Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 37.5 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
Happy Friday! All our friends will be back next week with contributions, and I’ll just leave you with a few thoughts for the weekend.
Today is Native American Heritage Day; it’s also Black Friday. My recommendation is that you boycott Amazon today (and every day, tbh), and instead spend your money on a donation to a local Indigenous group. As a reminder, Whole Foods is also Amazon, Amazon is the fastest-growing corporation in the history of the world, and wants to monitor your emotions. If you want to read a short silly account of what happened when my parents tried to get me a birthday gift from not-Amazon, here you go.
In doing a little research on Native American Heritage Day, I came across this page from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which gives an overview of how the US federal government has acknowledged Indigenous Americans with holidays. There is some weird stuff on there (1992 was the ‘The Year of the American Indian’); apparently, it was Trump who designated today as Native American Heritage Day. A collection of public museums are also celebrating the day.
While all this designating is fine, and better than nothing, it’s long overdue that we as a nation begin to actually repair some of the damage done by this settler colonial state. This looks like honoring treaties, returning land to and fully funding tribal governments, and issuing reparations.
You can take a few actions to return the Black Hills (where Mount Rushmore is located) to its original Peoples here. Read more about this effort and other Landback organizing here. The All My Relations podcast also has an episode about food sovereignty and a new episode about the history of ThanksTaking.
Here’s an exceedingly cute and very poisonous rat.
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