Thanksgiving: A Native American View by Jacqueline Keeler--Part One

Jacqueline Keeler is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.

Jacqueline Keeler is a Navajo/Yankton Dakota Sioux writer living in Portland, Oregon

I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.

Native Americans meet Europeans. missouristate.edu

Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing "Land of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful."

Aretha Franklin sings "America the Beautiful" at Barack Obama's first inauguration

Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.

I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. 

It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important.

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As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some "inside" knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes.