today is thanksgiving day in the usa and i’m having a difficult time writing this peace… on the one hand, every day is a day of thanksgiving and on the other hand, this is a day of mourning for native americans and on another hand, given the troubling events all over the planet, it is so very important to take a day to give thanks to the cosmos for the good that sustains us… my quandary is how to do this while remaining in integrity with our concerns about the wellbeing of Earth and the wellbeing of all our relatives…
for thanksgiving to truly be about the giving of thanks, settlers and their descendants have to first reckon with our ruthless disregard for native life… this colonial holiday based on the erasure of Indigenous peoples promotes a false vision of peaceful cooperation between nations… settler colonialism depended on the taking of land and the displacement of Indigenous peoples… accumulation and ownership of land are antithetical to how most Indigenous peoples understand relationships with people, the natural and spiritual worlds, and other-than-human beings.
“My Ancestors didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust.” We see relationships rather than capital as the key to our futures. We see the world this way because this is what has always sustained us. We have always understood the giving of thanks to be part of our everyday existence, part of how we maintain balance, part of how we think about the next seven generations, not just ourselves.
~Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of the Alderville First Nation~
being in good relations is a central ethical concept for many Indigenous nations meaning recognizing the mutual interdependence of human and other-than-human beings and engaging with others in a consensual, nonhierarchical way… it is about taking actions in the present that are based in the historical and spiritual traditions of communities, actions that promote the proper balance and reciprocity of the whole community…
today as i reckon with where i/we fall short, i offer this meditation from Rabbi Michael Lerner for me/us to come into right relationsip on this day of thanksgrieving/thanks giving/thankshaving/thanksbeing…
“Today we give thanks to this incredible universe for all the beauty, the goodness and the miracles that surround us every day and to which we have given too little conscious attention. And we celebrate the ability to be with friends, neighbors, family or others on this holy day of joyful appreciation of all the good in our lives.
Our beautiful and life-sustaining planet is in danger, so on this Thanksgiving we recommit ourselves to taking all steps necessary to reverse the processes that threaten the life-support systems of the planet, and to preserve the rich diversity of life forms and of beauty that we experience daily on planet earth. We are part of the unity of all being, a manifestation of God’s or Goddesses’ love, or of the loving energy of the universe that brought together our parents to bring us into life. While we are alive, we recommit ourselves to making every day a mini thanksgiving in which we take time to celebrate the grandeur and mystery of being itself.
This is the right moment, then, for us to also put forward our prayers or intentions for a world of peace, justice and environmental sanity. We who recognize that our ability to live today enjoying all the benefits of North America was achieved in part through a genocidal struggle against the native peoples of this land are not willing to live through another period in which other peoples may be losing their lands to settlers or oppressive colonization or through brutal wars...
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we affirm our dedication to being “unrealistic” for peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and a world based on love, caring, kindness and generosity. In so doing, we will make realistic what at first seemed to be unrealistic. And so it is. Amen.“
