The history we learn in school often makes our country seem great, yet innocent of wrong doing, barring one era of slavery that could not be ignored. The history books rarely tell the real story of our Native people—the true Americans who have been slaughtered by the mostly European white settlers who came to this country and decided to take the land from the people to which it belonged, no matter how many they needed to massacre.
There may be no worse time than Thanksgiving Day to remind America’s Native people how their genocide has been glossed over and mostly concealed by those who are guilty and by American history.
Below is a 2 ½-minute MIC.com video of Native American women who explain what really happened and how much of a farce the American version of Thanksgiving Day really is. Here is an excerpt followed by the video.
“This idea of pilgrims and Indians coming together and sharing a positive meal—it’s such a whitewashing and rose-colored version of American history.”
Video:
Native American Women Tell The Real History of Thanksgiving.
Tara Houska:
It was a brutal, brutal genocide that took place. And each Native person that’s here is a survivor of that genocide.
This idea of pilgrims and Indians coming together and sharing a positive meal—it’s such a white-washing and rose-colored glasses version of history.
Autumn White Eyes:
Thanksgiving isn’t what people think it really is. They aren’t going to tell you that pilgrims stole land, that they appropriated land, that Abraham Lincoln coined this holiday for patriotism during the Civil war and that Abraham Lincoln is the same president who ordered the largest mass execution of Dakota people the largest mass execution of Dakota people in United States history and that these same things have happened to Native people all across the United States.
Tara Houska:
We move into the story of Thanksgiving where, you know, it’s happy people sitting down to share a meal together. No, that’s not what happened. In reality, it was quite brutal.
Autumn White Eyes:
For this reason, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for many Native people. It is a day of sadness for many Native people. The stereotype that I most want to dismantle is that we are invisible, that we are no longer living that we’re not here. But the reality is we are here, we are thriving, we are speaking our language, we are practicing our culture.
Tara Houska:
I think it’s great that people share a meal, it’s great to be around family, it’s great to share time with family—to come together and spend real time together. I hope that there is a moment though—there is at least a moment of acknowledging the indigenous people who are still here. My name is Tara Houska. I’m an attorney, National campaigns director of Honor The Earth and a member of Couchiching First Nation.
Autumn White Eyes:
My name is Autumn White Eyes, and I am from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I am an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. And I am Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe.
Perhaps, Thanksgiving is the perfect day to remind ourselves how grateful we are that any Native American would find a way to forgive us and our slaughter of their people, their children, families and loved ones. To learn more about Honor The Earth, click on this link.
UPDATE:
Friday, Nov 24, 2017 · 8:27:38 AM +00:00 · Leslie Salzillo
I’m compelled to add a comment from ‘Meteor Blades.
Forgiveness for past slaughter is easy to give.
But the aftermath of the conquest still affects many Indians. And what’s hard to swallow is the fact that Indians and our issues remain invisible in society today.
The cultural genocide hasn’t stopped just because the active warfare ended, the last forced-boarding school closed, or because now there are casinos.
Indian children are routinely placed in white foster homes. Indian mineral and fuel resources are still ripped off in sweetheart contracts. Indian health is weakened by poor services. Life expectancy of reservation dwellers is lower than for the population as a whole. Educational levels are lower and many of the reservation schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education stink.
Indians are killed by police at the highest rate of any race. Voter suppression has contributed to Indian populations casting a lower percentage of votes than other population groups. Poverty, alcoholism, suicide, domestic violence are plagues affecting Indians more than any other racial group.
These are not new problems. It’s disgraceful that they are not new.
Promoting a genuine national commitment to deal with these problems until they no longer are problems would go a lot further than any mea culpa for the murderous past.
Thank you, MB. I hope you don’t mind my quoting your entire comment (you really didn’t have a choice). Your truths should be part of an ongoing national discourse until we not only see a factual revision in American history education, but also a stark change in the treatment of the country’s longest-residing Americans.