Thanksgiving. While you might be hearing less about Palestine, the last 40 days has been a non-stop military bombardment of the Palestinians living in Gaza. There’s been a large increase in settler attacks and illegal arrests of Palestinians living in the West Bank. I will never understand their struggle and the ways they’ve been cruelly policed, detained, exterminated, and removed from their homelands. 

I bring up Thanksgiving as this American holiday encourages me to reflect on the treatment of all indigenous people including Palestinians and Native Americans. Thanksgiving was taught to me as a time to demonstrate gratitude, but I never understood the emphasis on these platitudes while the real significance of the holiday seemed to be ignored. It’s 2023, and I still see people referring to Native Americans as “Indians” - and continuing to appropriate their culture with zero care for their welfare. In the same way, many Muslims, Arabs, and other “Brown” people are grouped together, I’ve seen that we refer to Native Americans as one. There were so many different indigenous populations with varying cultures, languages, and religions that lived throughout the Americas before European colonizers murdered them, and forced the remaining natives to assimilate to the European culture, religion, and language.  

Shamefully, I never thought enough about the treatment of indigenous Americans nor have I really ever had native friends. I think about this increasingly as I learn about the destructive colonization and apartheid policies that have been implemented. While civil rights efforts led to the integration of Black and White children in the 1950s, indigenous children were still not included until much later depending on the state. Many indigenous children were forced to attend assimilation boarding schools, denying them any connection to their native culture - there were countless cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse - and in some cases, there were many unexplained murders of these children. For many of these murders, its no real mystery what happened - but there was often little documentation to prove what happened.

The more I think about it, eating and drinking food that was produced on stolen lands all while living on stolen lands - it seems ludicrous to say that is a day of gratitude when we can’t even acknowledge our own history and the ways in which America came to be. On Thanksgiving, I encourage you to think about your privilege, reaping the benefits of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous Americans. Without this cruel history, we’d be nothing, nonexistent today. I do not see the genocide of indigenous Americans as my fault similar to the way I don’t see the Palestinian genocide as my fault. Rather, I fault myself and others for all the times we are quiet, when we know the truth and have such quick and easy access to the truth. I can continue to learn more about the indigenous people that came before me, lived here before me, and acknowledge the cruel and dark history of their genocide and ethnic cleansing through a strategic and inhumane apartheid state that America created to target non-white people. The least we can do to promote a just, equitable, and fair world is avoid complicit silence. That is the bare minimum.