Thursday marked Thanksgiving 2016. Yet another year when millions of Americans will travel miles to gorge on cooked birds with friends and family, all while giving thanks for the same things they're gonna complain about the day after.
Personally, I don't jive with this holiday. And if you bleed Sioux, Iroquois or Cherokee blood, you likely share my take, and why I ain't with it. Activists here wage daily wars against racism, but will put that aside to celebrate the starting point of one of the worst genocides in world history? What's up with that?
Why is any person of color even celebrating this holiday? (by the way, that also goes for white people.) What about the people who were here before any of us? The true non-immigrants here.
So why not something else? Maybe rather than just devouring food for sport in-between NFL games, we can hold a national "Native-American Appreciation Day?" A parade down the Canyon of Heroes for our indigenous friends? If Columbus can get one each year, dammit, why can't Natives as well?
For those of you nearing the end of winter term, preparing those papers on "anti-Political Correctness" (you know, the ones who'll undoubtedly write about how leftists are trying to "Kill Thanksgiving"), think about this.
If someone dared to propose a holiday to mark the moment Europeans began taking Africans from their homes to the New World for enslavement, or one to celebrate the moment Hitler and the Nazis began making preparations for massacring Jews throughout Europe, how many people would give those ideas a thumbs-up?
Native American visibility in their original country is almost zilch. Do we ever hear about Native American celebrities regularly? Where's all the major Native American news networks and cable shows? How many presidential candidates have even drawn up policies targeting issues in Native communities? Do people even give a damn that this Thanksgiving week, police have been assaulting natives fighting back against the Dakota Access Pipeline?
Just some thoughts on this day. Which I won't be eating turkey on, or really celebrating, for that matter.
