on Thanksgiving instead of showing your gratitude for colonizers.
While there’s no harm in taking the time to be grateful for your loved ones, here’s what you can do instead of extending that thanks to pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, or any other colonizers.
  1. Find out which tribe(s) are indigenous to your area, and what they’ve endured so that you could live there. Online maps like Native Land and this one on Native Languages can help. Once you know whose land you live on, read up on the history of that tribe as written by them to get the full picture of where you live, and extend your thanks and appreciation, either in words or money, to said tribe.
  2. As you remember the Wampanoag people, who allegedly sat down to feast with pilgrims in the early 1600s, understand that not all Indigenous people are the same. Many prefer to refer to themselves not as “Native American” or “Indigenous,” but specifically by their tribe’s name. Each tribe has its own set of traditions, practices, and beliefs. To learn more about the nuances and designations that Indigenous people use to refer to themselves, read this.
  3. Thanksgiving preparation can take a lot of time. Instead of interpreting this as making the most time-consuming, extravagant recipes you can find, spend more effort reading about the history of the country as a whole as told by indigenous people. Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution by Oren Lyons is a good place to start. If your histories of North America have all come from white men, you’re not getting the full picture.
  4. Your knowledge and support are nice, but put your money where your mouth is, if you have the means. Instead of spending money on a new outfit to impress your family or an expensive bakery dessert, allocate some of that money to local organizations like the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) or national ones like The American Indian College Fund, anything helps. You can find a list of organizations catering to Indigenous people here.
  5. Consume, and more importantly purchase, art, books, and goods by Indigenous people. Ask yourself which Thanksgiving dinner ingredients you can get from indigenous sources, then use this list of Native-owned businesses to find them. Instead of doing the Black Friday thing, gift a book or piece of art by an indigenous author to a loved one to show them your appreciation. I recommend Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women by Wilma Mankiller and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. You can find a list of great books by indigenous people here and recommendations from the First Nations Development Institute here. You can buy Indigenous art online at websites like Shumakolowa.
  6. From putting the first man on the moon to fighting for our environment, we have infinite reasons to be thankful for indigenous women. Show your gratitude towards them this Thanksgiving by donating to organizations that stand up for them, like the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women. (According to the Indian Law Resource Center, “More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence.”)
link to article for 5 more ideas.

On Indigenous People’s Day, a Look at the Movement to Revive Native Foodways and How Western Science Might Support—For a Change
http://www.foodsolutionsne.org/blog/indigenous-people%E2%80%99s-day-look-movement-revive-native-foodways-and-how-western-science-might?fbclid=IwAR0bjfKnfO8HiNULAWUfYKTZZlasgD-JMbnDn66sjVKJIvCyqgkbIbnCu7U
Such efforts to reclaim food sovereignty as a way to recover health, in all its dimensions, among the nation’s survivors of a traumatic campaign of Native American genocide is gaining momentum, and particularly so among the TCU network, known colloquially as “Native American Land Grant Colleges and Universities,” or even more eccentrically, the “1994s.” Ironies are plentiful in explanation. As Europeans colonized North America from the east coast westward, they established infrastructure and institutions to facilitate their settlement project.