While Thanksgiving is indeed partially a celebration of the yearly harvest, to say "Thanksgiving is just about giving thanks" really misses the point of what people are rightly complaining about - which is that much of the folklore relating to the holiday amounts to a celebration of collective denial around the historically dismal and dishonorable ways English settlers behaved towards the natives. And the controversy about Thanksgiving is not even new: Mark Twain acknowledged it as early as the 1920s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States)#C...
>“I can choose how I feel about this day, but it is a choice. I can either let the holiday claim me, or choose to reclaim it.”
>If I could ask one thing from my non-indigenous fellow Americans when it comes to Thanksgiving, I would ask that you refrain from teaching the romanticized version of the holiday. Read to your children about what it means to be thankful, what it means to heal and be a family. Learn as a family about the tribal nation that is local to where you live. Take time during dinner to recognize whose traditional lands you give thanks on. Take this holiday into your own hands and understand that not every Native will have good feelings about this day, and be accepting of that. We can all choose how we feel about this holiday, but it is always our own choice.
Sure, but the portions of his autobiography where he had remarked on this were only published in the 1920s. So these remarks were not known prior to that timeframe.
