A Truth-Telling for Anyone Who Still Feels Obligated to Show Up
Every November, America performs the same ritual. Roast a turkey. Pretend the family gets along. Pretend history is something soft and sentimental. Pretend the foundation of this country isn’t soaked in the blood of the people who fed the first starving Europeans and were thanked with genocide. Pretend, pretend, pretend! And then the media reveals whole columns on how to “survive” Thanksgiving with difficult relatives, pretending that the holiday isn’t already a survival tactic built on a national lie.
This year (2025), the Associated Press served up another one of those pieces, recommending the “gray rock” method to keep the peace. They recommend that you should “act boring.” Go flat. Be a dud. Don’t be yourself, like acting dead, like a possum. Don’t feed the beast of mad people in your family. This is the advice Americans need to endure a holiday supposedly about gratitude. Fake it! That alone tells you everything about the rot beneath the table and in many American families.
Because underneath the turkey, the football, the forced smiles, is the truth: Thanksgiving exists to sanitize a historical crime. It is the annual ritual of pretending genocide can be wrapped in pumpkin spice, cranberry sauce, and sold as unity. When we participate without reflection, that’s like sitting in the middle of a burning house and complimenting the décor.
Let’s spell it out. Indigenous peoples have been here for tens of thousands of years. They built civilizations, developed sustainable agriculture, created complex political systems, governed with laws of reciprocity, managed forests with controlled burns, sustained ecosystems, and modern governments still struggle to replicate. They had joy and peace. Before Europeans arrived, estimates of Indigenous inhabitants across the Americas ranged from 50 million to over 100 million. Scholars disagree on the precise figure (remember these scholars and their medium of information dissemination are mainly the same conquerors), but not on the magnitude of the collapse that followed. After 1492, Indigenous populations shrank by an incomprehensible eighty to ninety-five percent. Entire nations disappeared. In some regions, the death rate approached total erasure.
Disease played a massive part (white men would send contaminated blankets and other items to Native American towns to infect them), yes, but disease didn’t land on these shores alone. It came with forced labor, burning of villages, destruction of food systems, sexual violence, mass kidnapping, deliberate relocation, legislative erasure, and military conquest. Colonizers didn’t just stumble in with colds and sneeze at a Native here and there. They arrived with a religious mandate, economic hunger, and a vision of the world (A Doctrine of Discovery) in which Indigenous people were obstacles to be removed. The Wampanoag people who fed those first, starving settlers had no idea they were nourishing the architects of their own destruction.
And still, in most American classrooms, the Thanksgiving myth is taught as a warm, cozy story of cooperation. Children cut paper feathers and get excited about overeating, while the adults hide the history of stolen lands and broken treaties. Every November, the country infantilizes genocide and expects those who know better to play along. It’s history! Right?
It is understandable that Indigenous people mark Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning. They gather not to celebrate the stealing of their homeland, but to grieve. They mourn ancestors whose names were erased. They mourn lands taken by force. They mourn languages and cultures smothered by Christian missionary zeal. They mourn the attempt to turn them into a footnote in their own homeland. For them, Thanksgiving is not gratitude. It is a big open wound in their collective souls.
Meanwhile, modern American families cram themselves into homes where half the participants cannot stand each other. The day becomes its own miniature version of the national myth: pretend harmony, suppress truth, swallow discomfort, ignore cruelty, smile for the sake of “tradition.” The AP article describes people desperate to avoid being triggered by relatives who demean them, insult their lives and their intelligence, or weaponize personal information. That is what Thanksgiving means to millions. A holiday so corrosive that entire industries exist to teach people how to survive it.
And for what? For a ritual founded on a lie. For a story that props up the national ego. For a moment of forced togetherness that often harms more than it heals.
The advice I have is simple: if Thanksgiving hurts you, do not go. You are not required to sit at a table where people belittle you, even at the expense of being alone. You are not required to pretend your relatives are safe simply because you share blood. You are not required to uphold a story you know is false. You are allowed to choose your mental health. You are allowed to choose truth over tradition. This is the part Americans resist most: the idea that obligation is not the same as love or nationalism. You owe your well-being more than you owe a holiday manufactured to soothe the conscience of a conquering nation.
But beyond personal boundaries, there is a larger moral question. How can a country built on Indigenous dispossession teach its children to celebrate a story of harmonious coexistence? How can a nation that forced Native people onto reservations, stripped them of citizenship until the twentieth century, stole children into boarding schools, banned spiritual practices, and destroyed ecosystems built by Indigenous stewardship sell Thanksgiving as a lesson in unity?
There is a deep cruelty in asking Indigenous people to watch their tragedy be reenacted as a feel-good family drama. There is an even deeper cruelty in expecting everyone else to pretend this fiction is harmless. It is not harmless. It shapes identity. It defines belonging. It rewrites memory. It reinforces the idea that violence can be forgiven by ignoring it. America becomes a country where truth is optional, and comfort is sacred.
The irony reaches absurd heights when you remember why Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in the first place. It was a political move to manufacture unity during the Civil War. A civil war fought, at its core, to protect an economy built on enslaved Africans. A holiday created to keep the country together while half of it was fighting to be its own free human beings. And today, that holiday is sold as a celebration of family values. That alone should make you question what you are really celebrating.
If you want to honor the holiday at all, honor it with truth. Acknowledge the genocide. Say the names of the tribes who once lived on the land beneath your feet. Speak plainly about what happened. Teach your children that the Wampanoag fed the settlers and were repaid with centuries of dispossession. Learn whose land you live on and what became of those communities. Donate to Indigenous organizations. Use the day to build knowledge instead of repeating lies. Turn Thanksgiving into a day of clarity, not nostalgia.
And for your own sanity, surround yourself with people who do not harm you. Make a ritual of safety instead of suffering. Plan meals with friends rather than abusers. Share space with those who respect your truth. Do not let a holiday force you into emotional self-erasure.
Finally, call the holiday what it is. Rename it in your own home. Indigenous Peoples’ Day of Remembrance. Day of Truth. Day of Survival. A day to acknowledge history and demand reconciliation. A day to break the silence.
The truth is not something to fear. The truth is not an accusation. No one is asking for a white-people guilt parade. The truth is a path. And no country heals by denying what it has done. No family heals by forcing the wounded to sit quietly at the table.
Thanksgiving can change. But only if people stop pretending. Only if people stop performing. Only if people choose honesty over comfort.
You want a holiday worth having? Build one around truth. Build one around safety. Build one around people who do not require you to swallow your pain for tradition. That is the only celebration that means anything.
