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thanksgiving
Native Americans Hold National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving
"'Thanksgiving' is a white-washed holiday designed to conceal its true origins of violence, genocide, land theft, and forced assimilation," said the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Nov 28, 2024
In contrast with Thanksgiving celebrations across the United States on Thursday, Native Americans held a National Day of Mourning, promoted accurate history, and championed Indigenous voices and struggles.
Despite rainy conditions, the United American Indians of New England held its 55th annual National Day of Mourning at Cole's Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Kisha James, who is an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) and also Oglala Lakota, shared how her grandfather founded the event in 1970 and pledged to continue to "tear down the Thanksgiving mythology."
"The past influences the present" and "the settler project" continues with racism, misogyny, and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, James told the crowd. "The Pilgrims are not ancient history."
James took aim at fossil fuel pipelines, oil rigs, skyscrapers, corporations, the U.S. military, mass incarceration, and the criminalization of immigrants, and declared that "no one is illegal on stolen on land."
Jean-Luc Pierite, a member of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana and president of the board of directors of the North American Indian Center of Boston who helped organize this year's gathering, toldUSA Today that "while we are mourning some tragic history but also contemporary issues, we are also expressing gratitude for each [other] and building this community space."
"Coming together as a community for a feast and to express gratitude—that's not something that was imported to this continent because of colonization," Pierite said. "Indigenous peoples have had these practices going back beyond, beyond colonial contact."
This year's event in Plymouth included speeches about the suffering of Palestinians—as Israel wages a U.S. government-backed war on the Gaza Strip that has killed at least 44,330 people, injured 104,933, and led to a genocide case at the International Court of Justice—and of people impacted by extractive industries.
"The message from Indigenous peoples internationally has been consistent: that we need to center the development of traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, and move away from fossil fuel extractive economies," said Pierite. "At this time the world needs Indigenous peoples."
In New York City, police
arrested 21 pro-Palestinian protesters who blocked the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade route.
According toABC 7:
For the second year in a row, the group ran in front of the Ronald McDonald float to briefly stop the parade.
This year, they jumped the barricades at West 55th Street just after 9:30 am.
Many sat on the ground, locking arms and chanting "Free, free Palestine!"
Others held a banner behind them, reading "Don't celebrate genocide! Arms embargo now."
Video footage shared on social media shows members of the New York Police Department grabbing protesters and their banner, and throwing at least one person face-first into the road.
Multiple Indigenous groups circulated messages about Thanksgiving on social media Thursday.
NDN Collective said that "as Indigenous peoples, we reject colonial holidays rooted in the genocidal erasure of our existence. We demand #LANDBACK to reclaim sovereignty, repair ties with Mother Earth, and protect Indigenous ways of life—honoring them for generations to come."
The Indigenous Environmental Network similarly
highlighted that "'Thanksgiving' is a white-washed holiday designed to conceal its true origins of violence, genocide, land theft, and forced assimilation."
"We must re-evaluate what we've been taught about the history of this land and recognize that genocide, extraction, and exploitation of our lands and communities continue today," the group argued.
Brenda Beyal, an enrolled member of the Diné Nation and program coordinator of the Brigham Young University ARTS Partnership's Native American Curriculum Initiative, wrote about the history of Thanksgiving on Wednesday for The Salt Lake Tribune.
"Our history books mark 'the first Thanksgiving' in 1621 when at least 90 Wampanoag men, led by Massasoit, walked in on a Puritan harvest feast," Beyal detailed. "Approximately 150 years later, all 13 colonies celebrated a day of solemn Thanksgiving to celebrate the win of the Battle of Saratoga in December of 1777. [U.S. President] George Washington called for a day of thanksgiving and prayer in 1789 to give gratitude for the end of the Revolutionary War."
"Then, in 1863, [President] Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held in November of every year," she continued. "During the same year that Lincoln canonized Thanksgiving, the Shoshone experienced the worst slaughter of Native Americans in U.S. history while winter camped on the Boa Ogoi (Bear River) near what is now Preston, Idaho. More than 400 men, women and children were massacred."
