Members of Native American tribes from around New England gathered in the seaside town where the Pilgrims settled — not to give thanks, but to mourn Indigenous people worldwide who’ve suffered centuries of racism and mistreatment. Thursday’s solemn National Day of Mourning observance in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts, recalled the disease and oppression that European settlers brought to North America.
“We Native people have no reason to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims,” said Kisha James, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota tribes and the granddaughter of Wamsutta Frank James, the event’s founder.
“We want to educate people so that they understand the stories we all learned in school about the first Thanksgiving are nothing but lies. Wampanoag and other Indigenous people have certainly not lived happily ever after since the arrival of the Pilgrims,” James said.
“To us, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning, because we remember the millions of our ancestors who were murdered by uninvited European colonists such as the Pilgrims. Today, we and many Indigenous people around the country say, ‘No Thanks, No Giving.’”
It’s the 52nd year that the United American Indians of New England have organized the event on Thanksgiving Day. The tradition began in 1970.
Indigenous people and their supporters gathered in person on Cole’s Hill, a windswept mound overlooking Plymouth Rock, a memorial to the colonists’ arrival.
Participants beat drums, offered prayers and condemn what organizers describe as “the unjust system based on racism, settler colonialism, sexism, homophobia and the profit-driven destruction of the Earth” before marching through downtown Plymouth’s historical district.
They also highlighted the troubled legacy of federal boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society in the U.S. as well as in Canada, where hundreds of bodies have been discovered on the grounds of former residential schools for Indigenous children.