What Even Are We Celebrating
For decades, I have looked forward to this week as a time to be with family and friends and get a bit of rest before the year-end rush and festivities. It’s also a time to reflect on this country’s deeply problematic history of genocide and erasure of Indigenous people.
In that spirit, I want to share with you Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. It’s an important paradigm shift, especially for immigrants who have often bought into this false vision of our adopted country.
Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is a different kind of read, a page-turner set in a future America that feels eerily possible. No spoilers here, but in her afterword, she talks about the through line of child separation in Indigenous, Black and immigrant families.
Check out the podcast, This Land if you need further proof that what’s old is new. Conservatives have their eyes, hands and agenda on Indigenous children. And it’s as bad, if not worse than you think. Rebecca Nagle, the host of This Land, just published this essay in The Atlantic, which breaks down how the Supreme Court is once again (like right now, in the year of the Lord 2022!) going to undermine tribal sovereignty.
So what are we to do about this troubled holiday? Eyes wide open, for one. I have been calling it Gratitude Week as a personal attempt to rebrand. And, as Robin Little Wing Sigo (Suquamish) in her 2021 essay, suggests:
“Thanksgiving as a holiday is fraught with lies, but our indigenous family will use this colonized holiday to continue to decolonize love.”
In solidarity,
Sayu