It took years for me to understand the term “black Friday”. Growing up Black was always ominous. Red equally so. Black as darkness, red as urgent and dangerous.

It was only years later when my father shared his explanation of a bigger picture about accounting that it made sense and for anyone who doesn’t know I’ll make it brief. Business in loss not making money are ‘in the red’ and those profiting are ‘in the black’.

I’m opening this post this way on premise of a crossroads of sorts.

On this day I want to share one of my early memories of witnessing a billboard sign that read "Letting an Indian Fish is like letting a fox in the Chicken Coup". Somewhere someone has got to have a photo of that. I remind my son that this time of year while we are a focus of inclusiveness we have been deemed villains for many years by no means of our own making. I feel if the phrase holds true 'survival of the fittest' , we are here because the land and values are a part of who we are. There was a time Uncle Reub shrugged off some of our people wearing gear from the army surplus although it he was proud. Our fisherman were warriors on the water for years while people cut up our nets and damaged boats. History doesn't lie and this day I ask my friends who follow my work it would not be possible without the efforts of my people where bullets flew overhead and rocks were thrown at men who were all within their right to provide for their families for survival.

I truly believe in alliance and the need for it in time where the word ‘tribal’ has become a negative phrase. It builds a narrative of negative response now and has for some time. Yet here we are advanced with technology like no other with means of communication separated from the very ground we stand on regardless of where we are. To quote the fictional character, Tyler Durden “the things you own, start to own you”. I think that’s how it goes.

I’m not big on politics because I feel it’s bigger than me but as an artist like a comedian I can have commentary so this is just that.

I’ve always admired the works of Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. With Rock, on his first album, when that was a thing noted in his bit about a comparison of fighters. That ‘the lower you are on the social latter, the better fighter you’ll be”. As they say ‘it’s funny because it’s true’.

When I was on a consulting job a pitch was made where a man got up to with his opening slide of his powerpoint in bold words stating “we are all immigrants here'“. To which I was shifting in my chair, this was in Tacoma the land of my people and this guy was from Philidelphia and non-Indigenous. Little did I know a fellow consultant chimed in to point out she was Indigenous. Much to my surprise she grilled this guy for saying what he did and outlined why to the table. I felt a relief because all eyes were on me because I was labelled coming in as the Native artist and she didn’t carry the label herself. I backed her up of course and I made an ally, not because we had gone into something with a plan but the very fact that our histories and identity would be overwritten as a script that fit a narrative.

There are people and there will always be people who want things to be as they were in the ‘good ole days’ when ‘fill in the blank’. The idea we are free of racism is a long way away and as Chappelle once stated, America has to have an honest discourse with itself. This is to me what I hear people talk about so often in the mainstream of pop culture when they hate Thanksgiving having to deal with relatives they don’t see. On the flip side of that Native people in our confined spaces have learned to make room for different personalities and deal with our differences. This isn’t to say it’s perfect because as a result of disconnection with our language and our practices have adapted.

Alcohol and drug use is a part as it is in any colonized people. It’s an escape and impoverished people all over know this.

I’m asked so often annually as I expect when Thanksgiving rolls around what I feel about it and I’ve grown from it not unlike Chappelle’s skit he talks about as the person he was at stages in his life.

When someone asked me about Thanksgiving in my teens I’d shrug it off because I didn’t think anyone would listen honestly.

When asked about it as a man in my twenties I was ranting and angry for what I couldn’t explain because I didn’t have the way in to explain how backwards the notion was.

As a father of a teen now I am writing this with hopes that my son won’t have to deal with the question in anguish.

The world is not black and white alone, it’s many things and America as we know it is a work in progress. There are so many things one could lose themselves in diving into rabbit holes. If this experiment is to work it means shying away from sweeping ‘dark’ history under the rug and having a willingness to acknowledge atrocity in order to move forward.

As I’ve said time and time again ‘consider what the phrase “land of opportunity” means from an Indigenous perspective’ I say this because I’m grateful that at a young age when I didn’t feel right not standing for the pledge of allegiance in elementary school because I was beat up and called ‘an Injun’ in my homeland that I had support of my grandmother along with a small group of friends who were from different ethnic backgrounds. It gave me hope in my small town as a possibility of what we are seeing unfold today as we acknowledge injustice and solidarity.

There will always be differences and one cannot out match the other on the side of who was slighted more because that’s equally unproductive.

What matters is communication and to acknowledge the land you stand on because it’s a foundation that grants you a place to be.

Returning to the lessons of my father if we are indeed looking to get out the red into the black there remains a lot to be accounted for.