No thanks for Thanksgiving

This commentary was posted on Prison Radio on Nov. 24, 2013, written to honor the National Day of Mourning.

Every November, when Thanksgiving is scheduled, I think of the People of the First Nations (so-called Native Americans), and wonder about their mixed feelings for a holiday that celebrates their enormous generosity as well as their near-total destruction.

What do they have to be thankful for?

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared the first such holiday in 1863, and American popular culture has tied it to a meal between Aboriginal people and Europeans upon their arrival on this continent.

In fact, when the Spanish reached South America and the English reached North America, they soon embarked on dual extermination campaigns, which led to holocausts of Indian nations, both north and south.

Their arrivals spelled the doom of hundreds of millions of people, hunted, starved, diseased and enslaved. To them, hell had a white face.

They made treaty after treaty with the Indians, but the palefaces broke every one.

For the Conquistadors, Native peoples served as enslaved workers who worked themselves to death to mine silver and gold. To the Anglos, they were superfluous — it was Indian land they hungered for — and they got it — by hook or crook.

Caught between these two great, ravenous forces, there was little they could do but fight, but Europe flooded the Americas with immigrants, and sheer numbers told the tale of woe.

When first they arrived, European settlements were places of disease, hunger and pitiless death. First Nations folk fed the colonists, taught them planting and healed them with herbal treatments. They repaid them with unremitting war, smallpox used as biological weapons, land theft and slaughter.

Thanksgiving may be a holiday, but it ain’t a holy day.

It should be a day in remembrance of the First Nations that peopled this land for tens of thousands of years.

 – © ‘13maj November 24, 2013

Listen to Mumia give this commentary: prisonradio.org/commentary/no-thanks-for-thanksgiving/ 

Mumia Abu-Jamal (guest author)

Share
Published by
Mumia Abu-Jamal (guest author)

Recent Posts

<span class="streamer">Phony airlifts</span><br />EU photo ops won’t stop Israeli-imposed famine

Faced with demonstrations, urgent appeals and growing mass outrage that permeates all public space, the…

August 8, 2025

People’s Summit for Korea spotlights role of U.S. imperialism

Over 500 people attended the People’s Summit for Korea at the historic Riverside Church in…

August 8, 2025

Class forces behind U.S. genocide in Hiroshima, Nagasaki

This article, which has been slightly excerpted, was first published in Workers World, August 13,…

August 8, 2025

Lancet study shows: Economic sanctions can kill like bombs and bullets

Two documents together explain the lethal effect of economic sanctions applied by powerful imperialist countries…

August 7, 2025

Trump’s deregulations boost energy industry profits

For over 15 years, an Endangerment Finding allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions,…

August 7, 2025

<span class="streamer85">BAP condemns the Zionist brutalization and detainment of Chris Smalls, emblematic of the white supremacy at the core of Zionism</span>

The following statement was released on July 31, 2025. To read online, go to blackallianceforpeace.com/bapstatements.…

August 7, 2025