There is discussion of the history of the holiday thanksgiving and why it’s a day of mourning for Indigenous Americans and of the history of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, with an emphasis on the pre-history:
I have friends who fast and pray all day on Thanksgiving.
Some have worked on various (north and south) reservations in the U.S., worked or are working for people who living on the rez. Some are lifelong students of the teachers who still choose to live in these places.
John Trudell’s 1980 Thanksgiving Day speech:
For decades, Native Americans were forced to be reliant on the US government to bring them power
Slight addition
Same issue re this Mother Jones article, where this sentence really needs a letter to the editor (which I will be writing shortly):
Once the tribe makes this low-carbon material, they can begin to address a severe shortage of housing and jobs. Recapturing a slice of sovereignty would be a win for the Lower Sioux, once a largely woodland people who were subjected to some of the worst brutality against the Indigenous nations in North America.
They lost [!?!?!] most of their lands in the 19th century, and the territory finally allotted to them two hours south of Minneapolis consists of just 1,743 acres of poor soil. That stands in contrast to the fertile black earth of the surrounding white-owned farmlands.
Brackets mine.
“Lost”? WTF, Mother Jones, I really expected far more from you than this rather telling word choice. When you have something stolen from you, it ain’t lost. It’s taken by force. Stolen. By broken treaty after broken treaty after broken treaty.
And as long as I am here on this specifically, fuck off, The Atlantic. Seriously, do.
On July 28, 2017, The Atlantic announced that billionaire investor and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of former Apple Inc. chairman and CEO Steve Jobs) had acquired majority ownership through her Emerson Collective organization, with a staff member of Emerson Collective, Peter Lattman, being immediately named as vice chairman of The Atlantic. David G. Bradley and Atlantic Media retained a minority share position in this sale.[79]
I expected better from Laurene Powell Jobs as well.
The cultivation of the plant dates back to the Aztec empire in Mexico 500 years ago.
Among Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mexico, the plant is known as the cuetlaxochitl (kwet-la-SHO-sheet), meaning “flower that withers.” It’s an apt description of the thin red leaves on wild varieties of the plant that grow to heights above 10 feet (3 meters).
The article describes how the popular plant was renamed after Joel Roberts Poinsett:
Unvarnished published accounts reveal Poinsett as a disruptive advocate for business interests abroad, a slaveholder on a rice plantation in the U.S., and a secretary of war who helped oversee the forced removal of Native Americans, including the westward relocation of Cherokee populations to Oklahoma known as the “Trail of Tears.”
