5. Thanksgiving Special
Resources:
Indigenous Writes- Chelsea Vowel, Portageandmainpress.com
Thanksgiving celebration highlights Aboriginal culture-Suzanne Methot, AMMSA(info on Wataybugaw)
Thanksgiving in Canada-Celine Cooper, The Canadian Encyclopedia(info on the history of Canadian Thanksgiving)
Transcript:
Lapis:If that's not what you want, don't do it. Center your own happiness and center the happiness of people who need to be heard, and I think that that is so much more of a meaningful way of thinking about family and thinking about the world than, "Just eat turkey with your family. Eat duck with your family. Ignore them when they say horrible things, just shut up and eat!"
[Theme music plays]
Phuong:Welcome to The Rising Rose...
L:...A podcast that deconstructs concepts and reconstructs stories.
P:We are your hosts Phuong...
L:And Lapis!
[Theme music finishes]
L:Oftentimes, when we think about this holiday, what sort of images come to your mind? Is it a turkey roasting in the oven? Is it friends and family coming to see each other after a long period of absence? Is it the games and fun that we share on cold October nights? Or is it genocide?
So Thanksgiving is a holiday with a long and storied history, much of it is very, very bad, and much of which is in very desperate need of analysis. And I don't wanna pretend that I am the first to come up with these sorts of ideas. Obviously, I'm working off of a long, long tradition of indigenous scholars who have had a more critical eye towards thanksgiving, that much the public.
Thanksgiving is a very interesting holiday because in some ways it's one of the weird ways that states like Canada and America, where it is celebrated, try to merge immigrant groups that encompass them into a unified culture. It is in some way is, I don't know, a bit of Turkey thrown into the melting pot stew.
P:Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Part of how Thanksgiving has been portrayed through school and through the other institutions that we have gotten knowledge from really affects our perception on the origins of this holiday.
I can definitely remember how in school taught that Thanksgiving was about cooperation between indigenous peoples and the settlers that came. And how, you know, settlers are very thankful for indigenous people coming and providing them aid in navigating the land, in agriculture and just basically settling into the new life. While indigenous peoples were very thankful for all of the new technology that was brought over by Europeans and all of this brand narrative about equal exchange between the two. Meanwhile, I think the much needed analysis you talk about is the omission of the asymmetry in power and the imbalance of power that truly actually occurred during contact, right?
And I think Thanksgiving, as it stands right now, especially in states such as Canada, centers around a very settler understanding of Thanksgiving and being thankful for more material items such as wealth or land. But even in the way that family is conceived of and how gatherings are centered, mostly I think, still on your biological family and your obligations towards your biological family. Even if you may not feel a sense of closeness to them because you don't see them every day or you aren't in contact with them every day, Thanksgiving is the one holiday in which you have to congregate around a huge dinner table and speak with some relatives that you may very well not get along with. Which I think is a very interesting aspect of Thanksgiving.
L:Mmm-hmm. For more socially-minded people, Thanksgiving can be seen as a great thing, but for people who are more anti-social, Thanksgiving can be a day to dread and a day to endure.
Now, Thanksgiving is very interesting because although the Canadian and American holidays of Thanksgiving are often conflated, they have very different histories. Neither of which is necessarily good per se to indigenous people, but different. They represent different kinds of problematic, different shades, if you will. Thanksgiving that you're probably most aware of is the American Thanksgiving, which was modeled off of a 1621 harvest feast between the English colonists at Plymouth and the Wampanoag people who lived in the region at the time. Now, settlers, as settlers typically are, were completely useless when it came to actually knowing how to live in the new land that they had decided to colonize. But thanks to the help of the Wampanoag Tribe, who saw the settlers as an opportunity to help them fight off other neighbouring tribes in the area, they received the help of this Wompanoag man by the name of Squanto. Squanto had actually been kidnapped by the English earlier in his life and sold into slavery, and from them, he had learned how to speak English. Which really astonished the English settlers at the time because they completely assumed that no one would speak their language, but they seemed to have forgotten that by that time, there had already been decades worth of contact.
So Squanto was working on behalf of his tribe, probably not really motivated by any sort of altruistic feeling towards the people who had enslaved him. He was kind of thinking in more of a realpolitiks terms, "Okay, I know the English can be useful to get rid of some other tribes that are bothering us, and my tribe, the Wampanoag are in kind of a vulnerable situation because our people have been devastated by plague. Hmm, I know! What if we use English by the other tribe and we get on their good side?" And so he did this by teaching them how to cultivate corn, how to extract maple syrup, how to catch fish in the river and how to avoid poisonous plants. Because without those skills, about half of the population that had already landed on Plymouth had already died. So without Squanto's help, it is very likely that they all would have died because they were completely unused to the climate.
