On This Day of Mourning
Reflections on American Thanksgiving
“What to a slave is the Fourth of July?” inquired Frederick Douglass, and I echo his sentiments. What to America’s Indigenous communities is Thanksgiving?
A day of feasting to commemorate a genocide. The fabrication of history to wipe the stain of slaughter from our collective minds. A day to remember when the White man came to exterminate scores of Indigenous people as though they were insects threatening the harvest.
And indeed, a harvest it was, albeit a bloody one. America is a living testament to what can be built when entire groups of people are denied their humanity.
On this day of mourning, may we choose truth over comfort. May we refuse to indulge in the kind of ignorance that eases a guilty conscience. May we acknowledge the stolen land that is the lifeblood of our livelihoods. May we choose consciousness although the landscape we dwell in is always a breath away from wakefulness.
And as we fill our tables with halfway historical heaps of supposedly seasonal selections, may we remember to repent.
For where we claim there was friendship, there was murder. Where we assert there was communion, there was a massacre. May we repent for the way we silenced the voices of the only ones alive to tell their stories…
