Thoughts on Thanksgiving
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I finally got to visit my cooperating teachers and students I've been working with in the Navajo Nation. While I was there, I got to have a long discussion with one of the teachers there, and she told me the story of how she was taken by the US government and shipped off to a boarding school for her entire childhood, just like everyone else her age. She got to visit home just a few times a yer, but otherwise was completely removed from her Navajo community.
It was horrifying to hear her personal accounts of how her entire community's culture was systematically destroyed by taking away their children for decades -- forcing them to speak English and practice American cultural norms, while denying them the ability to learn their own family's language, traditions, and practices. She told me of families she personally knew that never got to have their children back. They were simply told that their kids “ran off”. No body to recover and mourn over, no real answers about what ever happened. No consequences or justice.
She lost the ability to speak to her grandparents, who only spoke Navajo. She missed out on years of time with her parents and the knowledge and wisdom they would have passed on to her. Her community lost any ability to support itself independently, because their original ways of living fell apart under their forced Americanization and a broken system of government thrust upon them by the US. My country purposefully and systematically worked toward wiping out their identity and assimilating them.
The school she teaches at now, the one I’ve been collaborating with since March, is actively working to undo this intergenerational harm and trauma. This school uplifts and celebrates its students’ heritage. The school serves the entire local community from pre-natal maternity support through adult education classes. Families are intimately involved in every aspect of their child’s schooling. They teach Navajo language and culture in every single grade level. Posters and signage around the school are in Navajo, and even the building itself is based on Navajo architectural principles. The week I was there was their “spirit” week, like most schools celebrate around homecoming. But instead of having “wear your pajamas to school” day and “wear your favorite sports jersey” day, they had days for wearing their hair and clothes in the traditional Navajo styles, celebrating their clans and family traditions.
It was such an honor to be there to witness this constant celebration and empowerment of their community. I learned so much from my students, and I came back home with a heart and a head so dang full of love, gratitude, and appreciation. These kids are wicked brilliant, full of kindness and curiosity and pride in who they are. They are being given the opportunity to fill in the blanks and repair the gaps that were viciously ripped into their community, and they are stepping up to this calling like the true superheroes that they are. I’m in awe of these kiddos, and working with them gives me genuine hope for a better future.
The origins of our “Thanksgiving” holiday in America are soaked in blood and tragedy, and it’s nothing to be celebrated. What my white, colonizing ancestors did to the indigenous peoples of this land is an evil on a magnitude so great that I don’t think any one brain can even fully process it. So what do we do in the face of this immense transgression? Some folks would say it’s not our responsibility, because it’s something our ancestors did — not us personally. In my experience, they tend to be the exact same folks who wrap themselves in the American flag and shout to the hilltops about the pride they have in their noble heritage.
Heritage has a whole lot of baggage attached to it, and if you want to claim ownership of what your ancestors did, then it seems to logically follow that we must equally accept the noble with the horrible. You don’t get to pick and choose the legacy you inherit. We (and the systems in which we operate as a society) are the products of our ancestors’ actions, and it’s our responsibility to acknowledge it, examine it, and decide what we celebrate and what we work to correct. It takes maturity to soberly accept this responsibility.
It is my deepest hope that the work I’m doing in my life right now, no matter how small it may seem in the grand scheme of things, will push the scales of justice in the correct direction. I can’t undo the horror of the past that stains my legacy as the descendant of colonizers, slave owners, and abusers of both humans and natural resources. But I can do whatever I can, by any means that I have, to make here and now a better place, and to work to resist the systems of oppression and consequences of intergenerational trauma that still surround us today.
I look at the kids I’m working with now, and I imagine what life will be like for them when they’re adults, raising their own children. It gives me hope.