In Teen Vogue, Dakota-Lakota Sioux writer Ruth Hopkins writes in Celebrating Native American Heritage Month: Dos and Don'ts:
Do boost Native voices.
We’re out here! Check out Native media sites like Indian Country Today, National Native News, APTN News, Censored News and Indianz.com.
Follow Natives on social media. Here are just a few Native voices on Twitter that you should follow: @NativeApprops, @mariahgladstone, @YazzieSays, @travisxthompson, @lilnativeboy, @rebeccanagle, @apihtawikosisan, @Tileiya, @simonmoyasmith, @Terrilltf, @nick_w_estes, @agnauraqtweets, and me, @RuthH_Hopkins. You will find many others through these accounts. . . .
Do learn about the history of the land you’re standing on and practice Indigenous land acknowledgment.
In 2019, it’s as simple as a Google search. Whether you realize it or not, the land you’re on was once tended to and protected by at least one Native American Indian tribe. Find out who they are and make informing others about it a regular occurrence.
We hope the excerpts from the articles (and the video) below catch readers interest and they click through to read the entire pieces. Please share what you like--the pieces themselves, rather than this post. Do boost native voices.
We'll start our feast of native voices--and the land we're standing on with an essay by Hopkins, who grew up in the Enemy Swim District of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate (Dakota) of the Lake Traverse Reservation in Northeastern South Dakota. We live in the Old Agency District, and we've learned a great deal about the SWO from members and our state legislator, who is tribal archivist.
In Giving thanks the indigenous way, Hopkins writes:
As you can see, when we pull away the white-washed veneer of the holiday, it is little more than the ritualised glorification of the extermination of an entire race of people.
But does it have to be?
There are many native communities who use the nationally designated holiday of Thanksgiving to dine with extended family - but they are not doing it to celebrate "Thanks-Taking", as it has been coined by those who know its true history. We are partaking in harvest feasts that indigenous nations have observed in the Americas since at least 10,000 BC.
Even now, feast days are still held throughout the year by southwest tribes. They include traditional dances, cultural activities, ceremony and banquets.
The Ottawas, who live in the northern regions of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, host ghost suppersin November, where they cook a large meal and invite everyone in the community to attend. These dinners are meant to honour loved ones who have passed on. People travel from one supper to the next until they have eaten at each one.
It is also a tradition of my people, the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota/Lakota of the Great Sioux Nation), to fix a plate filled with food that is set aside for spirits when we share a meal.
My people follow ancestral teachings and we have seven core values that we hold high: wowaunsila (compassion), wowauonihan (respect), wowacintanka (patience and tolerance), wowahwala (humility), woohitike (bravery), woksape (wisdom), and wacante oganake (generosity).
Generosity and gratitude are so revered that the most powerful among us are not those who hoard wealth. Rather, they are those who give the most to others, especially to those who need it most. Materialism is frowned upon, and to be called stingy or greedy is considered a grave insult. We aim to give freely to our brethren without counting the cost.
Generosity and gratitude are espoused in our daily lives and important occasions are marked with a "giveaway", where families give all manner of items to community members to honour kin for various reasons. Useful household goods, home decor, starquilts, blankets, art, horses, clothing, furniture and anything else you can think of may be given away at these occasions and there is often a feast of thanks associated with it. . . .
. . .This is what Thanksgiving could be, but in order for that to happen, we must recognise the truth of the holiday's revolting colonial origins. It may sound cliche, but when we fail to learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. . . .
At Time magazine, Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe member Sean Sherman, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, wrote in 2018's The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday:
. . .Many of my indigenous brothers and sisters refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving, protesting the whitewashing of the horrors our ancestors went through, and I don’t blame them. But I have not abandoned the holiday. I have just changed how I practice it.
The thing is, we do not need the poisonous “pilgrims and Indians” narrative. We do not need that illusion of past unity to actually unite people today. Instead, we can focus simply on values that apply to everybody: togetherness, generosity and gratitude. And we can make the day about what everybody wants to talk and think about anyway: the food.
People may not realize it, but what every person in this country shares, and the very history of this nation, has been in front of us the whole time. Most of our Thanksgiving recipes are made with indigenous foods: turkey, corn, beans, pumpkins, maple, wild rice and the like. We should embrace this.
For years, especially as the head of a company that focuses on indigenous foods, I have explored Native foods. It has given me—and can give all of us—a deeper understanding of the land we stand on. It’s exciting to reconnect with the nature around us. We Americans spend hours outdoors collecting foods like chanterelles, morels, ramps, wild ginger, chokecherries, wild plums, crab apples, cactus fruit, paw paws, manzanita berries, cattails, maple, wild rice (not the black stuff from California, which is a modified and completely different version of the true wild rice growing around the Great Lakes region), cedar, rose-hips, hickory, acorns and walnuts. We can work with Native growers producing heirloom beans, squash and pumpkins, and Native corn varieties, all coming in many shapes, sizes and colors. We can have our feasts include dishes like cedar-braised rabbit, sunchokes with sumac, pine-stewed venison, smoked turkey with chestnuts, true wild rice with foraged mushrooms, native squash with maple, smoked salmon and wild teas.
No matter where you are in North America, you are on indigenous land. And so on this holiday, and any day really, I urge people to explore a deeper connection to what are called “American” foods by understanding true Native-American histories, and begin using what grows naturally around us, and to support Native-American growers. There is no need to make Thanksgiving about a false past. It is so much better when it celebrates the beauty of the present. . . .
