Well, we’ve come around to another Thanksgiving. Last year I fasted on the day of Thanksgiving, choosing to give thanks and eat lots of yummy autumn food and spend time with my family and friends on a different day. Maybe it’s a little thing, and maybe it’s not the most effective thing, but it’s something I can do, and it’s something I can teach my children (should I ever have any). I’ve chosen to treat Thanksgiving Day as a day of remembrance, of honoring the indigenous people who have suffered at the hands of the white colonizers, who still suffer under a government and in a society that has chosen to forget them. So on this day, I fast to honor the indigenous people who are still here, and their ancestors who suffered so much.
It feels particularly important to talk about this now, as so many native peoples are finally getting attention from the majority populace in their struggle against the multi-billion dollar corporation Energy Transfer Partners, while the government does little to support them (mostly the opposite).
Here’s the thing—I am a woman of privilege, light-skinned (and with many more privileges beyond my skin color), and it every day it galls me to carry this privilege that shouldn’t even be a privilege. It shouldn’t be a privilege to not be racially profiled, to not have a higher a likelihood of rape, to have promises made by the government upheld. I’m ashamed and disheartened to live so comfortably in a country where my privilege is built on genocide, bigotry, and centuries of broken promises.
And how will we remember our history? If Germany lives every day with the memory of the holocaust, owns it, makes future decisions based on that part of their past, teaches it, remembers it, then maybe they are setting a precedent for it to not happen again. A country like Cambodia remembers Pol Pot but doesn’t have the education infrastructure to even make that a part of history yet—the Khmer Rouge killed everyone with an education, so there can be no imaginary line between past and present.
Why can we, as a country, not acknowledge the terrible genocide, terrorism, hate crimes, and racism perpetrated by our forefathers, so that we can make what reparations we can—including acknowledging that the descendants of those terrible events still live here, as part of this country, and have a need to be heard. If we cannot even apologize for these acts of terror and violence, what does that say about our values and our ego, as a nation? If we cannot teach the importance and weight of these events in schools, how will we create a nation that will not make the same mistake again?
Many people around me think that my stance on Thanksgiving, the way I treat the holiday and the way I talk about it is overdramatic. Many of those people are also folks who make disdainful noises at movements like Black Lives Matter as well. For the most part, those people are light-skinned people who are very comfortable in their lives. I don’t begrudge them that—how could I? But I do not understand how our own comfort should so blind us to the just cause of others who do not -cannot- enjoy many of those comforts, should blind us to their need to be heard and their struggles acknowledged.
Now, across our country, indigenous people are standing up for themselves and for what they believe in. They’re standing up for their lives, and we should be standing with them. We cannot continue sit comfortably in our privilege until it comes crashing down. We must be the instruments of its destruction.
Westering 