"Spare me the school-assembly version of Thanksgiving.

Since I was in grammar school, I've seen these misleading re-enactments. The Thanksgiving plays and celebrations glamorize the relationship between the Pilgrims and American Indians. They falsely portray the Pilgrims as the ones who allowed the indians to sup with them, rather than vice versa.

And they erase the genocide against Indians that followed.

The way we celebrate Thanksgiving in this country is - to say the very least - inappropriate.

Few people can even recall the name of the tribe that held Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims. We remember the Pilgrims, not the Wampanoag.

The Thanksgiving story subliminally invites us to believe that indigenous Americans have been offered a place at the table.

Thanksgiving is America's guilty holiday, a kind of camouflage, a symbolic excuse to ignore the elimination of whole populations of indigenous Americans by disease or war."

Get the Story:
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington: Let's change the name of Thanksgiving (The Bellingham Herald 11/19)