Being thankful.

I struggle with the holidays for several reasons.

1. I have worked retail for twenty years.  This morning I wrote out work schedules since I have no time at actual work to do paperwork.  We get slammed.  All our business happens all at once.  It can feel like pure insanity at times.  And managing employees in chaotic times can be somewhat challenging.  I feel like a football coach at times.  Choosing the best players for the right tasks.  Being on top of our game to avoid complaints and be the very best we can for a demanding public.  And the exhaustion at the end of the day!  Eek!

2.  Family.  It's still only been a year since grandmere died.  The family is scattered this year.  Parents traveled to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving on the farm.  Brothers are with friends in two different states.  Aunts are in Florida.  In-laws don't really get together much and stick to their own families.  Grandmere was the glue and heart and soul of my family time and it's just all so different now.  And I don't feel like I have my own family.  The mister and our cat.

3.  The Thanksgiving story.  I subscribe to Indian Country Today Media online and the hostility surrounding this holiday and Native Americans is rampant.  I can't say I don't blame them.  The way history works and how life is often sugar-coated to cover up atrocities and truths is horrendous.  I love a sappy Disney movie but real life isn't always like a fairy tale.  I wish there was a way to reconcile such difficulties in so many 'race-related' wars.  But I haven't found the way.

That's not to say I'm not thankful for what I have.  I am thankful for my own ethnic diversity that has made me so so aware of what the world is really like.  And I'm thankful for my eternal optimism, even in previous dark hours of depression and despair...I am thankful that I can always see a light through hard work and perseverance.  (Did I spell that right?). I am thankful for my loved ones, despite distance.  And my home.

I will leave you with this somber voice.  A poem.  Just something to think about.  I think about it.

November 19, 2013 at 5:56pm

Thank you for relocating relations, relocating their hearts, some forgetting or ashamed of their Indigenous roots.

Thank you for alcohol that now courses like blood through reservation veins.

Thank you for teaching our young, impressionable, heavily reserved minds your history and overlooking ours in reservation schools.

Thank you for Catholic boarding school surgeons painfully removing our Native tongue without anesthetic until our mouths bled English.

Thank you for that old white man in the white owned store on my rez that showed my 8 year old eyes the color of my skin as he stalked me like prey aisle-to-aisle, always a thief in his adult eyes.

Thank you for the bruises that covered my sister like war paint, painted by fists, baseball bat and a love created and mixed by your reservations, in wars she never won, dying every time.

Thank you for the U.S.D.A. approved diabetes that has stolen uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, my mother.

Thank you for BIA and its IHS replacing our ceremonial medicine with prescribed addictions that have now stolen so many visions on the rez that it’s hard to see what comes next.

Thank you for compulsory sterilization creating and rewriting so many stories forever left broken and unfinished.

Thank you for the children starving reservations wide, left alone and staying up late, hoping their parent or parents didn’t drink or shoot up all the check.

Thank you for the alcohol related car wrecks that have turned epic poems into tragic short stories.

Thank for the tiny white crosses plunged deep like hot knives into our land and the reservation roadsides that always claim another victim from families dying a little inside every time they drive past them.

Thank you for the F.A.S. and F.A.E. babies turned high school dropouts because the Caucasian teacher from a different world was never taught enough before coming to the rez to teach.

Thank you for the reservation suicides that have killed the spirits of those left behind.

Thank you for using us as mascots, making our young ones feel uncertain in their skin and redefining honor for them by turning us into a cold, unfeeling, symbol for a sports team where drunken fans honor us by mocking us.

Thank you for leading us on to reservations with no guidebooks on how to live in your world on our land, where we are still stumbling and learning, trial by heartbreaking error, to this day.

Thank you for your stereotypical portrayal of us in film and the movies where the white men are the heroes saving the Indians despite the Native-like titles like Dances With Wolves, Thunderheart.

Thank you for stealing our land, raping it like some woman you never knew the name of, leaving her crying, traumatized, bleeding.

* * *

Thank you for razing our homeland, cutting it up into states, poorly piecing it together and shrouding us in it like a quilt infested with smallpox.

I am thankful for all of this for making me feel too fucking much.

I am thankful for all of this turning me into a clenched fist in times when words don’t hit hard enough.

I am thankful for all of this, for stirring the spirits of warriors dormant in us for centuries.

I am thankful for all of this because without it, I could never write this.

Thank you for the artillery, arrows for my bow.

Born a few centuries too late and raised on U.S.D.A. approved commodity everything, Jonathan Garfield is an enrolled Assiniboine tribal member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux reservation in Montana. His stories document the tragedy forced on “his people” (which he loves saying ‘cause it sounds cool) that is the rez. Jonathan has been published in various Art & Literature magazines and quarterlies. His short story, “Reservation Warparties”, became a short film, adapted to a screenplay and directed by Angelique Midthunnder. The short film was featured on the program, Independent Lens, on PBS. Jonathan Garfield continues to write poetry and short stories. He is also a practicing trickster. 

Read more athttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/11/28/thanksgiving-poem-jonathan-garfield-152466