Not everyone wants to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that recalls a 17th-century feast shared by Wampanoag people and English pilgrims.
When looking back on the destruction that later came to Indigenous people, some have no desire to honor the colonizers.
IndigeThanx, an annual event sponsored by UC Santa Cruz’s American Indian Resource Center and Cowell Coffee Shop, offers an alternative. This year, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the event will be held online Nov. 19. There will be a conversation and cooking demonstration led by Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, founders of Café Ohlone, a cultural space and restaurant serving Ohlone cuisine reopening soon in Berkeley. Admission is open to all and is free.
Andrea Lopez, a second-year student at UC Santa Cruz whose family is in the Lakota Tribe, is looking forward to attending. Her family has its own native food traditions, including making fry bread.
“Having this inclusive space for us, it widens the spectrum of the different celebrations that can take place instead of Thanksgiving,” said Lopez, who does not celebrate Thanksgiving.
Café Ohlone is a restaurant dedicated to reviving the Indigenous food traditions of the Ohlone people of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions. It has been shut down most of the past two years because of the pandemic but had offered a menu featuring such dishes as black oak acorn bread, venison and mushroom stew, dandelion soup, and manzanita cider.
“We have worked hard to understand native plants of our Ohlone homelands along with their traditional uses, and listen attentively to testimony from our elders’ recollections of old Indian foods they remember,” said the founders on the restaurant’s website. “This is combined with documentation recorded by members of our Indian communities in the 1920s and 1930s from Sunol and Carmel, records that have been preserved and provide a crucial link to understanding the value, respect, and love our old timers have for these Indian foods; in the process we have developed a deep and personal love for these same foods and have personally seen how these foods can heal, empower, and better connect us to our Ohlone cultural identity.”
Medina is cultural leader of Itmay Cultural Association, a group of Verona Band culture bearers working to keep their identity strong. Trevino is a member of the Rumsen Ohlone community and is helping revive the Rumsen language.
Rebecca Hernandez, director of UCSC's American Indian Resource Center, said IndigeThanx is a long tradition at the center and is one of its most popular events. Every other year, the event rotates between a speaker and a shared meal. This is the second year in a row that the event will be on Zoom.
“It gives us the opportunity to counter the Thanksgiving narrative, to talk about the fact that there are native people who are working really hard to sustain traditional foodways and to celebrate it and to learn how to prepare it,” Hernandez said. “We want people to know there are still native folks all across the country and there’s a lot of native folks here.”
