A Different Meaning of Thanksgiving
By Isha Mehmood

            While most families were gathered around a dinner table laughing with relatives over turkey and pumpkin pie last Thursday, I found myself on a weathered brown couch in my apartment, drinking cheap boxed wine with friends and discussing the genocide of Native Americans.

            Yes, I am referring to Thanksgiving, which marks a commercialized celebration of folklore that blatantly ignores the brutal and bloody past of American history.

            We have been socialized as American children to desensitize ourselves from the actions of white ancestry in slavery, Japanese concentration camps and countless other past historical interactions. The history of Native Americans has been no different.

            With glorified stereotypes as mascots and small reservations in already less populated states, it becomes difficult to teach our children that “Indians” are not just a figment of our history that has since passed, like dinosaurs or discos in the 1970s. We take time out of our busy schedules to spend one day a year recognizing the one time we treated Native Americans as civilized people: during an extravagant feast where the Pilgrims and the Native Americans put aside their differences to celebrate a good harvest.

            The fact is Thanksgiving remains a holiday with a shady past. There is no one real event that marked its beginning and no real proof that a specific event occurred. Stories have been passed down and there are recollections of a similar incident such as that described by Edward Winslow in a journal in 1621. However, Thanksgiving as a holiday by that specific name originally began as a religious day where the Puritans went to church to thank God for a specific event, such as a good harvest during a dry season. Other stories circulate as well, attributing Thanksgiving’s beginning to an event in Groton, Connecticut in 1637. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded members of the Pequot tribe during their annual green corn dance and shot and burned alive 700 members of the tribe. The next day, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a day of Thanksgiving to thank God for their victory.

            Whether you believe the latter or the storybook tale where you envision Pilgrims and Native Americans circled around an oblong dinner table passing the peas and corn, you have to acknowledge that America has been less than kind to Native Americans and Thanksgiving should not be a day of festivity. We cannot forget the “Indian Removal Act” that Congress passed in 1830 that led to “The Trail of Tears” where nearly 4000 Cherokee members died. We cannot forget that these were the people who cultivated the land and called it home, yet we claimed to “discover” this land and push them onto reservations.

            We have held Native Americans in contempt for far too long. We took over their homes, we called them by the wrong name, we have stereotyped them as savages that we now praise as good luck charms for our sports teams, and we have since disregarded our mistakes by celebrating one mythological event. Please keep in mind this sad history next year when you are worried about keeping your waistline trim. This may be a day of celebration for you, but it is a day of sorrow and resentment for the native people of this land.