"It feels like our Native community is an old grandmother, who has a very large and very beautiful house. And years ago, some people came into our house, and locked us upstairs in the bedroom. Today, our house is full of people. They are sitting on our furniture, they are eating our food, they are having a party in our house. They've even come upstairs and unlocked the door to our bedroom, but it's much later, and we're tired, we're old, we're weak, we're sick, and so we can't, or we don't come out," reflects Mark Charles, a speaker and writer located on the Navajo Reservation in Fort Defiance, Ariz., in a video posted earlier this year titled "Being Native American in the US."
"But the thing that is most painful, is that virtually no one comes upstairs to find the grandmother in the bedroom. Nobody sits down next to us on the bed, and simply says: 'Thank you. Thank you, for letting us be in your house.'"
While some commentaries on Native Americans and Thanksgiving, such as a 2010 article by News Junkie, describe the holiday as "celebrating the genocide of Native Americans" and recall the long and bloody war history between colonialists and indigenous people, Charles shared in a phone interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday that he and his family celebrate Thanksgiving much like most other American families.
"It's a holiday that I see many Native Americans participating in and using it as a time to gather family and friends and remember to be thankful. But I also agree that there is a large part of our history as a nation that often gets ignored," he began, and noted that many people have heard or been told some version of the myth of the first Thanksgiving, of how a meal was supposedly shared between native tribes and some of the first pilgrims.
Charles, the son of an American woman of Dutch heritage and a Navajo man, is deeply involved in both Native American and Christian issues – he has worked on various projects with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, the Christian Reformed World Missions, Sojourners, Emerging Voices Project, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade; and he is a board member on the Christian Community Development Association and the Christian Reformed Church of North America.
He told CP that Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that provides people an opportunity to gain a little bit of awareness of the indigenous population, which today numbers over 5 million the U.S., but there is still very little understanding of the history of systemic injustices that have occurred.
As for the metaphor of the grandmother in the bedroom, Charles said that it has been a very successful tool and a starting point of conversation in many of his speaking engagements, both in native communities and non-native settings.
"I think it's very important for Native Americans – often we feel like guests in someone else's house, when the reality is we are the host people of this land. The starting point that I'm looking for is for Native communities to see themselves in the role of the hosts of this land, and the rest of the nation to understand in real practical and tangible ways that they are guests in someone else's house," he explained.