Every year I submit this piece for Thanksgiving because it captures, in my humble opinion, the best way I can express my outrage of the genocide of Native Americans that is summarily glossed over with a national celebration and an annual holiday of its occupiers.
As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time's spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday as a time of remembrance - historical and familial.
Every year I submit this piece for Thanksgiving because it captures, in my humble opinion, the best way I can express my outrage of the genocide of Native Americans that is summarily glossed over with a national celebration and an annual holiday of its occupiers.
As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time's spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday as a time of remembrance - historical and familial.
Historically, I am reminded that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather a National Day of Mourning, remembering the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed with European settlers.
I am also reminded of my Two-Spirit Native American brothers and sisters who struggle with their families and tribes not approving of their sexual identities and gender expressions as many of us do with our families and faith communities.
"Yes, there's internalized homophobia in every gay community, but as Native Americans we are taught not to like ourselves because we're not white. In our communities, people don't like us because we're gay," Gabriel Duncan, member of Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits (BAAITS), told the Pacific News Service.
And consequently, many Two-Spirit Native Americans leave their reservations and isolated communities hoping to connect with the larger LGBTQ community in urban cites. However, due to racism and cultural insensitivity, many Two-Spirits feel less understood and more isolated than they did back home.
But homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.
"Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion," Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written. "We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had."
Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans' acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities. They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a "universal knowledge" and special spiritual connectedness with the "Great Spirit." Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, historically Two-Spirits depicted transgender Native Americans. Today, the term has come to also include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and intersex Native Americans.
The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual rights of Native Americans
And the Pilgrims' animus toward homosexuals not only impacted Native American culture, but it also shaped Puritan law and theology.
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