ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ

This is my first Thanksgiving alone.

No, wait, let me try again.

Hey. It’s been awhile. I haven’t written anything on here for what feels like obvious reasons, but I’ll spell them out anyways, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s that what might feel obvious to me isn’t actually that obvious to everyone else.

Banal observations on my own human experience aren’t all that important when the government that currently controls my land is also controlling someone else’s land, and every single day an artist is blacklisted for saying the violence by which the land and its people are controlled is wrong.

What a privilege to be blacklisted instead of bombed. What a privilege, my friend Carmen says, to be burnt out instead of burned alive.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I’m in the middle of reading Libra by Don DeLillo, which is complete and total fiction, but parts of it are becoming real to me. The parts in question are that secrets are important and obfuscation is sometimes necessary and also this country I call my home is definitely the bad guy in the long arc of the moral universe.

I wonder if it’s actually illegal still for me to call myself a communist, or if that’s inflammatory disinformation leftist infographic creators just post so they can use fear to become popular.

Earlier this year I was on a video call with one of the leaders of Code Pink, a feminist who has had a huge impact on my development as a Marxist-feminist, and one of the most peaceful hearts I’ve come across. She told me a story about China and the way it treats its Indigenous population. No country is perfect, but her story of the people there having free healthcare and treatment for intergenerational trauma and alcoholism made me so sick with envy and grief, I had to force myself to smile until the end of the call, at which point I stood up and lay down on my brother’s hotel room couch.

I keep wondering what the appeal is of radical rugged individualism. Is it that its believers fear they’re too far gone to be loved? Or is that useless sentimentalism? I don’t really believe in evil, not pure evil. I think there are acts that are pure evil, of course, and the current genocide is one of them. But the idea that the world can be divided into good people versus evil people feels like it’s a slippery slope into no accountability. I cannot be held accountable, this worldview says, because I am a good person, therefore these evil acts have nothing to do with me. My soul and my conscience are clean. No, what I see is people who are selfish because we’re taught to be selfish saying things like “I don’t actually care about the hundreds of bloodlines being wiped out because I can’t afford the gas in my car.” Not noticing these two things are connected, not noticing the threads or the patterns or the difference between complicit and complacent. One means guilty by association. The other means smug and uncritical. A lot of us are both.

When I think about a better world, my brain always goes to the logistical aspect of it. Maybe that’s a reaction to the people I’ve met who want to reinvent the frontier and homesteading, specifically white millennials (this includes white Natives, sorry about your great-grandma or whatever, but you need to turn off Supernatural and read theory) who romanticize the idea of total societal collapse but don’t actually know how to gut a deer or shoot a gun or even carry a thought without making it about themselves. I think about where the food goes. Who grows it. How we’re going to get medication afterwards. Did you know you can harvest lithium from seawater? It takes less energy, too. On a purely dull, mundane, zero magical thinking note, this world literally gives us all we need. I don’t understand why we “need” slavery or genocide or a bottom-tier class of “untouchables” to be constantly imperiled and humiliated. This is not an invitation for you to tell me the world is run by dark magicians doing blood magic or whatever. I actually don’t care. But if you’re reading this and you personally know someone who’d look good in a guillotine, I invite you to imagine the world out of their grasp.

This is my first Thanksgiving alone. I was really happy a couple Thanksgivings back when I realized my mother had married into a white family that knew how to cook. I still remember how good that Polish food tasted in their warm house, surrounded by people who loved each other. I was really happy Thanksgiving of 2019, when my dad invited as many LGBT people as we could over and he joked that we should share pronouns instead of what we’re thankful for during the go-around. I was really happy Thanksgiving of 2018, when my house was full of Indians, including my friend Ishkwaazhe, who directed Mino Bimaadiziwin and spent the holiday sitting on our leather couch, typing away furiously at a screenplay while our dog, Smudgepuppy, buried his face in his hip. I wasn’t super stoked about Thanksgiving 2021, just because it was kind of dumb and annoying, and when I look back, all I can see is the face of the person who broke my favorite synth, among other things, visibly leering at my heavily pregnant cousin. Even then, it was a good Thanksgiving. The food was amazing.

Gratitude is a practice I hope to cultivate every day, not just today. When I first moved here, I slammed my thumb in the car door. The nail turned black and crystallized. Now it’s about to fall off. There’s a new nail already underneath, encased in the mica of my body. I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful for eyedrops and my medication, even though the side effects are what made me use eyedrops today, and I’m thankful for the white faux leather couches that came with my apartment because the previous tenant left in a hurry. I’m thankful for nightmares. How I have them now when I never did before. They tell me I’m human, more human than I remember. I’m thankful for boric acid suppositories and estradiol and testosterone. I’m thankful for PrEP and free books and big sweaters. I’m thankful for my mind and my spirit and the way I can change my behavior like that.

I’m thankful for you, reading this, for reading my work and sharing these moments with me. Me at my ugliest, at my most insecure, or today, making zero sense because I really have nothing of note to say. No history to stitch together. No connections to make. No grand revelations. You sit with me and honor me with your sitting, with your forgiveness, with your active listening and when you tell me something resonates and I get to feel like a node in a vast network of mycelia, feeding the people. Giving.

Tonight I urge us all to think about our country. The war machine. Divestment from it. This endless violence gives nothing, gains nothing. No wealth comes to you or I from all who die in hate. No homeland. No security. Ask yourself, really, when was the last time you felt truly held? Truly at home? Our leaders seem to have an infinite supply of resources for bloodshed and cruelty, but nothing to offer us, the people here who live and die on this land. Hotter summers, more brutal winters. Ceremonial protocols changing because they have to.

I’m an American. I’m a Native American. I say that without a hint of irony. I’m Ojibwe and transsexual and I have absolutely nothing to say tonight but that I’m thankful to be myself, to be here, to have a home and some food and blankets and pillows and a lot of interesting books to read and obsess over and be ruined by. To have people who love me. To love other people. For intimacy and its consequences. For anger and impulsivity and the humbling moment of apology. War, invasion, genocide, these don’t give me those things. These don’t bring me my freedom. You do. You give me everything I have. You set me free.

One of my friends had an art installation awhile back called “until victory, the logic of the people; until doom, the logic of imperialism.” I bought a zine version of the exhibit, printed on tracing paper, and it sits at the top of a bookshelf I bought when I first moved here, the one that makes my books look like one big, precarious pile, but in actuality, organizes them perfectly. What does victory look like to you? Does it look like zillion dollar zoom lectures with grifters who have skeletons in their closets? Does it look like pretty clothes, makeup, institutional acknowledgement? Or does it look like wild rice and stew? Your parents living until they’re well into their eighties or older? Your children trusting you with their biggest, darkest mistakes, knowing you won’t hurt them, knowing you’ll hold their hand? What does it sound like? Smell like? Taste and feel?

Thanksgiving is an excuse to eat a lot of food with the people we love. I’m spending it alone right now, except for my dear friend’s cat, who I’m feeding and checking on all week. You don’t gotta make it weird, God knows it’d be weird if you brought this up unprompted, but just look at the people around you, if you can. Feel the warmth. Let it suffuse your blood, muscle, skin, bones. Imagine this, but all the time, for all people on this big, miraculous earth. Can you imagine?