Maybe I’m a cynic, but… I hate Thanksgiving. Honestly, I’m not too crazy about holidays altogether, but Thanksgiving is just as terrible as Columbus Day. It’s a lie — a sham made up by white people to make themselves feel better.
The entire day is supposed to celebrate the supposed peace between the colonizers and the Indigenous people living on the North American continent. But there wasn’t peace. Natives showed colonizers how to grow food and then got brutally beaten, raped and murdered.
White people “thanked” Indigenous groups by forcing them to assimilate. In other words, they took away their language, their culture and their families. Natives were beaten for speaking in their own language instead of English. They were stripped of their names and identities, just to make white people more comfortable.
Sure, overeating and watching football isn’t that bad. As far as traditions go, it’s not a terrible one. But pretending you’re celebrating peace is ignorant. Either you actually have no idea what actually happened after that day, or you choose to ignore it so you can be more comfortable and carve your turkey.
The entire narrative of the day is a lie. I wish it wasn’t, I really do. I would love to celebrate a peaceful coexistence between the indigenous groups and those who came here to colonize, but that’s not how it went.
If we’re being truthful, there still isn’t peace between the white majority of North America and Indigenous groups. According to a report done by the Lakota People’s Law Project, Indigenous people are at the highest risk of being brutalized by the police. “Proportionally, Native Americans are the most likely racial group to be killed by the police,” the report says.
Native women, especially, are assaulted at higher rates according to culturalsurvival.org.
“Native American women are murdered and sexually assaulted at rates as high as ten times the average in certain counties in the United States — crimes overwhelmingly committed by individuals outside the Native American community,” the site says.
The only thing Thanksgiving does is give white people a pretty lie to cover up the truth so they don’t have to think about how their ancestors murdered millions. They don’t have to think about the fact that it is still a problem. At least Columbus Day is pretending to celebrate Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of America, though that’s a whole other issue. Thanksgiving celebrates colonizers eating the food of Indigenous people and then murdering them and millions of others like them.
Being thankful isn’t an issue. Pretending that Thanksgiving has any historical basis as something to celebrate is, though.
