This Thanksgiving, Americans will share voluptuous amounts of food and thanks with their friends and family just as the Pilgrims and Native Americans did in 1621, right?
Sadly, no.
Thanksgiving has been twisted from its harrowing truth to a happily-ever-after lie.
Native Americans have been used, raped, and killed by European groups since their land was discovered.
A nonprofit organization for Native American affairs, The Manataka American Indian Council, states on their website that on Thanksgiving day in 1637, the Pequot tribe celebrated their annual Green Corn Festival similar to how we celebrate Thanksgiving today.
That night, the Native Americans were tricked into being told to go outside by English and Dutch soldiers and were either shot to death or burned alive in their homes.
“The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared ‘A Day Of Thanksgiving’ because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered,” the Council said. The massacre itself was celebrated every year until Abraham Lincoln announced it to be a national holiday, “on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.”
California also has an ugly history with indigenous communities.
In his book, “ An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873,” UCLA professor Benjamin Madley discusses the state-sanctioned genocide of indigenous people in California.
“Official records made it plain that the state and federal governments spent more than $1,700,000 — a huge amount of money at that time — on campaigns against California Indians,” Madley said to UCLA’s official public relations department, the Newsroom.
The city of Azusa’s web page states the city itself once belonged to indigenous people, where the Shoshonean-Indian, or the Gabrielino, lived.
Although very diverse, indigenous culture does not remain in Azusa as it once did.
The Gabrielino tribe’s official website says many people from their tribe were killed due to Spanish conquest and disease and further disregarded by the Eisenhower administration.
Clearly, Thanksgiving is not celebratory for many indigenous people.
Though the meaning of the holiday itself has changed to being thankful for what has happened in the past year, Native Americans continue to suffer.
During the Black Lives Matter movement, CNN reported Native Americans launched the Native Lives Matter movement to raise awareness about police brutality in their communities.
“Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group,” the CNN article says. “For every 1 million Native Americans, an average of 2.9 of them died annually from 1999 to 2015 as a result of a ‘legal intervention.’”
Conditions on reservations are not any better, either.
In his article, “What It Means To Be Native American In Twenty-First Century America,” Penn State’s geography professor George Van Otten says, “ Native American communities continue to be plagued by persistent poverty.”
The U.S. government is to blame for this.
“All development projects on Indian land must be reviewed and authorized by the government, a process that is notoriously slow and burdensome,” says researcher for the Property and Environment Research Center Sean Regan in a Forbes article.
The slow bureaucracy prevents indigenous communities from implementing developments that would improve their living standards.
Worse yet, Regan says the Bureau of Indian affairs, which oversees funds for Native American reservations, was alleged to have mismanaged billions of dollars in Native American assets and has consistently undervalued natural resources on reservations.
Consequently, people avoid investing in Native lands and resources, further worsening economic conditions on reservations.
Never have elected officials taken full responsibility to correct the injustice indigenous communities have faced at the hands of the government.
More needs to be done to correct past wrongs.
This correction should begin with our understanding of history and Thanksgiving in particular.
As a society, we must acknowledge the true history of Thanksgiving and continue to educate ourselves and others about injustice in our country so that there can be positive change.
Support policies that benefit indigenous people, like true ownership of reservation lands or removing memorabilia of colonizers from public settings.
Visiting Native American heritage centers — like Haramoknga American Indian Cultural Center north of Azusa — and supporting their projects is another way to further progress.
The point is not to erase a day on which people can express their gratitude. The point is to redirect gratitude toward those who deserve it, like indigenous people.
For all the suffering Native Americans have faced, they are inspiring for their resilience and their strength.
It is important that people with privilege support that resilience and see to the success of indigenous communities.
