The Tensions of Celebrating Thanksgiving

And centering Indigenous Sovereignty and Climate Justice

When I sent my book proposal over to a writer-friend for review, I asked her to look out for whether I was becoming a bit too overbearing with the “I intend to learn from Indigenous peoples” aspect. Not that it isn’t most certainly my intention to learn from Indigenous peoples, rather I wondered if, as a White privileged lady with little to no knowledge about how the actual natural world works, I was expecting too much from Indigenous peoples to teach me. In the same way that we White folks have asked Black folks to teach us about racism when we should be doing the damn work ourselves before placing the work onto someone from a historically marginalized group.

In the end, I feel I reached a balance in the proposal and the way I’m approaching my project. But what was behind my intentions to learn from Indigenous peoples is very much a genuine admiration and acknowledgement that Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the climate justice movement. It’s something that I’m thinking about a lot this month, Native American Heritage Month, and especially with Thanksgiving this week. Because annually, I experience the very real tension of truly loving a holiday that is centered around food and gathering and gratitude while also acknowledging that Thanksgiving is a National Day of Mourning for Indigenous Peoples in North America. And so each year, I’m working to remind myself that I need to do the work not just to make Indigenous peoples teach me about climate justice, but also to do the research on my own.

Unlearning the Traditional Thanksgiving Narrative

I’m one of those privileged White folks who came around to unlearning the Euro-centric settler narratives at an embarrassingly late part of my life. I know I’m not alone here as Indigenous peoples and their rights have been overlooked, unacknowledged, and erased from the beginning of this American project. For even a social justice-minded person to be completely unaware of the harmful narratives I internalized is a testament to the propaganda that comes along with learning Euro-centric history. 

One of those horrifying realizations in this process, of course, is how very wrong we all have gotten Thanksgiving for our entire lives. That utopian scene of Pilgrims and Native Americans gathering around a feast of turkey in gratitude that were depicted in crafts and videos presented in my public school classroom was all just bullshit. That is why Indigenous Peoples are calling attention to this harmful narrative through the National Day of Mourning.

“The myth that is often told around Thanksgiving is a tale of friendship between the Native Americans and the settlers, but it stands in the place of what really happened after Thanksgiving—the erasure of the experience of Native Americans in the early 1600s and in the decades after that as more and more Europeans came to the ‘New World,’” writes Alejandra Martinez in Think Global Health. “Often, especially in school settings, a peaceful picture is painted of the event—a harvest celebration—and not much is mentioned about the Native American experience.”

With this increased awareness, I’ve come around to finding a balance with Thanksgiving. I can’t unknow the origins and I need to reckon with it. The way I’ve done that is first to do a whole lot of research about the actual history. You should very much read An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz for the comprehensive story–the book transformed the way I see this country and it should be required reading for every person who lives on Turtle Island/North America. Second, which is a consequence of having read Dunbar-Ortiz’s tome is that it’s reshaped my relationship with the land around me as now I know very well that every place I exist in North America is stolen land, so I’ve started doing the research of whose land I’m actual on (you can do this, too, and start with https://native-land.ca/). 

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

All of this has led me to a completely different relationship with Thanksgiving that feeds into my learning/unlearning journey as well as invites in the climate justice work that I’m doing and thinking about.

For that, I keep coming back to one particular All My Relations podcast from a few years ago, “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving.” One of the hosts, photographer and podcaster, Matika Wilbur (who you might also know from her incredible, New York Times-bestselling book, Project562) acknowledges that, as an Indigenous woman from the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes in Washington State, she still celebrates Thanksgiving in a “stereotypical American way.” But she’s found a different way to engage with the day. “I think…all of us could and should think about [Thanksgiving in] a different and new way of engaging with traditions that stem from Indigenous belief systems,” she says in the episode introduction. 

One of the ways she and her co-host Adrienne Keen, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation talk about reframing our relationship with Thanksgiving is the concept of gratitude and that there’s something inherently dangerous in detecting just one special day to gratitude.

“For a lot of communities, for most of us, it's an everyday practice,” says Adrienne. “It's all the time [and] practice…there's a very formulaic way that we think about giving thanks through prayer, through ceremony.”

“It really actually rewires your brain,” says Adrienne. “And this is something that Indigenous people have known from the beginning…is understanding how that can reshape your relationships to the land and to one another and to the material things in your life if you orient from this position of gratitude, of giving thanks and make it a daily thing, and not just this, like once a year, America blowout.”

This concept of infusing gratitude into our being–giving thanks every day for the air that we breathe, the soil that grows our food, the birds that distribute seeds, and the water and food that nourishes us–is a climate action in and of itself. It’s an area of reframing my relationship to the planet for this project that I know there is wisdom to be gained from the Indigenous relationship with the planet. And so much of that centers of gratitude.

Learning About Indigenous Foodways

Alongside reframing my relationship with gratitude, I’m also reframing my relationship to Thanksgiving food. It turns out the food we’re accustomed to eating at the kitchen table, namely turkey, don’t really have roots in history (whitewashed or otherwise). So I’ve convinced my mom to let me infuse some of what I’m learning of Indigenous foods into our Thanksgiving dinner.

Much of that learning has come from the award-winning chef and activist, Sean Sherman, who is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, owner and founder of the restaurant Owamni, and founder of the non-profit North American Traditional Food Systems (NATIFS). Everything Sean Sherman does is dedicated to uncovering Indigenous foodways that were seemingly lost thanks to colonization and the U.S. government’s attempts to exterminate and/or assimilate Indigenous peoples. 

I’ve been studying his book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen as well as New Native Kitchen by Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraiole and cooking from these books that not only offer amazing recipes, but lessons in Indigenous history. They also hold lessons about Indigenous resilience and adaptation to modern times. IBy cooking from these books for Thanksgiving and throughout the year, it’s a small way to bring in elements of Indigenous food sovereignty to our Thanksgiving table.

Indigenous Sovereignty is Climate Justice

Both of these very small (and one would argue rather insignificant) ways I’m reframing Thanksgiving connects very directly to lessons for the climate justice movement. The powerful connection that Indigenous peoples and cultures have with the land and nature highlights the revolutionary potential of Indigenous sovereignty movements. The food sovereignty movement is a part of that as well as the Land Back movement which has the goal of literally and spiritually returning stolen land back to Native peoples. 

“The demand for Land Back is larger than just a call for returned territory,” states an article from the Lakota Peoples’ Law Project. “The movement is also about returning resources, buildings, and smaller swaths of land, with a much larger benefit attached. Land back is about expanding tribal management — an essential element of climate justice work. Indigenous stewardship of land never produced the kind of emissions and toxins we are dealing with today.”

It’s the Land Back movement that is central to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s revolutionary protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s also unfolding in places like Mount Rushmore/The Black Hills and Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai’i (check out this story about examples of this happening around North America).

While my little shifts at Thanksgiving are certainly not going to turn the tide of climate change, nor are they a significant contribution to the climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements, they are a piece of the puzzle. It helps show others who they can rethink the narrative we’ve been taught. It creates space for conversations about Indigenous justice and what that looks like in relation to climate change. And, it at the very least moves toward matching my actions with my own values.