"This Thursday, my family and I will gather for a meal of thanksgiving. I have extended an invitation to whomever needs a place to rest, feast, and give gratitude. There is room at my table," she explained. "Ultimately, it is my hope that we as a nation can continue to consecrate days of remembrance, where we can both celebrate and mourn, acknowledge and repair, and find ways to be thankful, even with a wounded heart."
Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, Diné/Dakota writer Jacqueline Keeler addressed the future under U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who won another term in the White House this month.
"In my book Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands, which was published after Trump's first term, I delved into the settler colonial mindset that the Pilgrims landed with on these shores, and contrasted it with the perspective of the Indigenous people of the United States," Keeler noted.
"Origin stories define people by articulating the terms of their relationships with our Mother, the Earth, as well as other living beings, and each other. In my book, I proposed that these stories could act as algorithms," she continued. "The 'origin story' algorithm for settler colonists was straightforward; they came to other people's lands, occupied them, and sent the wealth back to their ruling 1%. Based on that origin story, you can predict what Trump and his base will do next."
"My question at Thanksgiving time," she concluded, is "how do we create a new origin story that includes everyone and puts us on a path to come together as a people—in harmony with each other and the Earth, our Mother."
Lakota historian Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and co-founder of the Indigenous group the Red Nation, appeared on Democracy Now! on Thursday to discuss the origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future, which focuses on seven historical moments of resistance that form a road map for collective liberation.
Estes examined the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's battle against the climate-wrecking Dakota Access Pipeline. "I actually look at a physical map that was handed out to water protectors who came to the camp. And on that map there was, you know, where to find food, where to find the clinics," he said. "To me, that provided, you know, a kind of interesting parallel to the world that surrounded the camps."
"You had the North Dakota National Guard, the world of cops, the world of the militarized sort of police state. And in the camps themselves you had sort of the primordial sort of beginnings of what a world premised on Indigenous justice might look like. And in that world, you know, everyone got free food. There was a place for everyone," Estes noted. "The housing... obviously, was transient housing and teepees and things like that, but then also there was health clinics to provide healthcare, alternative forms of healthcare, to everyone. And so, if we look at that, it's housing, education—all for free, right?—a strong sense of community."
"Given the opportunity to create a new world in that camp, centered on Indigenous justice and treaty rights, society organized itself according to need and not to profit. And so, where there was, you know, the world of settlers, settler colonialism, that surrounded us, there was the world of Indigenous justice that existed for a brief moment in time," he said. "And in that world, instead of doing to settler society what they did to us—genociding, removing, excluding—there's a capaciousness to Indigenous resistance movements that welcomes in non-Indigenous peoples into our struggle, because that's our primary strength, is one of relationality, one of making kin."
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Getting the Economic Facts Straight for Your Big Thanksgiving Dinner Argument
It’s not our job to tell people how they should feel about the economy, but we can at least add some facts as context to common complaints.
Nov 23, 2023
How the economy is doing has always been a contentious topic, particularly when friends and family with different politics gather for Thanksgiving dinner. And the question has gotten even thornier this year, with consumer sentiment and polling data about the economy becoming historically de-linked from official measures of economic health like GDP. It’s not our job to tell people how they should feel about the economy, but we can at least add some facts as context to common complaints.
Myth: “The economy is simply bad under the Biden administration”
In January 2020, the share of Americans saying that the U.S. economy was in “poor” shape was below 10%, but in recent months that share was above 40%. However, the unemployment rate in early 2020 and the middle of 2023 was essentially identical. The share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 with a job was actually higher in the more recent period. Economic growth in the last quarter of 2019 was 2.6%, while it was 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023. The economy is growing (at least) as fast as it was pre-pandemic, and jobs are more plentiful.
This higher-pressure labor market has substantially eroded inequality in wages. Consider one metric of inequality—the ratio of the 90th-percentile wage (the wage earned by the worker who has higher pay than 90% of the workforce) to the 10th-percentile wage. Between 1980 and 2019, this ratio rose enormously by about 34%. But a full third of this 39-year increase has been erased in less than three years after 2019 because of rapid growth in pay for low-wage workers, which has not been a historical norm. If this inequality reduction sticks, it could well be the single most important development in the economy in decades.
