This past Thursday, Americans across the country gathered together with friends and family to celebrate our yearly traditions of football, eating too much, and outrageous shopping. It seems like another normal Thanksgiving for most; your Uncle Ed gets a little too drunk, your Grandfather spews racist hatred everywhere, and your Great Aunts tell you how much you've grown and ask you several times about your love life. But, if you're paying attention, you know this Thanksgiving is different for many people.

While you were enjoying your deep-fried turkey and throwing elbows to get a PS4, protesters in Cannon Ball, North Dakota were fighting sub-zero temperatures and police officers with water cannons. Which is ironic, considering the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is fighting for their right to clean, drinkable water.

Let's start from the beginning, shall we? It goes all the way back to the 1500s, when the Pilgrims (fucking white people) sailed over here on their high horse and had absolutely no idea what they were doing, but were on a mission to prove a point to King James and, like any stubborn teenager, did it anyway. Who saved their asses from starving? Oh, yeah, the Native Americans. The Natives taught us wimpy white folk how to farm and hunt and agreed to defend us from bad guys. We made a treaty with them - Thus, the first Thanksgiving. What a wonderful sentiment.

Until we started killing them with smallpox blankets, forcing them off of their land and making them march thousands of miles to a small, crappy piece of dirt comparable to a cardboard box. And then, someone said, "Yo, guys, this is wrong. They were here first." So we quit doing that, right?

Wrong.

Here we are again, FOUR HUNDRED YEARS LATER, still being dicks to the Natives. We shoved them onto a reservation in fabulous North Dakota, and discriminate when we hire them, and then give them pennies-worth to live on, but no, that's not enough. We then route a pipeline through the middle of not only their burial grounds, but their fucking drinking water. We just aren't happy until we're literally killing people of color.

Were you thinking about them while you sat in your warm, safe house and put away several courses of a meal we eat to honor the fact that Native Americans saved our asses? Were you up there at Standing Rock, fighting for their basic human right to clean drinking water? Were you ashamed to be part of the problem? I can bet you the answer to all of these questions is no.

Don't you dare celebrate this holiday. If you don't care that the Dakota Access Pipeline is endangering Native American safety and liberty, don't you dare. Don't you dare pick up one fucking dinner roll if your dinner conversation doesn't include the topic of Standing Rock and how wrong this whole situation is or how you can help them. Don't you dare think you have permission to celebrate this holiday that was established because we were thankful to have our Native American friends then if you don't call them friends now. Don't you dare.

Instead, get your turkey-stuffed, Tryptophan-ed, lily white ass off your fancy dining room chair, get in your expensive car and take a trip to the Costco to buy some matches and water for those braving the elements at Standing Rock. Or better yet, go out there and do it yourself. Whatever you do for them, do it, and don't you think you can even call this "Thanksgiving" unless you do something about this. Remember that the Natives are the reason for the season.