#decolonizethanksgiving

[filipeanut]

So tinapay means bread these days, but apparently upon Magellan’s arrival, it meant some sort of rice cake. We don't know what the original tinapay was exactly, but food historians like Felice Prudente Sta. Maria are working on it. In the meantime, I blogged about other things I learned from her book "Pigafetta’s Philippine Picnic", in case you like to read about Filipino food, while you eat it. https://filipeanut.art/pigafettas-philippine-picnic-by-felice-prudente-sta-maria/

[willymac4]

#DecolonizeThanksgiving https://www.instagram.com/p/CWpa4YnLnfk/?utm_medium=tumblr

[francescamaxime]

Repost from @nativewomenlead • You don’t want to miss this event! Celebrating Native culture and Decolonizing Thanksgiving with an all-Native lineup, including: Joy Harjo, U.S. poet laureate David Treuer, Author of Heartbeat At Wounded Knee Tommy Orange, Author of There, There #Thanksgiving #nativeamericanheritagemonth #decolonizethanksgiving #nativewomenlead #NWL https://www.instagram.com/p/CH3Jg8TgsrK/?igshid=eqdcaara6gaf

[diasporaenresistencia]

Copy/paste! https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/8-ways-decolonize-and-honor-native-peoples-thanksgiving #Decolonizethisplace #Powertothepeople #decolonizethanksgiving #wearediáspora #diásporaenresistencia https://www.instagram.com/p/B5dkUYyhxhC/?igshid=1cscnfr08aaam

[pizzakaiju]

This holiday has bullshit roots, but if you think I’m skipping out on my favorite foods in the world, you’re out of your mind. I’m doing to thanksgiving what Christians did to Yule. #decolonizethanksgiving

[illmakeitmyself]

#ontheblog: rethinking Thanksgiving and centering Native American stories, supporting queer youth around the holidays. And soft pumpkin cookies. . . . #thanksgiving #softpumpkincookies #decolonizethanksgiving #history #cookies #dessert #food #autumn

[blackfeministwriter]

#DecolonizeThanksgiving (at Fort Belvoir, Virginia)

[christopherjdowdy]

My grandmother Jo and I are next to each other in her sitting room, in my parents’ house. Mom has put the translucent mask for the breathing treatment over her face. "This scared the boys so bad!" Jo laughs through the mask's little echo, reminding herself of how my cousin's twin boys had run from her when they saw her breathing deep draughts of albuterol, the fans whirring.

She faces east out the window. It is afternoon, Thanksgiving, and the light is still warm. Most days, in between loads of laundry, she sits here and looks at pictures, reads her Bible, dozes. She plans and prays, worries about us. I have followed, or maybe have half-led her in here from the kitchen where she was folding and re-folding towels, moving dishes from stack to stack.

We sit. Jo has been staying streets down with my aunt and uncle because she has given up her room here for L., who is very pregnant; she has been playing with our son, another one of her greats, who is very much four years old. "You are ninety and you gave up your bed. That's enough heavy lifting," I say. "Just sit with me."

Down the hall pots clank while Mom and L. negotiate recipe substitutions and counter space. "It has been...let's see. It is sixty-nine years today that I was married," Jo interjects into the quiet.

"Was it?" I start. "I should have known that." I am still again for a minute. "Where was it that you were married?"

And we are off. I know the stories but it is good to hear them again, to retrace the steps she and my grandfather took--Ft. Smith, Indianapolis, Detroit. Detroit. We retrace her steps and the steps of her Arkansas expatriate sisters and all of their families. The Dust Bowl and the War; shop floors and switchboards; dances, bars; the love of the churches she and my grandfather took a long time to find. On my phone we map Ford Street, Automobile, Federal, VanDyke--in my hand a god’s view of the places she raised her girls, where they walked to church and school, and though it goes unmentioned the parking lot where my grandfather pulled over quietly to die of a heart attack while on an errand alone. “I love you more than anything in the world,” he had said to Jo on leaving the house, as he always did, but this time did not return. My mom was only sixteen. When each of us grandsons got close to twenty Jo would sigh and smile.

“How did he get to Ft. Smith from Bunch?” I ask my mom later that night, of her father. “Interstate 40,” she says, and I laugh.

Bunch is a little farther from Ft. Smith than from Tahlequah, but Bunch was Indian Country by virtue of my grandfather’s family being there. As I understand it, it was a ranching life, a country life; his was a mixed-tribe family, Cherokee and Ojibwa. We’re on the Dawes Rolls I was raised to despise. He made a journey from that life to crisply-suited manager on the factory floor of Detroit at the height of its glory. Dale Carnegie classes; dictation correspondence courses. “God, your family, and education are the three things that matter in this life,” he told his girls, “and in that order.” He did not go to college, but his girls did, and one raised me, and here I am with a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, working at a college, a second kid on the way.

A few years ago I met with a local artist in Dallas, a woman who has been much braver than I have ever even had occasion to be in telling the truth with her trade. She and I talked over a project I was hatching and her insight was invaluable and toward the end she asked what I “was” and I knew what she meant and I cried about it, after she left, after we talked about my grandfather. The big bridge of his nose, his wide cheeks, his chestnut skin: these things I see in his old photos as I see in my reflection of the windows of my house when it is night and I wonder. At what he traded for this life, what his family had already traded, at the path that took him so far from the land. And what it means for me to reckon with it.

The threat of foolish, venal appropriation is real around Native identity—personal journeys of discovery that have white folks showing up empty handed at Standing Rock; an academic landscape that one feels is almost certainly rife with little Dolezals. “I am acutely aware that my survival does not depend on the political fortunes of the Cherokee Nation,” I said to another friend recently, a poet and teacher whose indigeneity arises out of Central America, “so I am usually reluctant to say too much about this in public.”

“Except for…it does depend on that. The survival of all of us depends on that,” she corrected me.

And of course it does.

While Jo and I talk about the lattice work of street and remembered things we are interrupted by S., climbing and crashing into me, resting his feet on the soft skin on her arm and spinning down off of her couch. “Be careful of Jo Jo” I implore him, but it is hard to understand how fragile we can grow when you are built of rock and sinew like a little child is. That we need to be gentle with her now is hard for me to imagine too, because I know all about the iron core the years revealed in her as she made her way through a profession and an independent life until she retired and left Detroit to live with us down south when I was thirteen. I know all she did even then, all she carried to make our good lives possible. But it is true: we are fragile stuff, in the end, and all along.

When I think about decolonizing Thanksgiving I think about my own body and its history. Here on this couch between this old and young life I consider now the tear gas and fires; I consider How Hard We Make It. They are breaking up the encampment today; fire hoses and bright lights against the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. These people asking just for something threatening not to be built on their land, just asking for one less intrusion into their sovereignty justified by trade, by commerce, by what the country needs, by what it must extract. And I am thinking about my grandfather’s journey, about the lengths he found himself constrained to go to build a life, about what it took put us all on a trajectory such that we would be a place of peace for my grandmother all these years later, where she could sit still on the couch with her restless hands, with me. It seems to me that we have already extracted much treasure from this land. So very much.