Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving. The only time some colleges ever get a break during the Fall semester and a time where you gather around the table and stuff your face with delicious food and turkey. It's also a time where you converse with long lost family relatives and their significant others as well as the usual people, like your drunk uncle, your crazy aunt and possibly her disturbed children, your uppity cousin and your forgetful grandmother or father. There's also their two crazy dogs, your other aunt's children who has a tendency to one-up you in every sense of the word and another random guest who you are probably trying to figure out their relation to.

While most people understand this tradition in the sense that it's to celebrate the coming of the pilgrims and the coming together of both Native Americans and the pilgrims, it also has a dangerous connotation. Thanksgiving isn't necessarily a happy time for all, but also a time for whatever reason is celebrated despite the grim history behind it.

You see, to Native Americans it paints a dangerous narrative of a happy time and of a happy exchange of peace, when really the European colonization of settlers in the Americas marked the death of millions of Native Americans. The controversy is still there and it's dangerous to forget that Native Americans did indeed suffer when the first Thanksgiving was held.

Sometimes, I wonder if any of those who do celebrate Thanksgiving realize what it might mean for Native Americans and Indigenous people of the Americas. I wonder if they realize some of the pain and disbelief and the shock of how normalized it has become to celebrate Thanksgiving and even Christopher Columbus Day. In several states already they have gone on to replace Columbus day with Indigenous People's Day in protest or Mourning Day for Thanksgiving.

While we can celebrate with good turkey around the table, I just want to be sure that I don't forget that the holiday and its celebration came at the cost of something.