I hesitated to leave my comment here because I'm part Native and aware that it's complicated. The kind of comment you left is not the best way to broach such subjects.
I would like to see more articles about Natives generally without focusing overly much on the victim narrative. I think I'm alive in part because of my Native heritage, for which I am also deeply grateful.
I appreciate your comment. I guess I am frustrated because I grew up with the colonizer mindset, that the Europeans who came here were nice people that did nice things and everyone had a big party together. I did a school play when I was a kid about making friends with the Natives.
It wasn't until after school that I learned what was really going on, and now when I see celebration for this day I really do just think of genocide. Probably not the best way to approach this but I was surprised at how strongly users are flagging any comment that mentions it. It makes me feel like people want to keep up their cognitive dissonance, and it feels like that mechanism is what allows our nation to continue harming first nations people to this day.
Clearly you touched on a very sensitive subject. I was also surprised that my link was flagged by this much people, as it was a very informative blog post about the fact that some First Nation tribes might have a different point of view about what Thanksgiving actually means to them.
I did email dang and asked if he can take a look at down votes in this thread. But either way, keep up the good work and don't get disappointed by the sheer amount of injustices!
Just to be blunt: because eventually nobody wants to hear it anymore.
This has been an extremely brutal couple of years for everybody, and by most estimations the brutality is going to continue. People want something to be happy about, and the idea of sharing things they're thankful for is that. You don't need to take that from them.
People don't want to deal with an Ebenezer Scrooge saying "bah humbug" after a year of lockdowns and not seeing families. Interesting topic but maybe one for after the holidays.
Users flag and I would assume I mostly associate the holiday with genocide. did it. Then you have the wrong association given the current tribal views on the holiday. This view doesn't help anyone and actively hurts the perception of the tribes. Can we just have one day where we are thankful and get along?
I work at a TCU and we gathered canned items as a staff to distribute to the less fortunate. That's the actual spirit of Thanksgiving.
4/20 is also traditionally celebrated as Hitler's birthday by white supremacists, but that doesn't mean all the stoners and hippies who celebrate cannabis on that same day are also celebrating Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews.
Decent people have reclaimed the day 4/20 and number 420 for better purposes than celebrating Hitler's birthday, the same way "queers" have reclaimed that term as our own and use it in the acronym LGBTQ+.
So let's please not let the white supremacists who celebrate American's genocide against the original natives maintain their exclusive claim on Thanksgiving, which literally means giving thanks, which is a good thing for everyone to do in general.
While Thanksgiving is indeed partially a celebration of the yearly harvest, to say "Thanksgiving is just about giving thanks" really misses the point of what people are rightly complaining about - which is that much of the folklore relating to the holiday amounts to a celebration of collective denial around the historically dismal and dishonorable ways English settlers behaved towards the natives. And the controversy about Thanksgiving is not even new: Mark Twain acknowledged it as early as the 1920s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States)#C...
>“I can choose how I feel about this day, but it is a choice. I can either let the holiday claim me, or choose to reclaim it.”
>If I could ask one thing from my non-indigenous fellow Americans when it comes to Thanksgiving, I would ask that you refrain from teaching the romanticized version of the holiday. Read to your children about what it means to be thankful, what it means to heal and be a family. Learn as a family about the tribal nation that is local to where you live. Take time during dinner to recognize whose traditional lands you give thanks on. Take this holiday into your own hands and understand that not every Native will have good feelings about this day, and be accepting of that. We can all choose how we feel about this holiday, but it is always our own choice.
Sure, but the portions of his autobiography where he had remarked on this were only published in the 1920s. So these remarks were not known prior to that timeframe.
They never had an exclusive or even a meaningful claim on Thanksgiving. I grew up on rezs and have never heard such. Thanksgiving has always been a celebrated holiday that shows Native American generosity.
