Get woke and stay woke refers to being aware of what’s going on around you in regards to racism and social injustice issues. Woke is the past tense of wake, and it refers to waking up to what’s going on around us.
As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time’s spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for.
However, as one who resides at the intersections of multiple identities — gender, race, sexual orientation, class, to name a few — this Thanksgiving, nonetheless, will be challenging for me because I wake up each morning hoping to find the portal to November 7th, the day before the election, to linger and dream and feel safe there a little while longer than where I am presently. I never thought a 2016 presidential election would have me not only time travel back to the 1950s and 1960s, but reside there at least for the next four years.
While this Thanksgiving season might not feel like a cause to celebrate for many of us, I realize for many of my Native American brothers and sisters this holiday has felt this way for centuries, irrespective of who was elected as president. Historically, since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Coles Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning of this U.S. holiday. And for the Wampanoag nation of New England whose name means “people of the dawn,” this national holiday is a reminder of the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of their ancestral nation and culture as well as their long history of bloodshed with European settlers.
However, the Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil rights of Native Americans.
Case in point: homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.
“Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion,” Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written. “We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had.”
Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans’ acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities. They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a “universal knowledge” and special spiritual connectedness with the “Great Spirit.” Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, historically Two-Spirits depicted transgender Native Americans. Today, the term has come to also include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Native Americans.
Because the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious liberty was devoid of an ethic of accountability, their actions did not set up the conditions requisite for moral liability and legal justice. Instead, the actions of the Pilgrims brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual parade and national celebration of Thanksgiving for their arrival.
This Thanksgiving might not look hopeful for many but I draw my strength and models of justice from the interconnections and intersections of various struggles and activist groups across the nation as well as the world. Trump’s presidency worries me, but I’m optimistic in spite of this difficult and divided time America is in because the words and acts of justice spring up organically in places and times and even in people you least expect from, signaling the struggle continues on.
“We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us — our planet, our children, our parents — or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us… This wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men [and] women of different colors, creeds, and orientations,” Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor who portrays Aaron Burr in the Broadway hit Hamilton, told Vice President-elect Mike Pence during his night at the theater.
It is in the spirit of our connected struggles for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we not solely focus on the story of Plymouth Rock, but instead as Americans we focus on creating this nation as a solid rock that rests on a multicultural and inclusive foundation.
And in so doing, it helps us to remember and respect the struggles that not only this nation’s foremothers and forefathers endured, but it also helps us to remember and respect the present-day struggle many disenfranchised communities across the country face, especially our Native American brothers and sisters, particularly on Thanksgiving Day.
Rev. Irene Monroe is a Huffington Post blogger and freelance journalist.
