Today is a national holiday dedicated to remembering a poorly documented account of maybe a feast at Plymouth in the 1600s. The concept of “Thanksgiving” as a time where settlers celebrated co-habitating with Native Americans is in textbooks, advertisements, and films all over the country. We have a day off, sometimes a couple or even a week to spend time with family, watch a parade, perhaps prepare for a shopping spree, and reflect on our gratitudes and bountiful harvest- cool! Sadly, this is probably the only day of the year kids recognize people living in America before settlers as a thing.

For me, feeling gratitude for all that I have, all that I feast, and all who I relate to comes generally all the time, but specifically at a pain during this time of year. To list gratitudes and petition for “30 Days of Thanks” during the month of November feels like a starry eyed kid with a laundry list of gifts granted (including things like novocaine and GPS??) in a room with the biggest elephant in it- an orphan ghost long forgotten, and a lineage swept under a beautiful flea market rug.

Personally, Thanksgiving is a time not only to celebrate the harvest (like it is in the rest of the world) but also to make a resounding impression upon Americans that, first and foremost, we must remember the ancestors of this land. We must remember “giving thanks” runs a thread of history to the moment where settlers unjustly grabbed land, massacred, and manipulated Native peoples. We stuff ourselves with food, sport, spirit, Macy’s day parades (capitalism), and the collective coma induced along with the false “truths” of this day, aid us in sweeping the story of our land so far under the rug the dust will settle and get vacuumed up with the morning after.

Getting political can be touchy when around family, so if you have the opportunity to express your thanks at a dinner table or gathering, I encourage you to extend one to the ancestors and keepers of America’s sacred land pre-Colonization. In an ideal world, we’d use this day to teach youth about power dynamics, human rights, mediation, and learning from our mistakes.

I remember a young Christina Ricci in “Addams Family Values” with quite possibly the most honest/hilarious popular historical commentary on the “First Thanksgiving.”

If you’re in the bay, I’ll be at the Shellmound protest. The destruction of one of the largest funerary structures and offering site of the Ohlone people…for a mall.