I’m sure that these types of celebrations and reconciliations are happening all over America. I just don’t have the pleasure to be there with you.
I was here:
Happy Thanksgiving. Here’s to a better world.
___
Full text of video:
(over drumming) History aside, the United States by tradition assigns the first Thanksgiving to a feast celebrating the survival of the Plymouth Plantation almost 400 years ago. Indigenous North Americans are credited with the success of those first Pilgrim settlers.
Each year we have the opportunity to remember that first Thanksgiving.
If any group has just cause for hostility to immigrants, it is the First Americans, the native peoples of the Americas. First the conquistadors and then the settlers brought catastrophic diseases, genocide and cultural destruction ... sometimes by accident, often by intent.
Shortly after Canada’s celebration of Thanksgiving in mid-October, we attended an event focused on building a flourishing future in Canada’s Columbia River basin. A night out on the town in the host city, Kimberley, BC, included a performance by dancers from the ?aq’am community of the Ktunaxa Nation.
Rather than try to recreate the past, the Ktunaxa, and other First Nations, are joining their culture and their future with that of their neighbors in the Columbia Basin. Much of British Columbia and Canada is build on unceded land, lands which First Nations never relinquished to the colonizers.
To my eyes a symbolic reconciliation took place on this Saturday in October: the dancers invited their neighbors and visitors to join them in a Friendship Dance ... bringing the WHOLE family together, symbolizing a brighter, fairer, more just future for us all.
We encourage you to find a way to bring your community together. In the current political climate, people of good will must come together. We must work and play ... and dance and heal together to create a livable, sustainable future.