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Re: fiyah pon misgiving day
<span style="text-decoration: underline">Thanksgiving is some Native Americans' 'Day of Mourning'</span>
<span style="font-style: italic"> For many Americans, Thanksgiving means turkey with all the fixings, spending time with family, and being grateful for the blessings of the year. But for many Native Americans , the holiday is a bit more complicated.
The introduction of European settlers to the Americas had a mostly tragic outcome for many indigenous communities. They lost land to people who distrusted and disrespected their way of life. They lost millions of people to territorial conflict, starvation and diseases brought from Europe. Their cultures were misunderstood, devalued and deemed inferior. Some think the traditional Thanksgiving narrative – generous Pilgrims, helpful Indians – implies Native Americans should be grateful about the events that led to their suffering.
Mahtowin Munro is co-leader of United American Indians of New England, which organizes a National Day of Mourning each year on Thanksgiving. The event began in 1970, as a way to memorialize indigenous people who died as a result of colonization and to protest continued discrimination and exploitation.
The goal: Offer an unvarnished view of what the archetypal Thanksgiving celebration meant for those who lived in America when the Pilgrims landed.
“We do a National Day of Mourning to talk about this and just to say, ‘You need to stop teaching this to your children, and having this false mythology,’” Munro said. “The idea is that the Pilgrims had this bountiful harvest and decided to share it and they invited the Native Americans and everybody lived happily ever after. The Native Americans definitely didn’t live happily ever after.” </span>
<span style="color: #009900">(but still, some Native people look at it this way also, and with which i happen to agree):</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">For J. Lucy Boyd having a Native American point of view of Thanksgiving is fairly new. She didn't know her grandfather as she was growing up, and learned only six years ago that he was Cherokee. Soon after, she became an official member of the United Cherokee Ani-Yun-Wiya Nation. Boyd's Thanksgiving means sharing with others and enjoying the bounty of the season – <span style="font-weight: bold">something she finds completely compatible with her recently discovered Native American heritage.
“The Native Americans had an end-of-harvest celebration before the Pilgrims came. I don’t see any reason not to celebrate it today,” </span>Boyd said. “I have more reverence for the plants, the animals, the things that sustain us.”
Boyd, a psychiatric nurse and author in Lakesite, Tennessee, will be sitting down to two Thanksgivings this year – one with her children and grandchildren, and another with her mother and grandmother – "one with the descendants, and one with the ancestors."
....
"Thanksgiving is for everybody," Boyd said. "It doesn’t belong to any one group, it belongs to all of us." </span>
<span style="text-decoration: underline">Thanksgiving is some Native Americans' 'Day of Mourning'</span>
<span style="font-style: italic"> For many Americans, Thanksgiving means turkey with all the fixings, spending time with family, and being grateful for the blessings of the year. But for many Native Americans , the holiday is a bit more complicated.
The introduction of European settlers to the Americas had a mostly tragic outcome for many indigenous communities. They lost land to people who distrusted and disrespected their way of life. They lost millions of people to territorial conflict, starvation and diseases brought from Europe. Their cultures were misunderstood, devalued and deemed inferior. Some think the traditional Thanksgiving narrative – generous Pilgrims, helpful Indians – implies Native Americans should be grateful about the events that led to their suffering.
Mahtowin Munro is co-leader of United American Indians of New England, which organizes a National Day of Mourning each year on Thanksgiving. The event began in 1970, as a way to memorialize indigenous people who died as a result of colonization and to protest continued discrimination and exploitation.
The goal: Offer an unvarnished view of what the archetypal Thanksgiving celebration meant for those who lived in America when the Pilgrims landed.
“We do a National Day of Mourning to talk about this and just to say, ‘You need to stop teaching this to your children, and having this false mythology,’” Munro said. “The idea is that the Pilgrims had this bountiful harvest and decided to share it and they invited the Native Americans and everybody lived happily ever after. The Native Americans definitely didn’t live happily ever after.” </span>
<span style="color: #009900">(but still, some Native people look at it this way also, and with which i happen to agree):</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">For J. Lucy Boyd having a Native American point of view of Thanksgiving is fairly new. She didn't know her grandfather as she was growing up, and learned only six years ago that he was Cherokee. Soon after, she became an official member of the United Cherokee Ani-Yun-Wiya Nation. Boyd's Thanksgiving means sharing with others and enjoying the bounty of the season – <span style="font-weight: bold">something she finds completely compatible with her recently discovered Native American heritage.
“The Native Americans had an end-of-harvest celebration before the Pilgrims came. I don’t see any reason not to celebrate it today,” </span>Boyd said. “I have more reverence for the plants, the animals, the things that sustain us.”
Boyd, a psychiatric nurse and author in Lakesite, Tennessee, will be sitting down to two Thanksgivings this year – one with her children and grandchildren, and another with her mother and grandmother – "one with the descendants, and one with the ancestors."
....
"Thanksgiving is for everybody," Boyd said. "It doesn’t belong to any one group, it belongs to all of us." </span>
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