So in order to thank the Wampanoag for their help, the settlers of Plymouth invited them over to have a feast. And they had this period where they had been doing really well in shooting down fowl like duck and bird, um but probably no turkey. And then the Wampanoag were invited and they brought along venison and they all shared some corn, and this is how kind of the tradition started. However, the side of the story that they don't tell you is that peace between the Wampanoag and the English did not last. In fact, 50 years later there was a King Phillip's war and it basically resulted in the genocide and virtual ending of the Wompanoag as a power in the region. So much for gratitude, you know? You save a peoples' life, then they just turn around and stab you in the back 50 years later.
[Break music plays and ends]
P:That is, I think, a good way to illustrate to the listeners of this podcast about how we pick and choose what details we remember from history to create a narrative as convenient for us.
I think that, you know, the role of tradition in this sense in society is to reinforce this overall narrative that settler claim towards land is legitimate because it was founded upon the desire to create a better life. And actually, oftentimes I would see settlers being conflated with immigrants in the same way in the contemporary sense of immigrating, right?
And I think that it's an important distinction to make here between settlers who are moving to what was going to be established as Canada and the United States in order to establish a western colony to further the imperial desires of Britain and France. I think that is a very different method of migration, or it's a very different motivation of migration over the contemporary sense of immigration. Where people who are actively persecuted in their countries are moving towards nation states that have been established as "better resourced" and a variety of other factors that would contribute to somebody moving.
I think that it's also worth it to note that, of course, settlers who came from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds or settlers who are persecuted in their home countries, or were facing difficulties such as the Irish and the potato famine. I think it's worth it to recognize the nuance of those who came because they were persecuted and sought a better life, but still were advantaged because of the ongoing violence towards indigenous peoples. I think that we have to recognize that as something important.
L:Definitely. I am very much against the conflation of settlers and immigrants because when immigrants come to Canada, they don't, you know, execute violence against the people that live here. They don't try to wipe out the culture of the people that live here. Whereas settlers, you know, not only do they come, they enforce their own idea of property relations on to the society that they lived in. And their goal isn't so much to co-exist with people of different cultures, it is to change the culture that was there before them into one that is a mirror image of their own.
P:I do think it's important though to recognize, of course, that there were settlers who had the power to enforce this such as the colonial agents who had money, who were sponsored by, you know, the monarchies that they came from in order to enforce this. And the settlers who come from a lower socio-economic background I think have less power in relation to these people to enforce that violence, right? But I do agree with you that it is different in the contemporary context. The contemporary immigrants that we think of now are typically people fleeing some sense of persecution and even if they aren't, the reason why most immigrants move is because their own countries have been devastated by imperialism or by colonialism in another facet. And it's difficult to attain stability because of the historical reality.
I do want to say though, that because Canada is a settler state, anybody that is non-indigenous is benefiting from the active displacement of the Indigenous people, so I just wanna make that very clear. Because as an immigrant myself, I think that is something that I've had to come to terms with that has been very difficult to come to terms with because I have faced discrimination. And I know that I have systemic barriers placed against me, but I do recognize that the systemic barriers I face are very different from the systemic barriers indigenous peoples face. And many times the Canadian state will use me and the benefiting of immigrants such as myself as an excuse to continue the ongoing violence or Indigenous people. So I do wanna make it clear that that is also a reality, it's very complicated and very messy.
L:Yeah, I definitely don't agree. I mean, I don't disagree rather. I wasn't trying to create a false dichotomy between settler and immigrant. All I'm trying to say is that the settlers that were coming to Plymouth have a very relationship than the immigrants that are coming today. And I don't disagree that, you know, a lot of the immigrants, they are still beneficiaries of living on indigenous land. That can't be something that we just gloss over, "Oh no, it didn't happen by virtue of them also maybe being people of color!" Yeah, that's not really how systems work.
And I'm not also trying to say that, "Oh no, the pilgrims of Plymouth were completely evil people who got what they deserved." No, they were religious refugees at the time, and of course, there were worse immigrants that came later, like actual feudal slave owners who settled in Virginia. And sometimes people who have been displaced, people have been persecuted can also become persecutors in another context. And that is very much what happened with the pilgrims and their descendants. Just because they suffered, it doesn't mean they did not inflict new suffering upon the people whose land they were settling on.
