"This Thanksgiving, don't call on me, as an American Indian, to offer up a prayer of thanks.

I sure wouldn't want to offend anyone with a prayer that dredges up key events of the dark past such as the forced, deadly removal of Cherokee Indians from their eastern homelands back in 1830. From the Carolinas to Oklahoma, 15,000 Cherokee were ordered to march through snow and ice and over mountains. At least, 4,000 of them died of starvation or exposure.

A prayer of thanks would be challenging should I reflect on the U.S. cavalry's longstanding war with many Plains tribes in an effort to steal the West. The Indian Wars revealed the height of this nation's inhumanity. In 1890, a sneak attack by the 7th Cavalry on a Lakota camp near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota left more than 150 men, women and children massacred."

Get the Story:
Mark Anthony Rolo: An Indian 'prayer of thanks' (The Sacramento Bee 11/21)