🌍IMSPARK: Thanksgiving Rooted in Truth and Respect🌍

🌍Imagine… Thanksgiving Rooted in Truth and Respect🌍

💡 Imagined Endstate:

A Blue Pacific where Thanksgiving (or its equivalent gatherings) becomes a time of genuine gratitude, historical honesty, and cultural respect, where Indigenous narratives are centered; communities reconnect with land, ancestry, and values; and holiday traditions reinforce healing, solidarity, and shared responsibility across island nations and diaspora communities.

📚 Source (APA):

NativesOutdoors. (2025, June 27). Decolonizing “Thanksgiving”: A Toolkit for Switching the Narratives of History. link.

💥 What’s the Big Deal:

The conventional Thanksgiving narrative, Pilgrims + friendly feast + harmonious beginnings, obscures a painful history of dispossession, genocide, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. The toolkit from NativesOutdoors explains that for many Indigenous communities, Thanksgiving is a triggering reminder of an ongoing colonial legacy, not a celebration🌿. 

Through the process of Decolonize → Dissect → Indigenize, the toolkit invites individuals and families to “pull apart everything we were taught,” challenge myths, and rebuild traditions grounded in truth, connection, and ancestral knowledge🌱. 

That matters for the Pacific and for you: in Hawai‘i and across our islands,they live on lands with their own histories of colonization, displacement, and cultural erasure. Honoring Indigenous truth, whether Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander, means acknowledging that history, listening deeply, and re-rooting gratitude in relationships to land, community, ancestors, and environment 🌺.

By reframing Thanksgiving as a time for reflection, land- acknowledgement, ancestral remembrance, ecological gratitude, and cultural continuity, rather than mythicized colonial celebration, communities can help heal historical wounds, support Indigenous dignity, and build intergenerational solidarity 🤝.

During Thanksgiving, imagine shifting from myth to meaning, from convenience to consciousness🍂. By embracing the toolkit’s call to Decolonize → Dissect → Indigenize, we can transform a holiday born of colonial myth into a practice of respect, remembrance, and real gratitude. For the Blue Pacific, with our own histories, cultures, and ongoing journeys, this can become a powerful act of solidarity, rooted in truth, honor, and hope for generations to come.

#Decolonize, #Thanksgiving, #BluePacific, #IndigenousTruth, #CulturalHealing, #LandAcknowledgement, #PacificSolidarity, #GratitudeAndRespect,#imspark