Thanksgiving

Disabled my Instagram account

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I’ve been spending more time at Council Grove lately than I have since spring, sauntering and pausing and thinking and looking around and then sauntering some more. It’s good to have pockets of time to be on those trails again even if the destruction from last summer’s freak storm is still breathtaking and heartbreaking. Every time I venture out I find a new section that I hadn’t noticed before, and just how much devastation the area absorbed. Times like this it is easy to be reminded of the impermanence of everything. I noted to myself while I was out there, lingering with a fallen friend:

It is still hard to believe this big old tree is gone down every time I walk by it. They seemed eternal because they've been here so long already, but as Kaagegaabaw defines life¹, it is “the eternal moving through the impermanent.” I love that, and it is what we all are, whether we're short-lived human people, shorter-lived bug and rodent people, or even the very long-lived tree people.

We are all beings of impermanence with the eternal moving through us. We are here for a while, and then we are not.

The place will repair itself, if allowed to. Just not really in my lifetime, which is sobering, isn’t it? It’s the long game, something I have been writing about with hopes to have published here by now but probably won’t wrap up until next week.

We also don’t have so much as a trace of snow yet here where I live, though the stark line of it is creeping down the surrounding hills. Ch-paa-qn looked particularly beautiful in her winter ensemble yesterday under a bright blue sky, and that was lovely to see. I expect winter will finally arrive about the time we are desperate for spring, a newish, yearly herald of more change to deal with: the growing evidence of irrevocable climate disruption. “The flow of the river never ceases,” wrote the 13th century Japanese hermit, Kamo no Chōmie, “and the water never stays the same.” As then, it remains now, change just happening faster and faster.

In other news I will be traveling to Los Angeles (Burbank, specifically) the week of December the 8th to finally record the audio version of Becoming Little Shell.² It will be a lot of work in a short amount of time and I’m excited, and curious, to make it happen. I’m very interested to learn how this part of the publishing process is accomplished mostly because, with access to a studio here in Missoula, I’d love to do more of this without the haggling and bureaucracy of involving other people. I’m not sure when the finished version will be available but as news unfolds regarding that I will let you all know.

Less exciting is that all this is happening during a week in December in which I’d cleared my schedule in a state of borderline desperation so that I could have some down time. Not two days after I unhappily canceled my Yellowstone workshop³ it was apparent that if I didn’t schedule the BLS recording that very week then who knows when it could happen. So rest will be delayed another week or two. At least all interactions during that span will be mostly with a microphone. And possibly a visit or two to In-n-Out Burger. I think I’ll manage.

Your support, as always, is a gift to me and I am very grateful. Your paid subscriptions are more important than ever.

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Destruction or not, the snowberries at Council Grove do their thing….

For as long as I can remember Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday. It’s been decades though since I ever associated it with the stupid story of the “traditional” narrative – certainly before I even escaped grade 12 – and I’m always jolted a bit that anyone still does. That we’re even still talking about it. My first, kneejerk thought is that in 2024 it requires an incredible degree of willful ignorance (bordering on overt racism and hate) to maintain adherence to that “traditional” narrative at all.

That is näiveté on my part. Having recently been in parts of the country where it’s clear that people don’t think of Indians at all, or have quite possibly never even met an Indian before, I expect there are still literally millions of people who believe the “traditional” Thanksgiving story still honors Indians. There’s no way for them to know otherwise because how could they? It’s not like this stuff gets taught in most schools. These folks have my compassion and I hope they have an opportunity to learn the truth. Everything I know about Indians I had to actively seek out. It feels like that is changing a little bit, but the pace is glacial.

I’m also convinced there are millions of people who know the traditional Thanksgiving narrative is bullshit and just don’t care. They are assholes.

I wrote about my eternal love for The Last of the Mohicans in Becoming Little Shell. It originated through a cartoon adaptation I first saw one Thanksgiving morning when I was very young. That experience drew me to the movie versions, and even the book.⁴ The thing about that story, and how it impacted a young boy who desperately wanted to be the Chippewa his grandmother said he was, is that its association with Thanksgiving made the holiday about the only time during the year that I got to experience attention being paid to Indians at all. As messed up as the original Thanksgiving narrative is, it was still a doorway into seeing Indians as heroes of a sort, even as noble and kind benefactors to the bumbling pilgrims. I’m almost ashamed to admit that such terrible and typical American gaslighting really served as an important lifeline to my nascent indigeneity, but it did.

I also love that the only people I really need to get along with on Thanksgiving are my family. Which isn’t hard. This year my mom said something like, “Isn’t it nice we don’t have to worry about those terrible interactions over the dinner table that so many other people talk about having?” It’s true. I think a big part of that is alcohol, or its absence at our table (aside from a little wine for some of us), but we are also a small unit who generally get along pretty well. That is part of what I love about the holiday, the celebration of that.

