Dear John,

If you’re like most Americans, then today you’re rushing to finish work, scrambling to hit the road or cook a big meal, and preparing to gather with family and friends for Thanksgiving. For many, tomorrow offers a much needed break as well as a chance to come together and share gratitude with loved ones from near and far.

But for many Indigenous Americans like me, Thanksgiving is a time of mourning and resistance. It’s a time of grieving for the genocide of millions of Native peoples, the theft of our land, and the relentless attacks on Indigenous cultures.

The sanitized Thanksgiving story taught in schools — with its depiction of a peaceful celebration between colonizers and our tribes — neglects to mention the massacres of, and brutality against, Indigenous Americans that set the stage for hundreds of years of systematic oppression. It erases a tragic and deeply defining part of our country’s history.

This includes erasing the history that many of my ancestors were forced to hold the majority of the care responsibilities for our colonizers — whether through enslavement, indentured servitude, or for poverty wages.

I know for some people the story of Thanksgiving is appealing because it’s about coming together. But we don’t need the harmful “pilgrims and Indians” narrative, with its illusion of past unity, to actually unite us all today. Instead, we can simply focus on the values we all share — togetherness, generosity and gratitude — to find a better way to celebrate this Thanksgiving.

So this Thanksgiving, and throughout the month of November (which is Native American Heritage month), I invite you to honor the power and strength of Indigenous women. Here’s a few ideas:

Learn about Indigenous women in history: Across most of the Americas, corn sustained powerful tribal nations, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee) nations in the Southeast. Women within these matrilineal societies owned their own households and the goods produced from them. Part of this power emerged from their central roles in kin and clan relations as well as their centrality to the production of corn. Similarly, Navajo women held great economic and political power since they owned large herds of sheep and other livestock. You can learn more on NDWA's Interactive History of Domestic Work and Worker Organizing.

Support the leadership of Indigenous women today: I am a member of the Navajo Nation and the New Mexico Caregivers Association, and together with my fellow caregivers, we are fighting to ensure that Congress passes the Build Back Better bill to help bring critically needed resources to our communities.

In my case, I have worked with caregivers on the Navajo Reservation for more than 10 years, but it wasn't until I became a caregiver myself that I truly began to understand how hard the work of caregiving is.

Where I live, in the Capital of the Navajo Nation, we are three hours from Albuquerque and five hours from Phoenix. It was extremely hard to access the resources we needed to care for my mom, who had become sick with cancer, on the Reservation. I was working full time and caring for her on top of my responsibilities at work.

My mom got more and more sick — as the cancer progressed, she had a stroke and then a heart attack. After the stroke, it became impossible for me to continue to work. I ran out of paid family leave, and my employer was not supportive of my absence.

Build Back Better would bring needed resources to our community and the caregivers who care for our people with such love and passion. If you haven’t yet, it would be great if you could join our fight to ensure that Congress passes the Build Back Better bill.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful to stand with supporters like you and to celebrate Indigenous women, caregivers, and leaders as we work to build a society where we can all get the care we deserve.

As always, Ahe hee' (thank you) for all you do,

Valerie Tsosie
New Mexico Caregivers Association, an Affiliate of NDWA