[Break Music Plays and ends]
P:The word settler is very contested for this reason because I think a lot of people recognize that colonialism was horrible, especially settler colonialism in the Canadian context. And I think a lot of people become very defensive at the recognition of their settler identity or their settler positionality. And I think someone who I've credited a lot with my understanding of settler as a word is Chelsea Vowel. She's incredible, she's an academic and an activist and a writer, but she wrote a book that is called "Indigenous Writes" and basically details in the first chapter about why we use certain words to describe the relationship between people within settler colonialism. And I think that it's important to keep in mind that in such a large system such as settler colonialism, even if you yourself don't have any intention of participating in that exploitation, by virtue of it being a system that relies on the exploitation of certain people, you will necessitate some privilege in existing, right? It doesn't mean that you yourself are a horrible person and that we are shaming you or telling you that you are bad or your family is bad, and that you should feel ashamed. It's more just a recognition of reality. In the same way that when we talk about white privilege, we need white people to realize that they have benefited from a racial hierarchy that they probably didn't want to enforce, but is existent now, and we must work to actively dismantle that. So it's the same way with settler identity, right?
I do think though, that it's much more difficult to attack settler fragility because it goes into the very conception of the belonging identity that we have, right? And I think for many folks who are Canadian or who identify as Canadian, that come from Anglophone backgrounds or Francophone backgrounds, really have a difficult time understanding this. Because the whole conception of what Canada is, is that the two founding nations or Britain and France, right? And if you come from a long line of family members who have been settled in Canada for a very long time, it's really hard to think of yourself as someone who is not indigenous to the land because Canada is all you've known, and Canada is what you grew up with. But I think it's important to recognize that even if you feel an attachment to the community and identity, and even if you feel attachment to that part of your history, you have to contend with the very unsettling (haha) reality of how your family could only really be safe because these other people are being violently persecuted, right? Just as how white people can only really benefit because all these other people are below them in the hierarchy. And I think that's difficult to understand, but I just wanted to say this because I wanted the people who are listening to this to know that we are not blaming a person or trying to shame you. But we want you to understand that when you get dismissive or defensive about this reality of being non-indigenous in Canada and in the United States, you're privileging your comfort over the lived realities of indigenous people and the persecution that they continue to face today. And not acknowledging that truth of how your family could only live in peace because of this violence, it only serves to continue the ignorance and the violence that is being perpetuated against indigenous peoples. And no matter how woke you think you are, and no matter how well you think you've unpacked this, there's still so much more to do, and I think that I just want all of our listeners to do that because we as people who are not indigenous are trying to do this ourselves every single day.
L:I don't wanna keep acting like a yes man, like, "Yes, I agree with everything." But Phuong did make very good points, and you know as someone whose family has lived or been settled on indigenous land for centuries now, it is a disconcerting reality. A lot of these people really do feel that Canada is their "homeland," and we often hear about, you know, the heartland of America too. It is a kind of an interesting relationship where now, after the land has been settled by them, after they have enforced their culture and their practices on the land, now the land belongs to them. Now their way of conceiving the land is paramount and law. And I think that it's difficult to undo that sort of mentality, while that ownership remains. You have to decouple the ownership and from there, you know, the grand delusion will break. But in order to get people supportive of undoing like colonial practices, we first do have to realize that we live in a colonial structure to begin with.
P:Yeah, absolutely. I also just wanted to add on by saying that this is where the difficulty comes, right? It's one thing to recognize your privilege or to recognize the advantages that you've been given due to the history of what you were implicated in. I think the next reasonable step is to push past the guilt or the shame you may feel, which is extremely difficult. And I think that it's normal to feel that type of guilt and shame, but in order to really make a difference or make a change the next question you have to ask yourself is "what are you going to do?" And I think a reasonable question to the audience too is just thinking of you know for example, if you go to Thanksgiving dinner with your relatives and they say something that is incredibly racist. Or they reinforce the idea that, "Oh, you know, Thanksgiving is a holiday in which we should ignore all of the horrible histories of violence, against indigenous people and we should just celebrate the positives of how indigenous people are doing better today right, and how everything is rosy and good today." How do you respond? How do you create new traditions that are more in line with your values and how do you disrupt that kind of thinking? I think it's a really good, uh, question to ask ourselves.
