HappyThanksGiving 
November 19, 2013 at 5:56pm
Appreciate relocating relations, relocating their hearts, some failing to remember or embarrassed with their Indigenous roots.
Appreciate alcohol that now courses like bloodstream through reservation veins.
Appreciate teaching our youthful, impressionable, heavily reserved minds your background and overlooking ours in reservation schools.
Appreciate Catholic boarding school surgeons shateringly removing our Native tongue without anesthetic until our mouths bled British.
Appreciate the old white-colored man within the white-colored owned store on my small rez that demonstrated my 8 years old eyes the colour of my skin because he stalked me like prey aisle-to-aisle, always a crook in the adult eyes.
Appreciate the bruises that covered my sister like war paint, colored by fists, baseball bat along with a love produced and mixed from your reservations, in wars she never won, dying each time.
Appreciate the U.S.D.A. approved diabetes which has stolen uncles, aunts, siblings, siblings, fathers, my mother.
Appreciate BIA and it is IHS replacing our ceremonial medicine with prescribed addictions which have now stolen a lot of visions around the rez it&rsquos difficult to see what comes next.
Appreciate compulsory sterilization creating and rewriting a lot of tales forever left damaged and incomplete.
Appreciate the kids depriving reservations wide, left alone and remaining up late, wishing their parent or parents didn&rsquot drink or skyrocket all of the check.
Appreciate the alcohol related vehicle wrecks which have switched epic poems into tragic short tales.
Thank for that small white-colored crosses stepped deep like hot knives into our land and also the reservation roadsides have a tendency to claim another victim from families dying just a little inside when they drive past them.
Appreciate the F.A.S. and F.A.E. babies switched senior high school dropouts since the Caucasian teacher from the different world never was trained enough before visiting the rez to educate.
Appreciate the reservation suicides which have wiped out the spirits of individuals left out.
Appreciate using us as mascots, making our youthful ones feel uncertain within their skin and redefining recognition on their behalf by turning us right into a cold, unfeeling, symbol for any sports team where drunk fans recognition us by mocking us.
Appreciate leading us onto reservations without any guidebooks regarding how to reside in your world on the land, where we’re still stumbling and learning, trial by heartbreaking error, even today.
Appreciate your stereotypical portrayal people in film and also the movies in which the white-colored males are the heroes saving the Indians regardless of the Native-like titles like Dances With Baby wolves, Thunderheart.
Appreciate stealing our land, raping it like some lady you won’t ever understood the, departing her crying, traumatized, bleeding.
* * *
Appreciate razing our homeland, performing up into states, poorly piecing it together and shrouding us inside it just like a quilt infested with smallpox.
I’m grateful its this to make me feel too fucking much.
I’m grateful its this turning me right into a clenched fist in occasions when words don&rsquot hit with enough contentration.
I’m grateful its this, for stirring the spirits of players dormant in us for hundreds of years.
I’m grateful its this because without them, I possibly could never write this.
Appreciate the artillery, arrows in my bow.
Born a couple of centuries far too late and elevated on U.S.D.A. approved commodity everything, Jonathan Garfield is definitely an enrolled Assiniboine tribal person in the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux reservation in Montana. His tales document the tragedy forced on “his people” (that they loves saying &lsquocause it may sound awesome) that’s the rez. Jonathan continues to be printed in a variety of Art & Literature magazines and quarterlies. His short story, “Reservation Warparties”, grew to become a brief film, adapted to some screenplay and directed by Angelique Midthunnder. Rapid film was featured around the program, Independent Lens, on PBS. Jonathan Garfield is constantly on the write poetry and short tales. He is another practicing trickster.
Resourse: https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/arts-entertainment/thanksgiving-a-poem-by-jonathan-garfield/