Myth: “Inflation has crushed living standards and that was the Biden administration’s fault”
Inflation was too high for most of the past two years. But, average wages for most Americans are higher today than pre-pandemic even after accounting for inflation. So, jobs are both more plentiful and pay more than they did pre-pandemic.
As for blame, the case for the Biden administration causing inflation is extraordinarily weak. Inflation was global, with every single advanced economy in the world seeing a pronounced increase in inflation, even as these countries took widely divergent responses to the pandemic recession. As of today, the U.S. has substantially lower inflation and lower unemployment than nearly all of our advanced country peers.
Myth: “But prices won’t ever go back down”
That’s mostly right if we’re talking about an average index of all prices in the economy. But these broad indices never really do go down in absolute terms (at least not in modern times). And that’s fine—what matters is the relative growth of wages and prices, and so long as wage growth outpaces price growth, living standards rise. The economy has seen a significant reset of both wages and prices relative to pre-pandemic times. It would be nice to enjoy today’s nominal wages that are 20% higher than in December 2019 while still being able to pay December 2019 prices for everything, but it’s always true that it would be nice to have today’s wages and last year’s (or last decade’s) prices. But that’s not how the economy works.
For specific goods like energy and food, however, prices do often go down. And energy prices are way down relative to recent peaks—peaks driven by global events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Further, some genuine progress has been made in ameliorating long-running cost pressures on U.S. families stemming from health care and education. The American Rescue Plan (ARP) lowered drug prices and provided more generous aid to families buying health insurance in the individual market. And the administration has tried to cancel significant amounts of student debt and expand programs that allow less burdensome repayment plans.
Myth: “The Biden administration kept gas prices high by stopping domestic oil and gas drilling”
For good or bad, this is flat untrue—the U.S. hit an all-time high in gas and oil production in 2023.
Myth: “Debt is out of control in recent years”
The federal government’s debt measured as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen since the first quarter of 2021 (the Biden administration’s first quarter in office). While it is true that the American Rescue Plan boosted deficits substantially in the first quarter of 2021, that was by design and the ARP was the reason why unemployment recovered so quickly in the wake of the pandemic recession as compared with previous crises. But since this planned boost to the deficit jump-started recovery, we have seen some of the largest one-year reductions in federal government borrowing in history. Key Biden administration deficit-reducing actions include a tax on stock buybacks, a minimum corporate income tax, boosted Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement to stop rampant tax evasion and avoidance among the rich and corporations, and reforms to stop pharmaceutical price gouging of public health insurance programs like Medicare.
“So, you’re saying everything’s great now?”
The economy still has plenty of challenges and problems. We allowed a significant and compassionate expansion of the U.S. welfare state undertaken in response to the pandemic to roll back in 2022, causing a huge one-year rise in poverty (and particularly child poverty). Despite a pronounced upsurge in workers’ interest and activism about joining unions, we have not fixed the legal and policy roadblocks to protect this vital right. The federal minimum wage remains at $7.25, and in inflation-adjusted terms has hit its lowest level since the 1950s. Our care economy institutions are in near-crisis and need public investment. Tax rates faced by the richest households and corporations are at the lowest levels in decades.
On each of these issues, however, progress would be made if even a sliver of Republicans in Congress would get on the right side of these issues.
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Thankfulness Buried in the Rubble
A day of thanks? A day of atonement? But where is the day of hope? When a day of peace?
Nov 23, 2023
Much as I love Thanksgiving — seeing my family . . . oh the turkey, oh the cranberry sauce — I feel like maybe a bomb fragment has hit the “thanks” part.
I find myself struggling to let a sense of thankfulness flow, because when I do — and doing so has always been a crucial part of the holiday — suddenly my gratitude for the blessings of my life starts to feel more like luck and, even worse, privilege. Yeah, how nice. I’m thankful for the books in my library. I’m thankful for the air I breathe, for my daughter, my sister, my nieces and nephews and all the friendship, all the love, that fortifies my life. But then . . .