[Break music plays and ends]
It is difficult kind of parsing a line between, you know, on one hand, yes, we have to recognize privilege, but to recognize privilege is not in and of itself enough. And for people who believe that no indigenous people have it good now or, "Oh, you know, these bad times happened yes, but they're in the past." I would urge you to look at what's actually going on in Canada and America. In Canada, we have this supposedly progressive Trudeau government pushing through pipelines left right and center. The Albertan government has in fact made it illegal to protest these pipelines, which is an of itself an attempt to say to indigenous people, "No, you cannot speak about these things going through your land. You just have to possibly accept them because your land belongs to us, it is our laws that dominate here." And then, of course, there's the New Scoop through the foster care system, where despite only making up 5% of the population, 50% of children in Canadian foster care are indigenous. That is insane. That is an insane disparity, and it's because we continuously view indigenous parents as not able to care for their children, and we are hyper critical of the way they raise their children. And we still have this idea that they need to be taken in, that, "Oh no, they need to be taken away from these dangerous elements in their culture and oh no, we can raise them to be proper Canadians."
And so when you say these things about Canada being, "Oh you know, colonialism is in the past." It requires looking past all of the suffering that is ongoing. It requires ignoring this. It's building happiness on a lie. And if you want to look into the future and say, "Oh no. In the present and the future, indigenous people will have it so good. We can just forget about these things that have happened in the past." No, the atrocities of the past have an impact on the present, and that impact is still being felt today, and if you want to pretend that that isn't happening, then you're building happiness on a lie.
P:Completely agree, and this also lends us to the question of, "Okay, well, what do we do? Because those who have established family traditions and who enjoy partaking in the food and having fun with friends and family on this holiday, I think that those things are good and are positive and we should be able to embrace them. But at the same time, I think we need to ask how do you participate in tradition in a way that's more in line with your own values, right? And I think that highlighting this to your family members and just having a conversation at Thanksgiving. Being the one to stand up and say, "Hey everybody, I want to create a new tradition where we talk about indigenous history or where we donate money to an indigenous organization and we give thanks to the original caretakers of this land. And we center our turkey eating and cranberry sauce making in the lived realities of trying to do better and rectify the grave injustice that was created in order to give us this facsimile of happiness."
You know I understand everyone's family situation is different, and if you personally are not somebody who is extremely confrontational, I understand that this can be difficult. But I really encourage those who feel safe to and know that they can speak out to do so because your voice matters and your family members are gonna be so much more willing to listen to you rather than to random strangers on a podcast. And I think it's even more apparent when you talk to younger cousins or younger siblings or relatives, because again, there is the added bonus of educating a new generation and creating a new tradition for things giving, right? I know that that's what I do in family gatherings, when I am unsure of how you approach the adults. I simply talk to the kids and ask them, "What do you think about this holiday, what do you think about Thanksgiving? What were you taught in school?" And I'm able to have a really full and enriching conversation with them. I think children understand so much more than we give them credit for, and another way to really navigate Thanksgiving for any other holiday with your family that could be ignorant or could be racist, is to talk to their kids and uh, see how they feel about it.
L:It is true that these older people, they can often be very set in their ways and very prejudiced. And of course you know, occasionally older people can surprise us. They can learn, and I don't want to discount the ability of, you know, your grandparents or your parents or your aunts and uncles or what have you, or even your older siblings to, you know, turn over a new leaf. However, it can be, you know, much more frustrating dealing with someone who's had years and years and years of this bias being ingrained in their heads by their parents and their parents parents, and it's so much easier to start with somebody who doesn't have that sort of background. But also I think that this is not just limited to individually in your own families, you could talk to your families and help them understand the roots of Thanksgiving.
Oftentimes there are more public ways of resisting. There is this 2002 celebration in Toronto called Wataybogaw, and it was an event called "An Aboriginal Thanksgiving" that was held over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Toronto over the course of two days. It was an outdoor festival featuring Powwow dancers, musicians, aboriginal foods and there was a marketplace for indigenous goods and little areas for make-and-take crafts and storytelling sessions, and it was held at the Harbor for Center. And I really just think that this is a great way to re-center Thanksgiving back into how indigenous people actually practiced it before colonization. Because although they did not call at Thanksgiving, they did have a harvest celebration where they would get together with friends and celebrate the fruits of this year's harvest.
