What I Am Actually Thankful For

I am grateful for a lot of things in my life. My family, having a car, having a job, my friends, my Buddhist community, food, water and the list goes on. However, I also understand that for American Indian and First Nation peoples, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning, to remember all of the brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers lost in the genocide that the white European settlers committed against American Indian folks. As someone who is not a member of the First Nations, I now use this day as a time for education and awareness. As a kid, I went along with the typical traditions and cultural brainwashing of Thanksgiving as this harmonious ceremony during which white settlers at Plymouth Rock coexisted with American Indian people.

And then, when I grew up and started reading more books and talking with actual American Indian classmates and people, I realized that perspective on history was incorrect. So, I had to educate myself and un-learn a lot of the white colonial bullshit that my elementary school teachers fed me, and I threw that pile of shit back into all of the shitty textbooks that taught me that Thanksgiving was this beautiful holiday. That shit stank, but the truth sometimes has to piss you off in order to set you free. As I grew older, I started reading more literature by First Nations authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie and Tommy Orange. For an online book club that my college alma mater does, the moderator chose a novel called Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, a Cree Canadian author. The novel describes the traumatic history of residential schools in Canada and the impact and legacy that these schools has had on the Indigenous Canadian adults who survived its horrors as children. I don’t know much about Canadian history, unfortunately, but reading Five Little Indians gave me much needed insight into how fucked up the residential school system was. It also helped me understand that like the history of the United States of America, you cannot fully understand the history of Canada unless you learn about the countless atrocities that Indigenous men, women, children and non-binary peoples faced throughout the nation’s history. In this government-funded residential school system, many Indigenous children were abducted and separated from their families and placed into these residential schools in an attempt to erase Indigenous education and cultural traditions from Canadian history and assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian society. There was a significant lack of resources, the staff abused children and white authorities at the schools punished Indigenous children for speaking their own languages. I watched a video to learn more about the history of these schools and when the survivors were describing to the reporter the abuse they experienced and witnessed, it really fucked me up, but I needed to get my mind fucked up because I needed to know how fucked up the residential school system was. I cannot begin to describe the horrors that the kids experienced at these schools. I will just say that reading that book, Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, will stick with me for a while.

One author I really love is Tommy Orange. He is an author from Oakland, California who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. I really love his writing and recommend his novels There There and Wandering Stars. Movies-wise, I recommend Killers of the Flower Moon and Fancy Dance on Apple TV. Fancy Dance is a movie directed by Native American filmmaker Erica Tremblay, and it is about a young queer Cayuga woman named Jax who investigates the disappearance of her sister, Tawi, while caring for Tawi’s daughter, Roki. I didn’t know much about the history of missing and murdered Native American people before watching this movie, but watching Fancy Dance made me want to learn more about the history of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. Even though I really loved Killers of the Flower Moon and thought Lily Gladstone was fucking incredible in their role as Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone goes by she/her and they/them pronouns), I really loved that in Fancy Dance Gladstone got to play the main character in the movie and also that their character, like Lily Gladstone in real life, is part of the LGBTQ+ community.

Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature. View all posts by The Arts Are Life