Happy (Ironic) Thanksgiving Day! 
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
November 26,2009

I never think of that ‘festive’ day without profound cynicism.  In my heart, I am honoring, not celebrating, Thanksgiving this year with mental remonstrations for the Navajo, Cherokee, Sioux, Creek, Apache, and 495 other Native American tribes whose emissaries first unknowingly greeted their soon to be, and for all time thereafter, nemesis, that duplicitous, swindling, rapacious, imperious white man bearing gifts and professing to bring their salvation. 

OK, OK, I know I should not be being cynical on the holiday meant for counting blessings.  With tongue in cheek contrition, I am, nevertheless, thankful that Mother Nature, near mortally wounded, still thrives despite her most errant offspring. 

In the early Spring of 1980, I lived for two months in a six by twelve foot trailer sans utilities in the desert of southeast Arizona, at the foot of the Chiricahua Mountains.  I often drove up into the mountains to visit the stockade where the US cavalry had captured and held Chief Sitting Bull.  I weep even now thinking about it.  I would sit and stare at a plaque on the clay wall that told of Sitting Bull uttering the famous words (my memory may not be exact) “My people go around with their lives on the tips of their fingernails.”  As the legend has it, he later marched with the whites in a Thanksgiving Day parade somewhere in Florida.  What heartbreaking nobility this courageous man showed as he swallowed his pride on that day of irony for the sake of some semblance of decent preservation of the last remaining remnant of the only truly aristocratic peoples to inhabit North America.