History was made this week as the first and only Native American Cabinet Secretary in the U.S. stood at Alcatraz, the now-abandoned island prison in the San Francisco bay, to honor Indigenous activists who had occupied the land about half a century ago. As HuffPost reports, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo tribe, acknowledged the activist group called the Indians Of All Tribes, who occupied Alcatraz for 19 months in 1969 to protest discrimination and abuse by the federal government against Native Americans and to reclaim land for their tribes.
Sec. Haaland’s speech was short but emotional, at points teary as she honored her forebearers:
“I didn’t understand it then, but my very existence as a Native child was in some ways an act of defiance against historic policies to exterminate Indigenous cultures, traditions, languages, and essentially us as a group of people.”
Watch her full speech here.
It’s easy to wave off the significance of Haaland’s gesture if you forget to think about the larger context. This was a few days before Thanksgiving Day, one of the most tumultuous holidays in the U.S. Partly because, depending on the year, it follows tense presidential elections (and many Americans end up at an awkward dinner with their politically-mixed family) but mostly because more people are rejecting the highly-sanitized “first Thanksgiving” myth and reckoning with the atrocities by settlers against Native Americans.
If you went to public school in the U.S., you will recognize elements of the “first Thanksgiving” myth in your memories of Thanksgiving at school, where you may have played the role of “Indian” or pilgrim in the school’s little holiday show featuring props of a fake turkey and paper-mâché cornucopia with faux fruit spilling out of it—a typical experience for a lot of American kids that has carried on in many schools.
But that myth of the pilgrims welcomed by Native Americans and lavished with a hearty feast that they shared together, isn’t based on facts. It is a supreme whitewashing of what actually happened when the pilgrims arrived—a small feast was in fact shared between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe, but not like that!—and the genocide against tribes throughout the centuries thereafter. As historian and author David Silverman told Smithsonian Magazine:
The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
The myth of the “first Thanksgiving” is harmful because it not only erases the thousands of years that Indigenous tribes occupied the lands of North America and flourished, but it also conveniently forgets the violence that was wrought on Native Americans by colonial settlers throughout the U.S.’ founding. That “pilgrims and natives got along just fine la di da” myth is also often the only thing many Americans, in general, are taught about Native Americans. That’s how you get embarrassing politicians like Rick Santorum saying dumb things, like: “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” 🤔 Sir, please read a book!
For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving Day isn’t considered a day to “give thanks” as is pushed by the popular Thanksgiving myth—quite the opposite. It is treated as a national day of mourning to grieve the millions of Native Americans enslaved and slaughtered by European settlers who arrived at the Indigenous-occupied territory in the 16th and 17th centuries.
[Note: Among the many misconceptions birthed by the “first Thanksgiving” myth is that the pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, were the first European settlers to occupy America’s soil. But Native Americans had repeated encounters with European settlers at least a century before in the 1500s. Spanish conquistadors came and established the first permanent settlement at St. Augustine, Florida.]
As the narrative around Thanksgiving shifts to center Indigenous voices, it’s been made clear that, for Native Americans, the holiday is a painful and exhausting time. As native journalist Mary Annette Pember wrote in Mother Jones, November is “the month of explaining Indians to white people.”
When turkey season comes around and non-native settlers gather to stuff ourselves with food, Indigenous-led rallies pop up across the country to commemorate the National Mourning. At Alcatraz, every Thanksgiving, Indigenous community leaders perform a Sunrise Ceremony, which is “a spiritual event, a way for Native people to ground themselves in community and in resistance and push forward together,” according to a report by Teen Vogue. As the name implies, the ceremony is done early in the morning and features Native American songs, sounds, and dances.
Beyond Thanksgiving’s unsavory history, Sec. Haaland’s recent gesture at Alcatraz this week was a major moment simply because of what it represents. After all, she is the first Indigenous person to fill a federal leadership position in the 200+ years of U.S. history. That she is now running the U.S. Department of Interior—the federal agency with the closest proximity to Native American affairs, managing the National Park Service and the government’s relation with the tribes—and did not shy away from the government’s faults against Native Americans in her capacity as a government representative, is really incredible.
Sec. Haaland has been busy taking care of business since she took up the mantle of Interior Secretary. One of her first actions as secretary was establishing a Missing & Murdered Unit (MMU) in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a division under her department, to collect and analyze data on missing Native Americans and work with the country’s law enforcement agencies to solve the cases. [Note: According to an April report by the Interior Department, about 1,500 Native American and Alaska Native people were listed as missing in the National Crime Information Center.]
In June, Sec. Haaland announced a federal initiative to investigate the U.S. government’s past oversight of Native American boarding schools, which will review decades of records related to the notoriously abusive schools where Indigenous children were abused and often killed as they were forced to assimilate into white settler culture. And this month, the secretary announced a task force to identify and remove derogatory terms used in the names of public land properties like valleys and lakes, starting with the removal of a word that is meant as an ethnic slur against Indigenous women. Beyond her public-facing work, Sec. Haaland is also bringing her philosophy of representing the underrepresented inside her department—half of her political appointees are people of color and about 70% of them are women. It’s safe to say that the agency looks very different from the inside than it did before.
In an exclusive interview with InStyle magazine (which produced the gorgeous photograph featured at the top of this newsletter), the secretary credited the daily cultural practice passed down from her grandmother for keeping her grounded and always moving forward:
“It’s about concentrating on the opportunities and the positive things in your life. I know sometimes that’s difficult when you’re faced with a million challenges every single day, but my grandma taught me to go outside in the morning, greet the sun, and say a prayer to welcome that spirit into your life.”
As we gorge ourselves on food and time with our loved ones, let’s remember, too, the things that we should be UNgrateful about. Namely the historic—and ongoing—discrimination faced by many Native Americans. Yes, there has been progress and some things to celebrate, but as Haaland reminds us there is still much work left to be done.
Have thoughts to share about what a boss Secretary Deb Haaland is? Or maybe you’d like to know more about the fake parts of the Thanksgiving myth? Reply to the email or comment on the post!
TWEET OF THE WEEK: ON UNFORTUNATE #HERSTORY MOMENTS 💄
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SOME GOOD READS
🔥 The U.S. achieved the embarrassing honor of joining several European countries on a list of nations experiencing “backsliding democracies” that was released by a Sweden-based think tank. | Deutsche Welle
🔥 Rotterdam descended into chaos after police and protesters clashed during demonstrations against partial COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions on unvaccinated residents. Things got so bad the city’s mayor called the situation “an orgy of violence.” | Al Jazeera
🔥 Right-wing nut Alex Jones, best known as the host of extremist outlet InfoWars, lost his fourth defamation lawsuit against families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, who he has warred with after falsely claiming the tragedy was a “hoax” to overturn the Second Amendment. | NBC News
🔥 A coalition of Virginia residents was awarded $25 million in damages after suing a group of white nationalists over the deadly white power rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Pay up, Nazis! | NPR
🔥 New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent watchdog to the NYPD, is pushing legislation that would allow it to launch investigations into police misconduct on its own without having to wait for a formal complaint. | Gothamist
🔥 Still trying to make sense of the shameful acquittals in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial? Watching this panel of insightful experts dissect what happened might help. | PBS NewsHour
🔥 Thousands of crypto-obsessed strangers tried to buy an authentic copy of the U.S. Constitution (for real) by raising more than $40 million in crypto together. Chaos ensued. | VICE
🔥 A historian’s quest to trace the life of an 18th-Century Black woman named Abigail, who died in Paris while enslaved to the family of U.S. Founding Father John Jay. | New York Times
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Thanks for reading this newsletter!
Happy holidays,
Natasha