November 30, 2020

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy Indigenous People’s Month! I used to think Thanksgiving was what I was taught in school. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Indians helped the Pilgrims settle. Later on, the Indians taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn. A great big celebration, a feast, was held with both the Pilgrims and Indians together. This was called the first Thanksgiving. Later on in my life, I learned that Thanksgiving celebrations, after the first Thanksgiving, were the Pilgrims celebrating that they had killed off a bunch of Indians and burned another Indian village down. History did not share that Pilgrims and other non-Indian settlers moved Indians off of their ancestral lands and villages. These ancestral lands and villages were then given to the non-Indians. My Great Grandmother and her ancestors were moved off their lands and put on reservations. Her ancestors were forced to leave the state of New York. Usually these reservations were poor lands, not suitable for farming, or living on. So, I celebrate Thanksgiving each year by having gratitude for Indigenous people ‘still here’! I celebrate thanks that our true Indigenous history, never really put in history books or taught in school, is now being shared. This is why I write this blog. This is why I share the story of my great-grandmother being forced to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School in 1891. Lastly, I pray our US Government will finally free Leonard Peltier. He has been in prison for over 40 years. I think he deserves to be free, don’t you?

A friend of mine on Facebook, Lisa Gammon Olson, wrote the book Remembering Green. The book is a historically accurate account of an Ojibwa girl who is forced to attend a US Government sponsored Indian Boarding School. For more information google Lisa Gammon Olson or Remembering Green.