Today, gratitude remains one of my favorite spiritual practices. “Every day is gift.” I know it soul-deep. Daily I’m grateful for all that Earth offers us. As children, my sisters and brothers knew the blood, sweat and tears that nourished Garden. We ate most of the year from her harvest and while we weren’t, as kids, always wild about tending her every day, we easily connected the hard work and sacrifice with the gift of food. These were the kernels of my understanding of Thanksgiving.
At school, we traced our hands and cut out paper Turkeys and heard the story and drew the feast shared between the Wampanoag people and the pilgrims in the early 1600s. We eagerly anticipated gathering with family … We enjoyed a simple, beautiful meal mostly prepared from Garden’s harvest. I’m grateful for the sense of tradition this instilled and the mantra Be grateful! that echoed throughout the 30 acres we were fortunate enough to call home.
In today’s global context, Thanksgiving holds deeper meaning. There’s so much more to the story of 1621. Today our gratitude is penetrated by heartache of those whose sense of home was lost, whose stories weren’t/aren’t acknowledged. Among them, many Native Americans for whom Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed.
This article written by Ecko Aleck, a Nlaka’pamux Warrior Womxn on Pentlatch Territory, arose amid own prayer and reflection. You may find the practical suggestions helpful. See https://natives-outdoors.com/temoajournal/2020/11/25/decolonizing-thanksgiving-a-toolkit-for-switching-the-narratives-of-history
Healing Earth begins, according to Thomas Berry, CP, by seeing ourselves and all creation as a communion of subjects instead of a collection of objects.
May it be so.
—Ann Jackson, PBVM, Prairiewoods spiritual services coordinator