Thanksgiving, A Rant

Today is Canadian Thanksgiving, also Columbus Day, also Indigenous Peoples day. That’s a lot. And Why? 

Well white folks need a way to valorize themselves. We need to be the hero.

Columbus wasn’t a looting slaving colonial imperialist, he was a on explorer! He discovered America. Obvious question everyone has heard before: how do you discover an already inhabited continent? Well they weren’t white, so it didn’t count.  

Thanksgiving? Oh yes, let’s sell a propaganda lie about European and Indigenuous cooperation, yes please. Note the sarcasm, thank you. The United States broke over two hundred treaties with various tribes. The waged total war on the tribes, paid bounties for scalps, and deliberately infected them with smallpox. Canada systematically destroyed the cultures of first nations by doing things like banning potlatch ceremonies and other core cultural practices to the first nations, while kidnapping children into the residential school system. 

So now it’s indigenous peoples day. And that makes it better. Now that we’ve replaced them on their own land, we’ve half heartedly dedicated a day to pretending we care. But we aren’t going to do anything to help them, at least not help them in anyway that respects their culture, their claim to the land, their history, or their wishes. And we certainly don’t want to mention the more than two hundred years of colonial conquest, systematic abuse, and institutional gaslighting. 

And just because we’ve managed to hide the violence that built and runs our story, doesn’t mean that the violence is actually gone. Now here’s the hard truth. We can’t do indigenous people justice as long as we are still enacting the story that conquered them. 

So perhaps we need a new story?