Thanksgiving Rant from a White Woman

The night of the inauguration my theater group threw an entertaining and raucous "Bawl". We invited speakers from the community, preformed skits and generally tried to console each other. One speaker was a Native American woman and her words have stuck with me all of these months.

In part she said....

"I realized the depth of fear most Americans (are feeling) is new to you but it is not new to us. For us this is just one more in a long line of Presidents who we know will act contrary to our values, destroy our sacred earth for greed, deny our basic freedom and threaten the lives and well being of our families... You my friends and neighbors, are the new Indians"

More recently, my 6 year old grandson has been learning the happy and almost entirely false story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. The real story of the early Thanksgiving feasts (there were many) involve mass murder, genocide and torture of the Native peoples. As a result Thanksgiving itself is a day of mourning for Native citizens.

On some level I think we deserve what is happening. As a nation our history is rife with blood, torture, enslavement, exploitation, you name it we've done it. But (and this is key) we still fail to face it, own it, and on some level atone for it.

I had a neighbor who was raised in Germany. I asked her if the holocaust was taught to school children. She said it was taught over and over again. Basically drilled into their heads the horror of what happened. There are not Nazi statues in Germany and the Nazi flag is banned. I got the impression that she, as a German, faced and owned what happened and Germany had grown and moved on as a result (as a whole... extremest factions do exist).

America, not so much. And I believe we as white people are experiencing to a much lesser degree the indifference to our well being, to our moral values that we as a nation have perpetuated on the Natives, the Immigrants, the African Americans... through out our history and continuing to the present day.

We, those of us who are white, have never acknowledged our collective sins and now our sins are being inflicted on us. As white Americans, it's our turn. The rot has progressed to include us. This was inevitable. As the speaker said: "You my friends and neighbors, are the new Indians"

Happy Fucking Thanksgiving.