#if you celebrate thanksgiving please learn about america's violent history | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lunulater · 1 year

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Today is a National Day of Mourning. Please make sure to center Indigenous voices first and foremost, today and always. Check out the shared link along with @mahtowin1 on both IG and Twitter as one resource for more info & ways to show support to our Indigenous family. My personal ruminations of today are below:

Please take this to heart; mourning is not at odds with celebration of life, of family, of gratitude. Grief and gratitude are not incompatible. Grief and gratitude are hand in hand in the practice of mourning, which is also a practice of healing. It is in times of mourning that we reflect most on our lives, our loved ones, and all that we might be grateful for. Conscious mourning is an invitation to honor those things. To celebrate.

So, if you must celebrate Thanksgiving today, please, take the time to educate yourselves and your families on what it is our Indigenous family is mourning. Take this time so that you may reflect collectively on the insurmountable losses and grief faced by the original Indigenous peoples of these lands. Loss of sacred lands, homes and havens, loss of human life, communities, cultures, languages. The grief soaked Trail of Tears. The grief of babies ripped from the loving arms of their families, to be stripped of their rights to heritage, to community. Name the genocide for what it is. Take time to sit with the violence of our shared colonial histories, here on these lands of the "United States of America" as well as abroad. Take the time to reflect on the ways this violent heritage persists even today.

May your time today with family (and food) be as a wake grounded in the collective mourning of Indigenous people. May you celebrate all you have to be grateful for anchored in that mourning. May you reflect on all the ways things could have—should have—been different and how we may challenge ourselves and our communities towards better. May you take the time to sit with the loved ones you still have the privilege of today, and reflect in earnest on the intergenerational traumas that not one of us can escape. Take the time to learn from our shared histories, from one another, take the time to heal, and to grow. Take the time to celebrate where each of us has come from, and where we might go. Take the time to reflect and foster accountability so that we might all leave this plane of existence better off than we have entered it. A feat that cannot be achieved without all of the above. Take the time to ground one another in humility and compassion, to do the work, and to share the burden in doing so. That is what family, what community, is for. To share the load of growth towards building better selves, towards building a better future for all.

My mother took us to PowWows and demonstrations of Indigenous practice, of creative joy. She got us books about Indigenous people and histories. For most of my childhood she collected Indigenous arts and jewelry. There were admittedly ways in which this erred into appropriation and exotification of Indigenous culture and people, I won't defend that, but she tried. She tried when there was little accessible public discourse to guide us in the paths of least harm. On that note, be sure that you are centering Indigenous voices today and always. Let those be the voices that guide you in truth and healing, and towards work centered in harm reduction.

My mother continues to try. It is for those types of efforts that I continue to try with my family, despite harms done which cannot be undone. It is for the witnessing of those efforts that I do not just give up on the world. We cannot undo all harms done, but we can try. We must try.

#national day of mourning #thanksgiving #is a colonialist sham #indigenovember #indigenous #indigenous lives matter #today and always #spilled ink #prose #essay #UAINE #protest #plymouth rock #United American Indians of New England #american indians #Indians #indigenous history #personal #trauma #intergenerational trauma #childhood trauma #the truth will set you free

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