It is more and more difficult to cling to my appreciation for Thanksgiving every year though and it doesn’t have anything to do with settlers and colonialism or any of the other usual suspects who I ignore for the day. I’m over all that, and those scoundrels get the focus of my ire the other 360-whatever days of the year. On this holiday it is my Indigenous relatives and non-Native so-called “allies” who cause me consternation with varying degrees of shaming and finger wagging about how horrible the idea of the holiday is.⁵

The anti-Thanksgiving social media deluge hit harder this year than ever before, likely because this was the first Thanksgiving in which I’d had any kind of social media since the last time I’d written about it. Memes and statements erupted from Native accounts and then exploded across my feed as anyone and everyone started sharing and re-sharing until it seemed that’s all I was seeing. It spotlighted how much of a bubble that particular part of my life – the Instagram-based, social media part – really is, especially as I began to see the same images and screeds shared over and over again from a widening ring of ripples. A bubble far, far beyond what my actual day-to-day, face-to-face life is, which was in a way kind of gratifying but also alarming. So I disabled my account. I don’t know that I will enable it again anytime soon, if ever. I don’t think it was serving much purpose anyway and it was starting to stress me out.

It isn’t that I disagree with the statements. It’s that I saw just how useless keyboard warrioring is, and how performative it is, and how prone I can be to participating in it. It was a mirror held up to my own actions and I don’t want to fuel that. I don’t want the online world to jade me against what my real world life is, where I actively go out and engage with people, for better or worse.⁶ I don’t want social media to rob me of my enthusiasm for that. It’s hard enough as it is!

Maybe large accounts reach people beyond the choir, and beyond trolls, but I doubt it. Social media just isn’t built for that kind of thing, it’s built to sell product – either product to buy or the products we make of ourselves for our followers to consume – and I don’t want to be one. If I wasn’t already aware of the performative nature of social media activism and “allyship” I am more keenly so now in the wake of a year of watching the genocide in Gaza unfold in real time. A majority of the same people who claimed to care about Gaza and claimed solidarity immediately abandoned that to rave about the excellent candidates the Democrats trotted out in opposition to Trump, pro-genocide politicians almost exclusively. I get voting for that ilk as a stopgap against Trump and his goons – I did myself, except for when it came to the presidential ticket⁷ – but I sure as hell wasn’t going to show any enthusiasm for those candidates. In fact, writing about my frustration over the entire thing led to some nasty responses and unsubscribes; this is one of the tamer ones:

There are a lot of people trying very hard to do the right thing. Not everyone who is elected becomes an opponent. I can understand the author's justified anger. I cannot agree that every single elected official is a horrible person just clinging to power and I don't want to spend time with that kind of thinking. And I'm from Portland, Oregon, too, where we support Chris La Tray. I've used his writing with students. But maybe not anymore.

First, an opponent is not necessarily an enemy, and if citizens don’t engage with elected officials with a healthy dose of critical thought and side-eye, then we’re suckers. Nor did I ever say every single elected official is a horrible person. I think the longer one stays in politics the more likely one is to become horrible⁸, which is as good a reason as any to strive for term limits on these people, but I’m sure some go into public service truly wanting to serve. That said, I think it requires a deep level of privilege to feel like being prepared to be in opposition to elected officials, even those you support, is more civic duty than you want to be responsible for. That’s thinking I don’t want to be around. So there’s the door – mind your ass.

I have devoted way to much time in trying to make my thoughts with this newsletter coherent and I just don’t think I’m going to get there with the time I have. I want to say that I think we are in for a long and difficult stretch here, one in which recovery, like out at Council Grove, probably won’t happen in my lifetime. Those of us who can really need to operate in real world, face-to-face contexts, and get away from our stupid screens and devices where we are just constantly shouting into a breathless void. No one is going to save us but ourselves, so take some risks. Think critically. Pick a cause outside of the establishment and devote yourself to it. Maybe you’re a diehard Democrat; take the time to really listen to the people who feel abandoned by them. Recognize the places where you can exert a little influence and exert it, even at the risk of comfort and lost relationships. Otherwise we can, and should, expect the worst.

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It’s funny as I write this last paragraph there is a cacophony of siren activity outside my window here in Burbank. Malibu is burning somewhere out there, and I have to hit the sidewalk soon to go do some recording. I’m a couple days beyond when I really should have shaved and washed my hair, but is it really even a recording session if one isn’t kinda greasy?

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1. Of course I mean my friend James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw. He talks of this notion while describing the Anishinaabe teaching of Mino-bimaadiziwin, or the Good Life, in Chapter Four of his essential book, The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings.

2. In OTHER other news it’s been days since I first started this newsletter and I am already IN Burbank and have a day in recording the thing.

3. Something I look forward to every year that, canceling, felt how it does when an injury or illness forces a cancellation. Given I’m not in Yellowstone this year, and I wasn’t asked to do a Freeflow workshop this summer, I’m feeling very disconnected from the communities I’ve come to rely on and I’m wondering what is next. There is always something next though, isn’t there? Maybe I could do Yellowstone and a river thing just for fun, even. What a concept!

4. Which I haven’t read in ages and I bet is gawdawful.

5. I get it, though. I am right in line with the outrage when I’m expected to celebrate and “just get along for a day” on the 4th of July. I feel the two holidays are vastly different though, but that’s discussion for another day.

6. And oof, have there been some doozies lately.

7. They called Montana for Trump maybe 20 minutes after the polls closed in my state, it was such a presumed anti-Harris landslide. The only race they called faster was the one for Governor, in fact. Not a single candidate I voted for in this state won, which says almost as much about those candidates as it does the dumpster fire this state has become.

8. The same could be said about writing and writers, I think….