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Thanksgiving celebration has always been synonymous with gratitude in this country. It’s a time dedicated to sustaining family and nurturing bonds with those important to us. The holiday is seen as a pillar in the expression of American culture, and, by extension, American values. But this definition comes at a great cost to the collective consciousness of the American people.

Our curiosity with Thanksgiving’s history usually stops at the Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving Feast of 1621. This singular event has overwhelmingly informed and reduced the holiday to its present-day narrative. If contextualized properly, though, Thanksgiving becomes innate to the inhumane crimes against Indigenous peoples.

Thanksgiving is, in essence, a celebration of genocide. The mass rationalization of this fact sustains the contemporary structures that inform American culture itself. Without genocide, the foundation of our traditional American identity falls apart.

In 1775, at the gates of the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered Maj. Gen. John Sullivan and his men on a murderous campaign in present-day upstate New York against the Indigenous people of the land, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. His response to the alliances created between five of these Iroquois Nations and the British didn’t seek peace or diplomacy, but mass erasure.

By the end of the Sullivan Campaign, over 40 Indigenous villages were destroyed. The survivors became refugees or victims of a later death at the hands of European settlers.

This event acted as one of the precursors to the creation of Syracuse and its surrounding areas. It functioned as the preparation of land, creating adequate conditions for the continued expansion of settler colonialism and U.S. development as an independent entity.

In 1781, now well into the war, New York state lacked funds to both incentivize military service and pay its soldiers, turning to land bounties as the solution. By 1783, New York’s payments to its enlisted soldiers were decided to come from land in the Haudenosaunee territory. The amount of land promised was based on military rank: major generals received 5,500 acres, brigadier generals received 4,250 acres and so on.

The genocide of the Indigenous people was used to enforce these new designations, not just in New York state, but all over the country. European settlements replaced Indigenous communities. Railroads and interstates erased already-advanced Indigenous infrastructure.

Food sources, like the American buffalo, were exterminated in an effort to create mass dependency, death and compliance. When European settlers arrived, there were over 10 million Indigenous peoples living in the Americas. By 1900, that number was reduced to 300,000.

Our entire society was built on genocide and continues to be. We have internalized, accepted and standardized it throughout our efforts of cancerous growth. Recent American media, like the 2018 show “Yellowstone” and the 2018 film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” have hesitated from or ignored the accuracy necessary to properly contextualize the role of Indigenous people in their stories.

White supremacy and the oppressive racial hierarchy created by slavery were encouraged and celebrated through literature like 1854 “The Planter’s Northern Bride” by Caroline Lee Hentz, films such as 1939 “Gone With the Wind” and music like Daniel Decatur Emmett’s 1859 song, “Dixie.” The U.S. used the enslavement of African people as the primary tool in their respective genocide. The genocidal ideology that fueled this structure rooted its reproduction in American culture as well.

These crimes are enforced by consistent societal celebration of them. Manipulating the very narratives that contextualize American culture privileges us with the ability to decode them as necessary requirements for achieving national success. Societal rationalization of genocide survives because of our collective denial of its effects.

This not only applies domestically, but globally, too. America’s historical encouragement of genocide extends far across the world. Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, personally ordered a carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia, killing around 150,000 civilians.

This action is often credited as an inciting incident to the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, which led to the 1975 Cambodian genocide roughly two years later. Two million people were killed over four years.

Kissinger and the Nixon administration also violated a congressional arms embargo on Pakistan in 1971, shipping weapons to East Pakistan and subsequently enabling the Bengali genocide occurring there.

As of Wednesday, the death count of Palestinians at the hands of a genocidal Israeli state has climbed to 69,513. Since 1950, as the occupation of Palestine developed, the U.S. has provided $63 billion worth of arms to the state of Israel. Last year alone, the U.S. provided around $12.5 billion in military reinforcements.

Donald Trump’s administration has taken great efforts to silence the truths about the genocide against the Palestinians. It seeks to weaponize our struggles so that we may turn on one another, mold false narratives in the media and whitewash our true history and current reality. It pedestals genocidal campaigns and looks to hand out awards for its accomplices.

American society has been forever intertwined with genocide, and many of us struggle to see it clearly. We attempt to abstain from our complicity by inviting an exhaustive silence that does nothing less than insulate us from each other. We pick and choose what to believe, often fed a historical education that convinces us that our country’s hands are not stained with blood.

We must stop sinking into the compartmentalization of our society. This isn’t a simple question that lingers in the world of politics or economy: It remains a pillar of our American identity. It informs and guides the many expressions of our existence as Americans.

It’s our choice to decide whether or not we care to sleepwalk through this reality. To transform our culture, we must first transform ourselves and challenge our pre-established understandings of American society through education. It is only then that we can begin to awaken a consciousness that will help formulate the path forward.

Mateo Lopez-Castro is a senior sociology, television, radio and film major. He can be reached at malopezc@syr.edu.

Published on November 19, 2025 at 9:44 pm