I have been thinking so much of this lately and my heart is sore...

I have been thinking so much of this lately and my heart is sore and hurts so deeply. I don’t want to eat and drink and be merry on Thanksgiving. I don’t want to celebrate a holiday now when the treatment of Native Americans, is, was, and will undoubtably continue to be so astonishingly poor. When there are men and women and children being sprayed with freezing water, with rubber bullets, with tear gas and terror. How can we pretend it’s ok to celebrate a holiday in which the only reason we, we white foreign immigrants, survived, was due to the compassion and kindness of those who were already here, when this is how we repaid them? With genocide and the blatant thievery of all that belonged to them, and only them. I just cannot be ok with this, and it makes me ache in ways I cannot describe and I think how ridiculous that is, me, privileged, so far removed from a half a millennium of suffering and endurance and the tireless fight they have had to fight just to remain a people.

I wish we could go back in time and give it all back. Every blade of grass, every drop of water. I wish we could arrive on those old ships and ask questions, not shout demands. I wish we could have learned, watched, transformed, and became what they were. What they still are. I wish.

Three words just keep rattling around my mouth, spilling out to everyone that deserves it, and they still feel empty. I. Am. Sorry. It’s not enough, it won’t be enough, and sorry is for the sayer. Nevertheless, I am sorry.