It happens every year, usually the week before Thanksgiving:  I'm asked what my plans are for the holiday, and it's usually in that probing kind of way to really frame another question: "Do you celebrate Thanksgiving?"  It's a fair ask.

In throes of my recent travels lately, I recall talking on the phone in an airport jetway about the holiday weekend. The woman in front of me seemingly overhead the words "I don't observe" because she literally looked up from her phone to study me. 

But it wasn't always that way.  Growing up with my elders on Laguna Pueblo, I remember fine feasts prepared at either the family home in the old kitchen, and in later years, at my Grandma Sugarplum's cozy HUD home.  We ate the typical menu items: turkey with stuffing, yams with marshmallows, deviled eggs, Jello molds, pumpkin pie - you get the idea.  But we also had our own traditional foods: posole, oven bread, baked squash, my Auntie Daisy's unmatched red chili tamales. 

These food memories are fond memories.  

When my elders passed, a great deal of these feasting traditions went with them.  The family met less and less, but also, the reality of this day—at least for me, had started to sink in.  By high-school, I knew that Thanksgiving was awash.  But not to the extent that I do, today.  Thanks, Internet.

Like every American educated in our public schools, there isn't anyone over the age of 10 who hasn't been taught the same story about how Indians saved the Pilgrims from famine, and in return, honored their Native neighbors with a bountiful meal.  Wrong.

In other words, the Wampanoag's were uninvited to the first storied Thanksgiving.  And they were invisibilized in the lead up to the first official Thanksgiving Day holiday, including when George Washington made slight moves for a day of thanks after the Revolutionary War.  

I've been spending time up in the North Arctic where no one goes hungry up here, and where no one doesn't say thank you.  It's just not our way, whether you're Iñupiat or Pueblo, Lakota or Wampanoag—it's not in our DNA to deny people nourishment.  It's not in our mannerisms to not show gratitude, especially for the foods gathered from the land. 

Obviously, I'm speaking from a place of kinship society, like the small villages here in the North Arctic which are really more like one big family—often portrayed as too poor to help themselves, but really are incredibly wealthy when considering their rich subsistence economies.

Last night, I feasted on maktak (whale blubber) and tuttu stew (caribou) with a dollop of seal oil.  I'm incredibly grateful for the families that welcome me to their tables from night to night, and for the Indigenous lands which feed me.  No matter how you honor this upcoming holiday, please keep these points in mind.  That is all. 

On a side note: sorry to have missed you all last week. I was hoping to get my boarding school piece out that I promoted in an earlier newsletter, and have since come up with a back-up plan for publication. See my update in the Feedback section.  

So glad you're here 🌾

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