::::::::
Why do we call them "Indians" anyway? Does this reflect European's ignorance of the world at the time of Columbus? They thought they were in India! And why call them "Native Americans"? They had no reason to refer to themselves in honor of some obscure European "explorer". Why do we insist on calling his type "discoverers"? They "discovered" a landmass that was unaccounted for in their limited worldview, but that had been inhabited by a race of people with ten thousand years of history on the continent, with a million souls of a thousand different but inter-related cultures that had been living on the land for hundreds of generations in an infinitely sustainable way with little threat of over-population or resource depletion, with no imagined "divine dominion" over other species and Nature in general. Who famously, from written accounts of the period to kindergarten classrooms today, were known to have received the murderous bastard Europeans with magnanimity and compassion (thus the origin of the "Thanksgiving" mythology).
In the interest of getting the labels right, let's call the "explorer-discoverers" by their more appropriate appellation, "conquistadores". This much more accurately describes their role in history. Basically, the white, European elites sent groups of highly expendable low and middle class servants and workers on a capitalist, Christian mission to secure new markets for physical and spiritual exploitation. After two hundred and fifty years of unspeakably ruthless carnage and deceit, they were finally able to establish a whole new nation-state devoted to spreading its rapacious capitalist business model and its genocidal Christian religion over the entire continent, at the expense of an irreplaceable indigenous culture and a comparatively undefiled environment. After another two hundred and fifty years, under the aegis of the American eagle, they have succeeded in building the largest, most technologically-advanced military empire the world has ever known and are on a path to proselytize the rest of the world on their "free markets" and their "compassionate Christian" god.
Another "holiday"(holy day?) season rolls around needing observance to keep the myth, and the economy, alive. The requisite amount of time has been invested by the public school system to indoctrinate the next generation of consumers, I mean "citizens". A not very subtle synthesis of theology and militarism has been suffused into the curriculum, at least at the statutorily required level, if not sooner, all the way down to a few months post-partum (so Mom can get back to work!) So much for the mythology of the "separation of Church and State". An equally egregious effort has been made in the economy to fabricate sufficient "need" for superfluous goods so the all-important cycle of work-produce-consume can continue indefinitely, inexorably increasing the foreign trade deficit and otherwise hastening the demise of self-same economy. Meanwhile, as Americans eat their factory-farmed, hormone-and-antibiotic-ridden abomination that symbolically takes the place of the beautiful natural avian that never did exist in numbers great enough to satisfy their greed, millions of men, women, and children are cold and hungry in far away lands that they are bombing and "sanctioning".
I realize it's probably a very "un-American" sentiment, but viewing the scene under the cold, harsh light of historical fact, rather than ideological fiction, "thankful" is not the emotion I'm able to conjure...