We met Sherman at a meal his company prepared for the Yellow Medicine Community of Dakota near Granite Falls, Minnesota and frequently draw on his Sioux Chef cookbook to prepare the indigenous ingredients our romantic partner, a member of the SWO, grows or receives as a tribal elder.
We recommend the cookbook, or readers can get started at the New York Times' Sean Sherman’s 10 Essential Native American Recipes.
Another voice about Thanksgiving? In Indian Country Today, a press release from the United American Indians of New England, 50th National Day of Mourning to be observed in Plymouth, MA:
United American Indians of New England (UAINE) has called for the 50th National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Massachusetts on Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 12 o'clock noon. Participants will gather by the statue of Massasoit on Cole's Hill above the Plymouth waterfront.
Since 1970, several hundred Native people and their non-Native supporters have gathered annually in Plymouth on US Thanksgiving Day. According to United American Indians of New England co-leader Moonanum James, “We Native people have no reason to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. We want to educate people so that they understand the stories we all learned in school about the first thanksgiving are nothing but lies. Wampanoag and other Indigenous people have certainly not lived happily ever after since the arrival of the Pilgrims. To us, Thanksgiving is a Day of Mourning, because we remember the millions of our ancestors who were murdered by uninvited European colonists such as the Pilgrims. Today, we and many Indigenous people around the country say “No Thanks, No Giving."
James explained that, while there will be recognition of the history of National Day of Mourning upon this 50th year, much of the day will be devoted to speaking about contemporary issues.
Co-leader Mahtowin Munro spoke about some of those current issues. “Participants in National Day of Mourning this year will speak about many things. We will mourn and honor the thousands of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls & Two-Spirits (#MMIWG2S). We will express our solidarity with the Indigenous people of Bolivia who are suffering as a result of the US-backed coup there. A common thread will be the need to protect the sacred water of the Earth, without which there is no life. We need to stop the Keystone XL and other pipelines, fracking, and mining. Speakers who have traveled all the way from Labrador and Manitoba will speak about the impact of hydro megadams on their communities. We also hope to have a statement from the protectors of sacred Mauna Kea in Hawaii. From Labrador to Bolivia, from Boston to the Amazon, Indigenous peoples are defending their sovereignty and insisting that nothing should happen on their lands without their freely given consent. Indigenous solidarity is international.”
She continued, “Once again, the inhuman actions of the US government will compel us to express our solidarity with refugees who are being denied entry, especially our Indigenous relatives from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries who are fleeing largely because of US policies that have destroyed their countries, and who are having their children stolen from them by ICE and other US agencies. Indigenous people here know too well for generations what it means to have our families separated as a result of government policies such as residential schools and removal of Native children to white homes, and we will continue to raise our voices in protest of what ICE is doing.”
Also in Indian Country Today, Jacqueline Keeler, a Diné/Ihanktonwan Dakota writer, reports in 'Welcome Home Mia Rae Ann' ...'Thank you and wopida':
Sadly, these young women and their children had been relocated only three weeks earlier when their home in White Swan tribal housing had been condemned after being flooded for seven months. In March, a bomb cyclone hit the area turning basements into swimming pools and ripping off roofs.
As reported in Indian Country Today, the reservation housing community saw little assistance, when in mid-September, 11 inches of rain fell in 24 hours and washed out U.S. Hwy 18 the only paved road to their homes. The road had re-opened only two weeks earlier, after being raised four feet, but that was not enough. Some residents had not even had a chance to drive on it and joking named it the Gov. Noem Memorial Highway. The $1 million improvement was the only visible assistance the South Dakota governor provided the community. It was still underwater as of this week. However, a portion beyond the barricades that connects to a road to the housing community was driveable. . . .
Despite all this, the community has found support with each other, regularly eating meals together in the community center. For Thanksgiving, they are planning a meal with all the trimmings. A retired doctor, who delivered many tribal members throughout his career, Dr. Howard Gilmore and his wife Gene have donated turkeys and ham for the feast.
"On Thanksgiving," Shelly Sansouci, vice chair of the White Swan Community said, "I'm expecting 250 people."
They are giving thanks, saying Wopida, for survival for still being there. . . .
A a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, writer Nick Estes retweeted this item:
Thanksgiving counter-programming: listen to a recent lecture at the NL by @nick_w_estes on settler colonialism & Native resistance against it. https://t.co/lZ2Dqv61GM
— Newberry Library (@NewberryLibrary) November 28, 2019
Finally, a 2012 video of current Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation in Oklahoma, reading Perhaps the World Ends Here:
As she says, "Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite."
May all of our readers find many people, creatures and texts to be thankful for this day, however it or the world ends.
Photo: Various ingredients foraged from prairie land around Coteau des Prairies Lodge near Havana, N.D., July 19, 2016. Dan Koeck—The New York Times/Redux via Time. The Lodge is on the Lake Traverse Reservation.
Giving thanks:
Ruth Hopkins recommends in Celebrating Native American Heritage Month: Dos and Don'ts
Support Native organizations like NDN Collective, Indigenous Environmental Network, Honor the Earth, Four Directions Vote, and Illuminative.
If you appreciate our posts and original analysis, you can mail contributions (payable to Sally Jo Sorensen, 600 Maple Street, Summit SD 57266) or use the paypal button in the upper right hand corner of this post. Those wishing to make a small ongoing monthly contribution should click on the paypal subscription button.
Or you can contribute via this link to paypal; use email [email protected] as recipient.
Comments