politicalsci:

On
Thanksgiving, between 700 and 1,200 people will gather in Plymouth,
Massachusetts, for a “National Day of Mourning” to educate people about
the vicious history of the treatment of Native Americans and the issues
affecting them today. This year is dedicated to water protectors at
Standing Rock and to the struggle for recognition of Indigenous Peoples’
Day.

“There’s
nothing wrong with having a meal with friends and family, and I would
say especially for many of us where our families have survived genocide,
it’s so important for us to be able to sit down with each other and be
grateful that we have food and to enjoy spending time with each other,”
said Mahtowin Munro, a co-leader of United American Indians of New
England, the group that organizes the event, who has attended every year
since the 1980s.

“The
real underlying issue is the mythology… there’s a view that the Natives and the
Pilgrims lived happily ever after and the Native people just evaporated
into the woods or something to make way for the Pilgrims and all of the
other aspects of the European invasion,” she continued. “All around the
country, schools continue to dress up their children in little Pilgrim
and Indian costumes and the Indians welcome the Pilgrims and they all
sit down together and everybody says ‘Isn’t that cute, that’s so nice.’
That’s not at all what happened.”

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Settler colonialism is the social, political and economic system that
Europeans brought with them to this continent that turns land into
profit, dispossessing Native peoples from the land through forced
removals, military massacres, genocide, sterilization and forced
assimilation (among other tactics). Indigenous people have long
recognized that this is an ongoing process, not one discretely contained
within a historical period.

Settler colonialism requires an ongoing violence against Native American
people. Many narratives obscure this fact, however, by speaking of this
violence as occurring in the distant past and in some mythical place
(e.g. “the Wild West”) or erasing it altogether (as in romantic stories
about Native and settler friendship). As a result, many people wrongly
understand settler colonialism as something we have progressed beyond or
something that never seriously existed in the first place.