Beloved of God,

As you read this, many of you are preparing for Thanksgiving celebrations later this week. Thanksgiving has always been THE holiday in my family of origin, the time when we would gather 30+ people at my mother’s house—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—and we would gorge ourselves on turkey with all the fixings, pour over the Black Friday sales circulars, watch the “young bucks” take on the “old farts” in the annual Turkey Bowl football game, etc. And I’ve mentioned in other articles around this time of year how the day after Thanksgiving we pile into the car & drive to the family homestead in the Palouse to make sausage. The older I get, the more I realize my parents provided a fairly Rockwellian childhood for me and my brothers—and I am grateful for these memories and realize just how blessed I am to have experienced these types of events!

Recently, we have begun paying attention to other voices around Thanksgiving. We are hearing from our indigenous siblings that Thanksgiving is not an awesome day of celebration for them, and (in fact) never has been. Thanksgiving Day commemorates the day when white European colonialism landed on the shores of North America & began the systematic destruction of entire nations, their cultures, & their way of life.

I know many of you will probably stop reading right now. You’re tired of “wokeness” making you feel guilty for many of the things you love & you point out that you personally had nothing to do with the genocide of the indigenous people of the North American continent, and furthermore: you think it shouldn’t have happened, but does that mean we have to give up Thanksgiving?!

Of course not. And also: yes.

Before we are anything else, we are human beings. And we share this earth with other human beings whose ancestors were harmed by our ancestors. We are human beings who learned a very skewed picture of our own national history, to the detriment of other human beings. And that is convicting to me, and (I hope) to you. We are not the people who inflicted the damage, but we are the people who benefit from the damage and continue to support systems that institutionalize the damage—often without our knowledge that this is even happening.

I’m writing this article, not as a “shame on you, white people” letter (I think there’s quite a lot of that out there right now without me adding to it), but as encouragement. If you are a member of the dominant white culture, and most of us are, take some time this week to learn a little bit about the cultures that called your land home before you did. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but perhaps temper your celebration with education. Acknowledgement. Repentance.

Because I am the “professional God person” in my family, when we gather later this week, I will most likely be looked at to lead grace. And as I lead that grace, I will also be naming the cultures that called the land home long before we did. Not as a guilt-inducing exercise, but as an exercise of gratitude, a reminder that we are linked together by the land we love & that we share the responsibility of stewarding that land, a responsibility given to all of us by God the Creator.

If you would like to learn more about which indigenous peoples lived, loved, laughed, worshiped, wept & died on the land you currently call home, you can go to www.native-land.ca for more information. You can also talk about beginning worship services, council meetings, etc with a land acknowledgment—there are samples available on www.elca.org for you to use. These land acknowledgments were written by Vance Blackfox, the Desk Director for American Indian Alaska Native Tribal Nations of the ELCA, so they are solid examples of ways we can begin to understand the ways historical events continue to impact the lives we live today & serve as a helpful guide if you have an open heart to do this work, but are afraid of doing it “wrong” (believe me, I talk to Vance a lot).

In closing: As the NW Intermountain Synod of the ELCA, we acknowledge and honor the Snoqualmie, the Yakama, the Okanagan, the Colville, the Kalispel, the Coeur d’Alene, the Nez Perce, the Blackfoot, the Salish, the Lemhi-Shoshone, the Shoshone-Bannock, the Cayuse, the Umatilla, the Walla Walla, and others upon whose ancestral homelands our synod gathers, as well as all our Indigenous siblings who have and continue to care for this place—this land—and call it their home.

May God bless you with the richness of life in this interconnected web where we are just beginning to listen for all the ways God the Creator has knit us together in this world and in this life.

Bishop Kristen