People ask us whether we celebrate Thanksgiving. We have a single answer:
Every day.
Of course, I realize that what they mean is, “Do you celebrate the dominant-culture American holiday called “Thanksgiving Day?” Mostly, I refuse to be drawn into an artificial discussion within an artificial frame based on an artificial holiday. It’s not my job to pander to comforting and comfortable stereotypes and fake history. It is my job to honor our ancestors and their real history, and so if you plan to ask us questions like these, you should be prepared for brutally honest (and discomfiting) answers.
I believe it was in 1970 that Native activists observed the first National Day of Mourning and Remembrance on what the dominant culture calls Thanksgiving Day. At least, that was the title it was given among the folks I knew, with some shortening it simply to National Day of Mourning. Sources now seem to indicate that the shorter version was the original version, so perhaps the people around me simply lengthened it as a way of more fully honoring our ancestors, observing that worth celebration along with that deserving of raw grief. I use the longer version, partly from habit, but also because I insist on a more fully-articulated version of our history and a more fully-realized vision of our future.
Spirit knows there is much to grieve, and (much like that “holiday” originally designated for October 12th) this day brings that home anew every year. It is through the blessings of Spirit itself, the sacrifices of our ancestors, and the great strength and courage and hard work of our peoples that we are still here. Those sacrifices — sacrifices of blood and bone itself, of soul and spirit — were unspeakable in their pain and suffering and horror and betrayal. And so we cannot flinch from looking at them, from acknowledging the centrality of their role in shaping our history, our past, our present, our future. We owe our ancestors that much (and much more).
But while our peoples have always made a communal space for mourning, it is, as everything else in life, a matter of balance. It cannot be all grief and unrelieved sadness; a sole focus on the evils that have been (and are still being) done to us diminishes the fully-rounded lives lived by our ancestors (and by ourselves), and disrespects the harmony required by our traditional ways.
And so remembrance requires more of us than tears: It requires respect, honor, commemoration, celebration. Yes, celebration. Our peoples have always known that there must also be space for joy, for drumming and singing and dancing and feasting. We honor those same ancestors when we sing honor songs, when we dance in their memory, when we prepare the foods that sustained them for thousands of years with care and love for our own families.
And so, for us, today is a day for feasting.
And through it all — the mourning, the remembrance, the celebration — runs a red ribbon of thanksgiving: for our histories, painful though they may be in places, and for the ancestors who brought us to this place in time today; for our contemporary existence despite half a millennium of organized campaigns of genocide, and for our ability not merely to survive but to thrive, with tongue and song and dance and food and medicine and art and so many lifeways still intact for so many of us; and for our future, our children and their children and their children’s children, and the possibility of leaving them a better earth, even unto the seventh generation and beyond.
We have much to mourn. We have much to remember. We have much to celebrate. We have much for which to give thanks.
And while for us, thanksgiving is a way of life, a small-“t” part of going about our days, sometimes unconscious as much as articulated aloud, we also choose this day to keep these tasks and traditions entrusted to us by Spirit.
We have said our prayers and given our thanks with the dawn; we will do it again this evening when we feast. As we do, we wish you and yours the same measures of respect and joy and gratitude that we will celebrate today, and every day.
~ Aji
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