I’m often fond of pointing out how progressives ruin everything. They have ruined comedy, movies, our institutions, and pretty much everything else they get their hands on. Thanksgiving is no different. This year, leftists are continuing a tradition called “Truthsgiving” that they invented a few years ago as part of their anti-Thanksgiving movement.
Axios reported:
“Thankstaking,” the Native American-influenced alternative to Thanksgiving, has become more noticeable in the U.S. amid a racial reckoning.
Why it matters: Indigenous tribes in recent years have been asserting their sovereignty around water rights, criminal justice and political representation. Thanksgiving, where Indigenous people are the center of a national myth, is also a target.
“Indigenous activists, scholars and artists are using the hashtag #thankstaking in November to bring attention to land theft, removal and the exclusion of Native American history in schools,” according to the report.
The movement’s website explains that “Truthsgiving is an ideology that must be enacted through truth telling and mutual aid to discourage colonized ideas about the thanksgiving mythology – not a name switch so we can keep doing the same thing.”
It further notes that the “holiday” is “about telling and doing the truth” so that “we can stop dangerous stereotypes and whitewashed history from continuing to harm Indigenous lands and Peoples, as well as Black, Latinx, Asian-Americans and all oppressed folks.”
Truthsgiving is one of several ways people have pushed anti-Thanksgiving sentiments since the 1970s, when they established the National Day of Mourning. “Native Americans say the Thanksgiving myth glosses over the decades of horrific violence imposed on Indigenous tribes after a three-day feast between Pilgrims and the Wampanoags,” according to Axios.
Thanksgiving was originally established to celebrate the three-day feast between the pilgrims and Wampanoags that took place in 1621. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the holiday during the Civil War to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
But some have found the modern-day commemoration to be offensive with its depictions of Native Americans. Axios pointed out that “[s]chools introduced the Thanksgiving story to children without discussing the violence that followed, and often encouraged students to make cut-out, paper Indigenous headdresses.”
“Thanksgiving is nothing but government propaganda,” said Crystal Echo Hawk, founder and executive director of the Indigenous advocacy group IllumiNative.
Almost nobody denies the atrocities that were inflicted on Native Americans hundreds of years ago. These acts continued for centuries after the first Europeans discovered America. It is also not inappropriate to discuss this history and how it figured into the nation’s history.
However, it is also not wrong to celebrate a holiday that has come to mean so much to the American people. Most view it as a time to reconnect with friends and family and to focus on that for which they are grateful.
What the Truthsgiving folks fail to realize is that people can acknowledge both. Contrary to what they seem to imply, there are plenty of times in which people can focus on America’s history – the good, the bad, and the ugly. To suggest that we should do away with one of its most cherished traditions is absurd and unnecessary. But, as I said at the beginning, progressives ruin everything, which is why most do not take them seriously.