Friends,
For those that will celebrate Thanksgiving this year, it's incumbent upon us all to give this story, this myth, and history a closer look, particularly as we think about the racial justice moment that we're in, along with the horrible impact of COVID on native peoples.
This in-depth, New York Times piece reminds us of the horrific killing of the buffalo as a way to kill Indians and with that, the taking of their land and resources, together with any memory of always being on Indigenous land. In this vein, I am proud of our UT students for insisting that the university incorporate a land acknowledgement in all UT programming as part of their 8 Demands in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings and the ensuing Black Lives Matter Movement.
Although our schools mostly do not teach this history with not even college students getting it unless they happen to stumble into a course that does, we can all nevertheless individually educate ourselves through posts like these. Also worth reading is another pertinent 2016 piece published in The Atlantic titled, "'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone.' From the perspective of historical scholarship, there is no ambiguity in this brutal, violent history that Thanksgiving Day masks.
I would hope that we can all give thanks and acknowledge this enduring colonial legacy of which this day also happens to be about.
-Angela Valenzuela
#NativeLivesMatter
FORT PECK INDIAN RESERVATION, Mont. — On a frigid November morning inside a tractor barn in northeast Montana, 10 members of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes joined in song to bless a thirty-aught-six hunting rifle, and to lift up the spirit of a buffalo they were preparing to kill. One man played a painted hand drum. Others passed around burning sage.
The hunt that followed took place on Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, 27,000 acres of rolling pasture on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Every stage of the hunt was marked by a ceremony to give thanks for a buffalo that descends from animals killed to near-extinction by white settlers in the late 19th century.
The mass killing was part of a government-approved effort to seize land from Native Americans who depended on the animal to survive. The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.
Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”
It is now widely accepted that the story of a friendship-sealing repast between white colonists and Native Americans is inaccurate. Articles debunking the tale have become as reliable an annual media ritual as recipes for cornbread stuffing.
But this year should be different, say Native American leaders, scholars and teachers.
The holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice, and a pandemic that has landed with particular force on marginalized communities of color. The crises have fueled an intense re-examination of the roots of persistent inequities in American life.
This Thanksgiving also comes on the heels of an election in which 110 American Indian and Alaska Native candidates ran for office, according to the National Congress of American Indians, and on the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage.
Winona LaDuke, the Native American activist and writer who ran for vice president in 1996 and 2000 as Ralph Nader’s running mate, believes that the country is primed to re-envision Thanksgiving as an occasion to come to terms with the cruelty Native Americans have experienced throughout history.
"I've seen a growing awareness, a wake-up, to the systemic oppression of people of color,” said Ms. LaDuke, an enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation. “There is a movement toward justice for Native people. People want to listen.”
Thanksgiving, of course, is a time for listening, a welcome opportunity for prayer, reflection and looking back, and many Indigenous people celebrate it in their own way. But the problem with its origin story, Ms. LaDuke and others say, goes beyond misrepresentations about what was served in Plymouth, Mass., in 1621. (There is no evidence that turkey was on the menu, and pie couldn’t have been, because there was no flour or butter available for crust.)
