[Still pertinent . . . ]
“Do Indians celebrate Thanksgiving?”
I am asked this question at least once every fall. Which, by the way, is too many times.
The answer is that my family (though I can’t speak for the other 5 million Indigenous people in America) doesn’t. Not the “brave-pilgrims-and-friendly-savages” version of the holiday, anyway. Twenty or 30 of us might gather under the same roof to share a meal. We’ll thank the creator for our blessings.
But that could be true of any Thursday night in a Wampanoag house.
Wish any of us a “Happy Thanksgiving” today, and we’re liable to cut you off and say, “You mean the National Day of Mourning?”
In fact, there are quite a few autumn traditions that the Indigenous people of this country have to keep our distance from. Halloween, of course, means non-Natives dressed in tacky renderings of our traditional regalia. Then there’s football season, and hearing the name of the Washington, D.C., NFL team (which, among other meanings, refers to an Indian scalp sold for bounty).
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