A DIVERSITY OF THANKS : Native American Day of Thanks, Sadness

Mary York is an urban Native American for whom Thanksgiving has always represented a paradox.

“As a revered holiday, I observe it,” said York, a North Hills woman who is part Chiricahua Apache, Mohawk, and Penobscot. “I’m an American. But it was also a day of sadness, a day of mourning for me.”

Los Angeles has the largest population of urban Native Americans, about 100,000 people representing 200 tribes from across the United States. And the way they celebrate Thanksgiving--if they mark it at all--varies widely from person to person.

The American Indian Student Assn. at Cal State Northridge, for example, has decided to ignore the holiday because, aside from that first storied encounter with the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, the relationship between Native Americans and those who took their lands went sour, said Linda Pepper, vice president of the student group.

Many of the massacres of native tribes, as well as the mass forced migrations to reservations happened during the winter months and the traditional holiday season, said Pepper, a history major studying the United States colonial period.

Tacheeni Scott, a biology professor at Cal State Northridge and a full-blooded Navajo, plans to take his family snowboarding in Colorado for Thanksgiving, but on the way he will also stop off to visit his parents on their reservation near Tuba City, Ariz., where they traditionally slaughter a lamb as part of holiday feasts. His parents give him as much meat as he can take with him.

“My family has always taken advantage of holidays to get together as a family,” said Scott, who points to that first Thanksgiving as a way of showing the true quality of native peoples.

“I think that is a very good testimony to the teachings we have among Native American people, that strangers are to be taken in and helped,” Scott said. “We take great pride that we have always been a hospitable people.”

“The bottom line is--for most American Indian people--we are always giving thanks,” said Paula Star Robideau of the Southern California Indian Center. “We give thanks for the creation of another day. We give thanks for the food and for the creation of all creatures.”

Father Paul Ojibway, a Roman Catholic priest who is the liaison from the Catholic Archdiocese in Los Angeles to the Native American community, said that Native Americans in the past 20 years have tried to get away from the Pilgrim version of Thanksgiving in favor of their own culture.

“It’s really a signal for us in the American Indian community to start taking care of our poorest people,” said Ojibway, who is also half Ojibwa, from the upper Great Lakes region of Minnesota. “Somehow, we lose the perspective that every day, hundreds and hundreds of Indian families go hungry.”

The irony is that the Thanksgiving feast, marking the arrival of European settlers in North America, foreshadowed the end of the Native American culture’s dominion, he said. In that culture, he said, no one went hungry, and people expressed gratitude through feasts.

“In the gratitude is a fundamental tenet of Native American spiritual life,” Ojibway said. Giving thanks, he said, “provides the strength we need to do battle to remain who we are.”