#honoringindigenouspeoples

[stephantasmagoria]

Thanksgiving Reflections 2019

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Today I am fortunate to give thanks for my very life on the land stewarded by the Northern Valley Yokuts in what is now known as Fresno, California. It is the land where my father, my siblings, my niece, my nephew, and I inhaled our first breaths. It is where my mother exhaled her last breath. I’ll be sitting with my 79 year-old Armenian father, a man who represents the first generation of his family born in the United States of America. His parents, my beloved grandparents, were both refugees of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Centuries of my Armenian ancestors knew the pain of violent separation from the land that birthed them. I know the inherited pain of the ubiquitous denial of this violent separation. Whenever I am in a space in this country where folks honor the indigenous peoples who stewarded the land before the genocide (yes, it is a genocide!) that spanned centuries, I imagine what it might be like for me to sit in a room in Turkey with my father and the ghosts of my grandparents, hearing someone of Turkish descent honor our ancestors for stewarding the land so that people could simply be there and breathe. There is a place deep within me that resonates and heals with the soundwaves of recognition for the indigenous people in the United States. There is a visceral understanding, beyond words, of the importance of this action. Immense and immeasurable gratitude to the Northern Valley Yokuts for stewarding the land where my grandparents found refuge less than a century ago, making it possible for me to be on this planet. I regret that I don’t yet know the specific name of the tribe(s) that lived where my dad and I will be today (the name Northern Valley Yokuts was a very general name imposed on myriad tribes by colonizers). I vow to continue learning and honoring their legacy, and the legacy of any tribe where I happen to be. Happy Thanksgiving to all. May today bring us into fuller connection with the truth of interdependence in service to healing our ancestral lineages, ourselves, and our planet.