For most Americans, Thanksgiving is cause for celebration. It marks the beginning of the season of giving, a time to focus on family. But for some of America’s Native population, it is also a time for mourning.
“To most Natives, Thanksgiving is not a celebration,” Dennis W. Zotigh, tribal citizen of the Kiowa Gourd Clan and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Winter Clan, said in an interview with USA Today. “Natives, particularly in the New England area, remember this attempted genocide as a factual part of their history and are reminded each year during the modern Thanksgiving.”
Indeed, while many American children across the United States still view Thanksgiving as a one of many happy exchanges between the Native Americans and the pilgrims, the reality of most interactions was one of violence and genocide. However, thanks to many years of pushback and activism by many Native Americans, that may be changing.
For example, through various forms of social media, teachers have been educating themselves to do Thanksgiving right. Many have even begun to teach Native American history outside of just Thanksgiving, with states like Connecticut, North Dakota, Oregon and more mandating the education into curriculum.
And yet, despite all this change in education, the actual treatment of the US towards Native Americans seems to have changed very little. In June of 2021, the clean water system failed at the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon, and they weren’t the outlier. 8 out of every 1,000 Native American households don’t have access to indoor plumbing, according to US Water Alliance. The same source noted that “Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing” and that nonexistent or faulty pipes or water systems have forced residents to rely on bottled water, a cost they may not be able to afford.
According to the 2018 US Census, Native Americans had the highest poverty rate among all minority groups at 25.4%, and according to the 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the unemployment rate for Native Americans was 6.1%, close to double that of white Americans.
As students head back to school following the end of the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s important to remember the multi-faceted meaning of Thanksgiving, for Native Americans and Americans, and how the legacy of mistreatment towards Native Americans continues today.