You know I feel like in many ways, what happened to Thanksgiving is rather parallel to what happens to a lot of pagan celebrations, like Samhain, turned into All Saints' Day, which turned eventually into Halloween. The dominant religion sees ideas that it likes from another culture, and then "Yank!" takes them and turns them into their own little thing. In a weird way, you could say that Thanksgiving is a bit of cultural appropriation.
P:Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. If that is true, then how do we create new traditions if you have the resources to do so, right? You have the resources to, for example, choose to celebrate it with your chosen family, then how do you create these new traditions that reflect your values? I think a way to do it is, as you say, one: to look at the alternative public celebrations that are happening in your area and just root yourself in the history and the traditions of how indigenous people celebrate Thanksgiving. I think another way to do it is to center the celebration on how you are not only grateful for what you have, but how you will share in the wealth of what you have with other people, right? I think many people think of Christmas as the holiday to give and to be able to, you know, share or redistribute wealth, but I think all holidays of celebration deserve that, right? Because if you are going to celebrate what you have, especially if you're going to be cognizant of the privileges that you hold systemically, then I think the next logical step is to say, "Well, if I am grateful for all these things I have, then why don't I share this with people who might not be able to be thankful because they don't have the access to the same resources I do, right?
I think that one of the best ways to create new tradition is to respectfully participate in what has been established and conduct yourself politely in spaces in which you've been invited to, which means not speaking up unless you're asked to and really just sitting and observing and absorbing what is going on. And the second is to also just look at traditions from your own heritage. I think for me, being a Vietnamese immigrant, there's a lot of interesting holidays and celebrations in Vietnamese culture that I have very much been disconnected from growing up here in North America, right? I've actually heard of a lot of Vietnamese families instead of having turkey, they will have duck or another type of food on Thanksgiving. And even though it seems like a very minor switch, I think it's still a new way to create new traditions that are in line with your own values, especially in line with values of celebrating diversity and celebrating a culture that is beyond the Western conception of what acceptable celebrations should be.
L:Another way I wanna approach Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving and family, it doesn't just have to mean biological. It doesn't have to be, you know, "Oh, it's just the people who gave birth to me, and the parents of the people who gave birth to me." Family is what you make it. And if you think that your biological family is, you know, too frustrating to be around, that they don't treat you with the respect that you deserve as a human being, then here's what you can do. Go with your friends. You can't choose necessarily your biological family, but you can choose your friends and you can make a new family with them. And if there's times when you can't see your family or they're away, yeah celebrate Thanksgiving or Wataybuyaw, or whatever you wanna call it, with the family that you find and the family that you make. And I really did like Phuong's point about how all holidays have a potential to be occasions to think about others, occasions to redistribute, occasions to care, occasions to participate because in some ways, it really helps us see all of us as part of a wider family. A wider human family that are all worthy of respect and dignity and support.
P:Yeah, I think this is especially important because I think Thanksgiving for folks who are in marginalized communities who might have to face biological family members or relatives who they may be distanced from, it can be incredibly unsafe. And it can be incredibly violent to go into a family gathering, knowing that you might see that one aunt who says that she doesn't believe that trans people deserve rights, or to see that one uncle that says that black people are inherently violent. I think that to have to interact with those people is not... like Thanksgiving should not be a way to mandate and force people to be with the family that they don't truly feel that they belong with. And I really agree with you Lapis, that family is who you make of it, it's your chosen family as well as your blood. And of course, I don't wanna negate the fact that many cultures emphasize an importance on family, and I think that that's good and that's important. If you have family, biologically, that cherishes you, that loves you? Yes, I spend time with them, don't ditch them for your friends, if you don't want to, right? What we're saying here is more so if you really don't feel like you can celebrate with your family and you have the means to not do so, as then you have your own space and you have friends in which you can celebrate the holiday with, we want you to be able to reclaim that. We want you to be able to have those alternative celebrations that truly will center your joy and your happiness over this kind of forced obligation to be with family.
L:Exactly. Joy is something beautiful, and that you don't have to force yourself into some sort of weird colonial ideal and you don't have to force yourself to endure your blood family, no matter how horrible or heinous they may be towards you. If that's not what you want, don't do it! Center your own happiness and center the happiness of people who need to be heard. And I think that that is so much more of a meaningful way of thinking about family and thinking about the world than just eat turkey with your family. Eat duck with your family. Ignore them when they say horrible things, just shut up and eat!