As I give thanks to the walls of my house, as I kiss the computer at which I sit, I hear bombs flying and suddenly I can envision all of it . . . all of it, all of it … being taken from me in an instant. I envision digging for a child in the rubble.
Yes, this current war that is saturating the media — Israel’s assault on Gaza, funded by the United States, emerging from seven and a half decades of Israeli occupation of Palestine — has entered my consciousness in a way I can’t seem to ignore. It’s only one of several hellish wars festering on Planet Earth right now, but I can’t stop hearing the Israeli defense minister seeming to explain all of them: “We are fighting human animals.”
And once again, genocide is just and righteous and necessary. And history’s soul cracks open. The story of Thanksgiving is two cultures embracing and sharing a feast of life. But then one of the cultures stole the continent. As New York Times reporter Maya Salam wrote some years ago: “Thanksgiving facts and Thanksgiving myths have blended together for years like so much gravy and mashed potatoes, and separating them is just as complicated.”
Yeah, stir in the genocide. Stir in the slavery. The holiday starts renaming itself: Thankstaking.
Here’s a frequently left-out fragment of the Thanksgiving story. It’s the story of Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Wampanoag tribe in the 1600s. He’s known to be the Pilgrims’ rescuer who, after half the Pilgrim settlers had died during a harsh winter, taught those who were left some necessary survival skills, including how to catch eel and grow corn.
But, according to potawatomi.org, Tisquantum’s story is “less innocent than the narrative that he assisted the Pilgrims with teaching them how to grow crops and take advantage of North America’s bounties.”
What’s generally not mentioned in the classroom is that six years before the Mayflower arrived, in what is now known as Massachusetts, a slave-trader had captured Tisquantum, along with a group of Native Americans, who were taken as captives to Europe. Tisquantum eventually wound up escaping and made his way to England where he learned English. He returned to the American continent in 1619.
As the Potawatomi site explains: “While Tisquantum was overseas, New England’s Indigenous experienced a monumental death rate, with some communities losing nearly every tribal member to the decimating effects of European diseases.
“Upon returning to North American and his village of Patuset, Tisquantum found only piles of bones of his fellow tribesmen killed by the plagues. He realized he was the sole survivor of his village. The illness spread so quickly that many local tribes never had time to bury their dead.
“Where Tisquantum’s village once thrived, the Pilgrims established Plymouth Plantation.”
Tisquantum — escaped slave, sole survivor (because of his capture) of a village wiped out by a plague bequeathed by the Europeans — helped the newcomers learn how to live in their new land. In 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their successful harvest that year, along with the Wampanoag, who apparently considered themselves allies of the new arrivals. But they weren’t. Instead, genocide ensued.
Wamsutta (Frank) James, a founder of the movement declaring Thanksgiving to be a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans, said in a 1970 speech: “We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end.”
All of which leads me back to the present moment, more or less. A day of thanks? A day of atonement?
As much as the human race has accomplished in the past several hundred thousand years, its evolution hasn’t yet created global social sanity. Despite cries of outrage from the political margins, geopolitical civilization essentially remains organized around the principle of war and conquest: Fragments of humanity are still trying to destroy one another. We’re at a point where our destructive power is so great that we’re on the brink of global suicide.
Sorry to bring this up just as the turkey’s being served. So let me try to find my way back into a spirit of thankfulness, as much as I can muster in the shadow of looming genocide. I am thankful that Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley recently doubled the number of U.S. senators calling for an Israeli ceasefire in the war — from one (Dick Durbin of Illinois) to two.
Merkley said: “Most importantly, the Israeli people and the Palestinian people must find leaders determined to partner with each other and the world to replace the cycle of hate and violence with both a long-term vision for security, peace and prosperity featuring two states for two peoples, and immediate, concrete steps toward that goal.”
The “thanks” feel small, but the hope is enormous.
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