The National Day of Mourning

The Thanksgiving origin story is a bunch of hooey. Republicans want to keep it that way.

What most USA citizens refer to as “Thanksgiving,” Native Americans designated the National Day of Mourning in 1970 and have marked it as such ever since.

That’s the only tip-off one should need to understand the holiday’s origin story is an absolute crock o’ crap.

Academic and blogger Aaron Bady summed it up nicely in his poetically titled piece, “Thanksgiving is Bullshit.”

“Obviously, the holiday is a racist and nationalist celebration of American manifest destiny, an expression of gratitude for God’s gift of ‘America’ to the (white) people who arrived and took it by force from the (non-white) people who were living there.”

By force and through genocidal tactics, like the government-sanctioned slaughter of buffalo so Natives would not be able to sustain themselves. Unfortunately, that was simply a continuation of pilgrim behavior. In fact, several years after what the myth tells us was the first Thanksgiving in 1621, the European interlopers “beheaded and dismembered” Wampanoag Chief Metacomet and “impaled his head on a spike to display for 25 years.”

These bloody truths are the poisoned roots of Thanksgiving, not to mention U.S. history overall.

And now, due to Republican-controlled state legislatures’ bans against Critical Race Theory, school kids will continue to be force-fed the same old whitewashed crocks o’ crap.

Clearly most white “Americans” can’t handle these truths.