P:I think that that's truly a way to also give thanks, right? Because you can give thanks not just for the people around you, but also give thanks to yourself and your body that has carried you so far. And I think... Again, if you're the type of person who even just enjoys their own space and doesn't even want to see other people, then maybe have a sole Thanksgiving celebration. You know: treat yourself, go buy some ice cream or something that makes you happy because you should also be able to give thanks for yourself and be grateful for how far you've made it despite any problems that have come your way. Because I think it's also beautiful to highlight the endurance and resilience of folks, especially folks who are marginalized, especially Indigenous folks who just don't want to participate in Thanksgiving at all. I think a good way is to create a new tradition of just loving yourself, celebrating yourself and choosing to be grateful to be alive, to be thankful to be alive.
L:And I just wanna say a few words now that we're nearing to Thanksgiving. I have always felt that Phuong is family. That Phuong is somebody who really gives me joy and who I really am grateful that I've gotten this amazing chance to work with on this podcast because it is an honor to work with her and as an honor to hear her voice. So Phuong you, give me joy.
P:Oh, thank you. That is so sweet. I completely agree. I am so grateful for our friendship, I am so grateful for this podcast, and I'm so grateful for everyone in my life who has helped me be who I am today. Whether you are still in my life or not, if you have ever made an impact on me I am sending out my thanks and my gratitude towards you. And I think we can wrap this up by giving y'all or wonderful listeners six questions to think about, because it will be six days until Thanksgiving at the release with this episode. The first question is, what are you actually thankful for and why are you thankful for those things?
L:Question numero deux, why does this holiday exist and what is it about? I provided a little bit of a snippet on this podcast day, but you can go a lot deeper than I did, and Canadian Thanksgiving in particular has a very interesting history that I sadly didn't get to cover in this episode.
P:The third question is, what is the role of tradition in society? I think we also covered this briefly in this episode, but you could also just think of what is your tradition in your family or how does it structure your everyday life and your perception of holidays in general, I think is a great third question to think about.
L:Another question for the fourth day of Thanksgiving is, how can we create traditions that more accurately reflect our personal values and what we would like to share with our loved ones? Like think about Wataybugaw. The indigenous people in Toronto, you know came together and said, "You know what? We don't like what Thanksgiving is. Let's make our own." I really do encourage you to do that too. If you aren't satisfied with the traditional ideal, make your own. If you're a really solitary person, there's nothing wrong with that. Have joy in doing that, that is your own tradition. And if it's friends and you don't feel like you really wanna be around the blood family, go be with your real family and go do it without any judgment, because that is an amazing new tradition that you have created. That is beautiful, making new things.
P:The fifth question is what can we do to reclaim the narrative of things giving so that everyone can create traditions in which they are thankful for, or simply, how can we make space for those who don't wanna reclaim it as well? I think that for those who still have an attachment to Thanksgiving, there's a way to do it that is more in line with your values, if you want to move towards a more inclusive idea of Thanksgiving. But I think for those who simply don't like the idea of Thanksgiving and kind of just wanna scrap it all together, we should still make space with the people too. As the audience, we would invite you to think of ways that you can support people who don't wanna celebrate Thanksgiving for whatever reason, and how we can make this holiday better for everyone.
L:Yeah, like in America, on November the 26th, there has been for decades now, since the 70s, a National Day of Mourning protest. That indigenous people will flock to Washington DC and then they will protest about Thanksgiving and raise attention to how the reality of Thanksgiving and what it represents is a lot less sunny than it is portrayed and celebrated by the state and by lots of Americans.
And last but certainly not least, the sixth question that we will offer to you today is how do we center joy? How do we center sharing, how do we center authentic love, and authentic beauty, and authentic gratitude as opposed to performative entitlement? And thank you all so much for listening to this episode. It's been great to have you on, and I really hope that you have a great Thanksgiving or however you want to celebrate or not celebrate this time of year.
[Ending Music Theme Plays]
P:Make sure to check out our website www.therisingrose.ca for show notes and other resources.
L:This episode was...
P:..Produced and edited by Vu Hai Linh. The theme music was composed by Oscar Abley.
L:All other sounds are from Zappslapp.com. Cover art is designed by Bridget Lee.
P:Until next time!
[Closing theme ends. Record beeps.]
L:Ironically, eating duck would actually be more, like, authentic to the 1621 thing, because what they actually ate was probably duck. We don't really know, they described it as fowl, but yeah, go ahead. Eat a duck, be more historically accurate. I love it. [L laughs]
