Mayflower Street Deadend

Header image description: A picture of a street sign for “Mayflower St” with a “dead end” sign underneath it. This was taken in Plymouth, Massachusetts when I attended the National Day of Mourning in 2020. 

I’m a few “holidays” behind with this writing stuff. Still working to find a rhythm. I wrote a draft of something on the National Day of Mourning / “Thanksgiving”, but it took a minute to land on a platform and get setup and then find the energy to revisit. Anyway, here is a slightly edited and expanded version of what I wrote on November 28, 2024...

Every year during the autumn, at least in my bubble(s), there is more ambivalence and tension and in some cases outright disgust related to the “colonizer holidays”. Of course there are the reframe’s of Indigenous Peoples Day and National Day of Mourning, but overall it’s still nauseating to navigate the mess of contradictions with family, social circles, and determining what might contribute to getting closer to transforming our relationships. 

I am curious about the wanting for some people to find a way to be able to feel good, to pivot to joy, to focus on gratitude, despite the horrors that “Thanksgiving" stems from. I do believe in the need to hold complexity and contradiction. But if the approach is making it so that one doesn’t feel the discomfort in that complexity or contradiction, then it’s not really holding it.

So what are we to do? The family plans that I was potentially going to partake in didn’t end up happening, and so I went the route of fasting, tuning in to the National Day of Mourning livestream out of so-called Plymouth, Massachusetts¹ , and beyond that focusing on contemplation - without the potential for refusing an invite from family. (I wrote about the ambivalence of what to do on this day in the last post)

There are of course various opportunities to be active, such as delivering food and supplies to local encampments and socializing there (encampments being an effect of colonialism), but to be honest, it ultimately feels necessary to have a somewhat quiet day to focus inward.²

I am wondering about this need in our society (maybe mostly for “white” people) to turn away from the discomfort of remembering that for the current dominant way of living to come into being, massacres and theft took place, and maintaining this way of life requires ongoing massacres and theft.

I imagine some people might think that I myself am taking an easy route and just choosing to be miserable. That might be. But I am also trying to tune into an inner knowing that feels right, even if what surfaces feels awful.

So what is my motivation? Maybe what it comes down to is, I yearn for living something other than whiteness and Americanness. This would include something other than capitalism and patriarchy and imperialism. And because I was raised white and American means I am constituted, at least in part, with all of these things as part of me. They aren’t just external forces. They are how I see the world, how I relate to time, to the cosmos, to exchange, to plants and animals and the earth.

So I am imagining they need to be extricated from me in order to live something else.

Does it require wholesale refusal to see what’s on the other side? How does one find a good balance in the process of transforming? And regardless, I believe it is necessarily a collective effort to reach the other side. As Mariame Kaba says, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

This also tracks with Noel Ignatiev’s argument in the essay “Abolish Whiteness”,

And in this reflection on motivation, I am also reminded of a passage in Rehearsals for Living, when Robyn Maynard shares in a letter to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson during the initial phase of Covid 19,

This line by Bambara also hit me, and is hard to really consider. 

I think I want to be well. And in this post, I am honing in on an ambivalence around approaches for liberation. If you hunger strike, even collectively, you may physically die. If you self-immolate, however admirable that is, you may physically die. I think I can relate to the motivation behind these acts, but I want to physically live. But even if a method doesn’t involve physical death due to one's own actions, if you are so uncompromising (and effective) in moving with love and liberation - Fred Hampton comes to mind, having been murdered by the US’s FBI at the age of 21 - you are likely not going to physically live very long.

But the question arises, if you’re avoiding the potential for death (or incarceration) in liberation work because you yourself want to continue to live, are you really living? And what’s underneath the avoidance to fully commit? To quote Fred Hampton, via my friend’s work-in-progress film exploring these topics from the position of being in the Irish diaspora,

When I first heard this quote, it certainly stirred something in the depths. What is the threshold here between living a good, revolutionary life, and falling into complacency? I don’t think everyone needs to be Fred Hampton - there are many types of necessary roles - but it’s certainly a sobering prompt.

Lately when I begin to get overwhelmed with approaches for liberation, plants (not the ones employed by the CIA) have invited me to connect with them. First yarrow and then rosemary (as mentioned in the previous post). A couple days before the National Day of Mourning, another plant started calling for my attention: Dandelion. It turns out Dandelion root is recommended for detoxing. I purchased some Dandelion root tea at the coop (with the intention to someday harvest it directly). I brewed some and drank it while spending some time drumming. It did feel like stuff was working its way out. My jaw and other areas of my body were tensing, and it felt like energetically stuff was working its way up and out of my shoulders and back of neck — similar to microdosing psilicibn.   This feels appropriate, in that maybe, hopefully, it is helping me detox some of this human shit, this US holiday shit, this pressure to look away from what we’re doing to each other shit.

It didn’t feel good on the surface to drink the dandelion tea and be drumming, and yet it felt right. I felt trust. Similar to going with the impulse to spend some time with rosemary that l believe was indeed helping regulate my nervous system around family, and yarrow back in October helping to identify some core wounds and hard truths to consider. (still another story for another post)

So for now, my motivation is indeed to tune in and align with ways that will lead to relationships that are no longer mediated by whiteness or Americanness (internally and externally, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and structurally) — however I do believe that it requires doing so with others and only so much transformation can happen in just one lifetime.

Fasting for a day for the National Day of Mourning, in solidarity with others who also fast during the day, also feels right, but it only heightens the awareness of not knowing what it is like to go hungry for days, or worse to be starved by global superpowers. I am keenly mindful that I have food in the kitchen and control over when the fast will be done.

So what is the use of going thru this and contemplation about hunger and mourning and ongoing settler colonialism + ongoing Indigenous resistance and resurgeance?

Writing this at the tail end of my 24 hours fast, I know I’m not thinking as clearly. I’m less patient. I can feel my body starting to respond to being outside the normal range of hunger.

I’m about an hour before I’ll break the fast, and I’ve taken a couple sips of dandelion root tea. I wonder if its detoxing properties will have a different effect while I am on a very empty stomach…

1  I highly recommend watching the speeches from the National Day of Mourning rally. Please share any thoughts in the comments! (From Turtle Island to Palestine, LANDBACK!) One call to action from this rally is to call on President Biden to free Leonard Peltier. Learn more and take action at: https://freeleonard-peltier.com/ and  https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/ 

2  One way to support unsheltered relatives in “Minneapolis” is to follow Nenookaasi Healing Camp (led primarily by Native women) and share/donate to their campaign to buy land to have a place for people struggling to get stable and transition to housing)