Reflections of Thanksgiving: A Season for Acknowledgment, Not Erasure
I’ve never made a big deal out of Thanksgiving. Sure, I enjoy the time off like anyone else — an opportunity to be with family, relax, and reconnect. But unlike the countless Americans who grow up with warm-and-fuzzy images of pilgrims, I can’t fully embrace that sanitized vision of the holiday. Part of this is my own background; I have Indigenous roots, though mostly from Canada, where Thanksgiving isn’t the same cultural cornerstone it is in the United States. But the legacy of Indigenous displacement, brutality, and cultural erasure isn’t confined by the U.S.-Canada border. Similar atrocities occurred on both sides, and those wounds are still fresh for many.
The day after Thanksgiving this year, I found myself in a restaurant with family. As we waited for our meal, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation at a nearby table. Three women were discussing someone younger in their family who, as one woman complained, had posted on Facebook about not celebrating Thanksgiving “because of what we did to the Indians.” She dismissed the younger relative as having something “not right in her head.” Another woman chimed in, saying, “Well, we did kill many of the Indigenous people.” To this, the first woman responded — without missing a beat — “We were DEFENDING ourselves against them, and the holiday is celebrating the good Indians who didn’t hurt us. I’m tired of being attacked for celebrating it. I didn’t do anything to any Indian.”
No one attacked her. She did, however, call a family member mentally ill for not celebrating. It was a breathtaking statement, a window into a particular mindset that too many people still share. A mindset founded on a tale so watered down, so mythologized, that it barely resembles the historical record. It raises the question: what history books did this woman read? Where did she learn this version of events — that Europeans were merely defending themselves against hostile tribes, and that Thanksgiving recognizes some kind of mutually beneficial relationship where only the “good” Indigenous people are worth remembering?
This is where the core misunderstanding lies. The traditional Thanksgiving story taught in many American schools is often a neat package: Pilgrims, struggling to survive, learn from friendly native neighbors. Together, they share a meal, symbolizing cooperation and gratitude. But what that story leaves out — or severely downplays — is what happened before and after that encounter. Indigenous peoples were already living on these lands, thriving in established communities with their own social, economic, and spiritual lives. Europeans didn’t “discover” a “New World”; they encountered nations that had existed for millennia. The wave of colonization that followed these early encounters brought land theft, forced removals, broken treaties, epidemics, violence, and policies aimed at cultural and literal genocide. By the time we had what we now recognize as the United States, the Indigenous population had been shattered, their lands stolen, and their sovereign rights trampled.
None of this can be reduced to a simple “we defended ourselves.” You cannot claim self-defense when you’re arriving uninvited to someone else’s home, pushing them aside, and reshaping everything in your image. No, the woman in the restaurant personally never harmed an Indigenous person. But that does not negate the fact that she, like so many Americans, benefits from living on land that was once someone else’s, built on the displacement of Indigenous peoples. Simply acknowledging this reality is not an attack on her moral character. It’s a necessary confrontation of the truth.
Perhaps it’s this discomfort — the fear that acknowledging historical wrongs demands personal guilt — that drives people to cling to sanitized versions of history. Yet acknowledging harm and complicity in historical wrongs isn’t the same as being guilty of them. It’s about understanding the full story, treating the past with honesty, and allowing that honesty to shape how we move forward. After all, no one is demanding that individuals personally apologize for atrocities committed centuries before their birth. Rather, the plea is for respect, for accuracy, and for recognition that our holidays, traditions, and national myths did not arise from thin air.
This matters more than ever as books are pulled from school libraries and curricula are “revised” to soften the truth of our shared past. When we remove or distort the historical record, we set up future generations for even greater confusion, misunderstanding, and cultural tension. The result is a public conversation that becomes more and more detached from historical fact, and people who consider someone “mentally ill” simply for choosing not to celebrate a holiday that rests on contested ground.
It’s possible to enjoy Thanksgiving — for the family gatherings, the sense of gratitude, the break from daily grind — and still acknowledge the complicated history beneath it. Acknowledgment never hurt anyone. If anything, it strengthens us. If we can hold space for the harvest meal that symbolizes cooperation while also remembering the results of colonization and suffering, we might actually become the empathetic nation we imagine ourselves to be.
And maybe next year, when overhearing a conversation about Thanksgiving, I won’t be stunned by historical denial. Instead, I’ll hear thoughtful exchanges about reconciliation, about ensuring that no people’s experiences are erased. That’s not too much to hope for, is it?
