Thanksgiving?

“Grieving for their suffering, I send my Love, Respect, and Gratitude to those Beautiful… First People… May Their Cultures Live On”

Thanksgiving is a difficult holiday for me. The premise of celebrating the time where Eastern American Indigenous people helped foreign colonists survive the winter and taught them how to tend the land only to be systematically slaughtered, suppressed, assimilated, repressed, poisoned, kidnapped, and enslaved for the next 300+ years is dubious at best.

I choose to celebrate gratitude daily, and I have a deep sorrow in my heart around the way native peoples have been treated and their culture nearly erased.

There is also the fact that today, tens of millions of Turkeys gave their lives to be devoured in celebration.

There is nothing festive about any of this.

I also understand the premise of this holiday is a celebration of life, of giving thanks to the Earth and being in gratitude for the harvest, and for family. Which is great. It doesn't hide the fact that there's so much blood on this holiday's hands. And then we go ahead and celebrate the day after with the biggest sale of the year. Slapping a "Native American Heritage Day" on the same day just adds insult to injury.

That’s fucking disgusting. No way around the reality of it. Don’t lie to yourself.