“What to a slave is the Fourth of July?” inquired Frederick Douglass, and I echo his sentiments. What to America’s Indigenous communities is Thanksgiving?
A day of feasting to commemorate a genocide. The fabrication of history to wipe the stain of slaughter from our collective minds. A day to remember when the White man came to exterminate scores of Indigenous people as though they were insects threatening the harvest.
And indeed, a harvest it was, albeit a bloody one. America is a living testament to what can be built when entire groups of people are denied their humanity.