Most Americans will not be having a traditional family Thanksgiving this year, because of travel restrictions, large gathering restrictions and so on. But at the New York Times, the War On Thanksgiving goes on — because the War On Thanksgiving is a War on White America.
The hunt that followed took place on Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, 27,000 acres of rolling pasture on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Every stage of the hunt was marked by a ceremony to give thanks for a buffalo that descends from animals killed to near-extinction by white settlers in the late 19th century.
The mass killing was part of a government-approved effort to seize land from Native Americans who depended on the animal to survive. The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.
Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”[Links in original]
In one scene, the Wednesday character, cast as Pocahontas in a children’s Thanksgiving play, goes off script to take violent revenge on the Pilgrims. “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours,” she calmly seethes. “Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, other people get it, too,’” said Ms. Jaakola.
There were no “Indians” before the discovery of America by Europeans — there were indigenous tribes who hated each other, and warred constantly in Hobbesian fashion.
There was also no America, as we know it today — the land was there, but the country is a creation of the Historic American Nation.
