The last Thursday of November is widely celebrated as Thanksgiving in the USA, to commemorate a harvest festival performed between Native Americans and Plymouth settlers way back when. It been a national holiday since Lincoln and, for some reason, is still going strong. I say, “for some reason”, because I would like to believe that at this point, we all know what really happened to natives with the arrival of the Europeans. Hence why in New York City, Columbus Day has been renamed as Indigenous People’s Day, to stand with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Yet, Thanksgiving still seems to stick around, and unfortunately, the excuse of it being tradition isn’t going to cut it anymore.
A day of feasting and coming together seems happy and sweet, but when the origin stems from a systematic ethnic cleansing of an entire population of people, it’s a holiday to let go of on a very tall cliff and let die a brutal yet sudden death. Continuing to celebrate this blood splattered holiday is continuing to normalize colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide, all of which are still very much rampant.
So while you celebrate genocide with a homemade turkey, remember how the colonizers killed between 40 and 50 million bisons to starve the Native American population. The mass murder of bisons, a staple in the indigenous diet, was a major factor to the genocide of the Native American. If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope the infamous image of a mountain of bison skulls you learned about in school ruins your dinner. This methodical, forced starvation is a tactic borrowed by Israhelli settlers today in Palestine. The blocking of necessary aid and only allowing small amounts of junk food are genocidal tactics aimed to kill the population, scarily similar to what we saw inflicted on Native Americans.
Furthermore, celebrating the beginning of this beloved country built by enslaved and tortured Africans isn’t something to be proud of either. Millions ripped from their homes and stripped of their cultures to be used only for labor are responsible for the structure of our cities and the country’s economic growth until widespread slavery became illegal.
Native Americans and African Americans alike have been historically victims to slavery, torture, rape, genocide, dehumanization, and stripped of their identity and culture. They continue to be oppressed today while their white counterparts continue to reap the benefits of generational wealth and corruption. Native Americans are stuck in underdeveloped and underfunded reservations where drug and alcohol abuse run rampant with the lack of several necessities and freedom. Many African Americans are tied down by red lines to over-policed projects which are deliberately under supported financially.
Whether it be Manifest Destiny or Promised Land, this idea of building a holy nation on top of the skulls of massacred children is still prevalent but is deemed okay because these children are colored. When the white man kills the brown child, no one bats an eye until hundreds of years later. Maybe now, instead of hundreds it’ll be decades, but why must we wait decades for justice to be served and for it to be a common belief that genocide is wrong? Why must we wait for it to be acceptable to say free Palestine to open our mouths on the subject? Why must we always wait for the white man to deem something as wrong or right before we can speak the truth without punishment? We saw what happened to the indigenous peoples of the land we live on today, now it is a conscious decision to watch or fight against Palestine reaching the same fate. There are countless similarities between the oppression of Native Americans, African Americans, and Palestinians because all oppressed peoples can see themselves in each others pain and history. It’s the same gun barrel shooting at them all, just in different timelines, by different names, to different colors.
Thanksgiving is more than a tradition, it is a purposeful normalization of hatred and oppression against colored people. Like, “yes it was bad, but we don’t have to talk about it”. Not wanting to talk about it and recognize it is ignoring the world’s injustices. You can’t slap a bow on ethnic cleansing.