As a Lakota Native, this year I want you to give thanks for the truth

Believe me, I really wish this historical reality-check were more palatable, but the truth is as hard to choke down as that overcooked white meat

Before you let your child dress up in an imitation headdress this weekend, take a look at the Native people living alongside you today and think about what they are advocating for (Getty Images)

Ah, yes. It’s that time of year again when the leaves have fallen, daylight savings is giving us all seasonal affective disorder, and American families and friends gather together (on the last Thursday of November for some reason) to do what we call “giving thanks.”

In most cases, the Thanksgiving experience looks a lot like spending hours — sometimes days — toiling over a stove to make specific ceremonial foods, all in varying shades of brown. Participants then sit down to feast on said food and after that, anyone with an able body is expected to head outside and toss around the ol’ pigskin together. It’s an elaborate display of “thanks” that Americans have cultivated, and, like so many other American holidays, Thanksgiving is expensive, gluttonous and historically questionable.

I am a Lakota Native educator and comedian who has existed in both Intertribal Native and non-Native communities throughout my life. So while I’m aware that white American people are normally very averse to having their gravy-filled bubble of holiday cheer pierced by the sharp point of truth, I’m not afraid to do the poking.

This Thanksgiving, with political divisiveness already corrupting dinner tables nationwide, I invite you, non-Natives, to join me in the slow but necessary extermination of popular colonial narratives about Indigenous peoples. While there is something truly meaningful about a heartfelt thanks for the blessings of this land, I believe there’s also room to acknowledge the cost of these blessings. Let us gather, as we do when the leaves fall, and give thanks for that which I believe all Americans are deprived of these days: the truth.

Let’s start with the truth behind what many call “The First Thanksgiving.” The Mashpee Wampanoag is the tribal nation your children’s kindergarten teachers are ignorant of when they dress their students up for that annual Thanksgiving pageant. When you’re snapping pictures of your kid wearing either a paper pilgrim’s hat or a feather-adorned headband, please think about the Mashpee Wampanoag and regard them as a people who exist today, despite generations of land theft and settler violence. They’re currently fighting for autonomy over their own land — something that President Trump’s Department of Interior is threatening to take away.

When tribal land is held in trust by the federal government, that tribal nation has the ability to make determinations about the use and management of their trust land as well as the resources it might provide to its people, with the support of the government. Many tribes within these manmade US borders have land in trust and I’ll assure you that trust statuses and treaties for most — if not all — tribes have historically been violated by the very government that upholds them. This still happens, even after the genocide of millions of Indigenous people at the hands of settlers who somehow, after sharing a wonderful meal with them, were willing to take Natives’ lives in order to occupy their land. How’s that for trust? One thing we can trust in this Thursday is that the Wampanoag Nation and other tribes of New England will be celebrating their 50th annual Day of Mourning. Chew on that.

Just like Americans enjoy peddling this Pilgrim and Indian corn-and-handshake narrative in our schools, educators love to teach the settler-colonial project as a partnership between the civilized and the savage. Non-Natives recall the Indians as noble rustics of the ancient American past who became sophisticated after years of voluntary assimilation into white culture.

Pure horses**t.

In my experience as both an educator and a person who (like you) went to school, the erasure of contemporary Natives and the whitewashing of our nation’s violent colonial history is quite possibly the most harmful deed that a school could enact on its students — besides perhaps refusing to provide free and healthy lunch options. Before the tofurkey is carved this year, maybe folks could take turns reading passages from Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Better yet, purchase the student edition, bring it to your child’s teacher in October and kindly request that they take a different angle on history this year. Your child can handle critical thinking and deserves to see history from many lenses.

Mmmm, dessert. What would Thanksgiving be without a delicious pumpkin pie? Well, it might mirror what many Native families experience year-round because Native folks have been separated — often geographically, but most certainly culturally — from our Indigenous food sources for generations. According to the organization Partnership with Native Americans, one in four Native people experiences food insecurity and Native people are 400 per cent more likely to report not having enough to eat.

The imposition of food scarcity in Native communities is a historically vicious form of colonial violence that has intersections in intergenerational poverty, unhealthy government commodities and forced cultural assimilation. The work going into the Native food revitalization movement right now is truly groundbreaking. I highly recommend non-Natives support this growing movement without appropriating it — as we know too well that when whiteness sees something it wants, it never bothers to ask before taking.

Believe me, I really wish this historical reality-check were more palatable, but the truth is as hard to choke down as that overcooked white meat. If you’re interested in participating in the revitalization of the truth behind America’s history, shift your perspective, ingest media and information from Native sources and most importantly, give back.

If you’re eating a meal in North America right now, you’re on Indigenous land. Think about that for a second. Most of us are on someone else’s land right now. This holiday, I request that you ask yourself: Am I a respectful visitor?

Jana Schmieding is a Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux writer, comedian and educator living in Tongva territory a.k.a Los Angeles