11/29/2025
LIBRARY DAY ORACLES by dama
Thanksgiving is usually offered to us as a softened myth: pilgrims, gratitude, a table where difference supposedly dissolved into harmony. But anyone shaped by migration, forced movement, or ancestral dislocation knows that stories rarely arrive so gentle. And the land, as Mary Austin reminds us in The Land of Journeys’ Ending, carries its own version: one made of crossings, ruptures, and watercourses that hold memory longer than any nation-state.
What if Thanksgiving began from that vantage point, not from a colonial table, but from the migrations already in motion long before Europeans arrived? From ancestral routes marked by those who knew how to move with the land rather than against it.
And then there is the chapter, “Cities That Died.”
Austin describes the acequia madre, the mother-ditch, where water created a shared destiny, forcing people to practice reciprocity or perish. Entire cities lived or died according to whether they honored their relationship to water, community, and stewardship. That, too, is part of the migrant story of this continent.
Not a feast of reconciliation but the violent interruption of existing Indigenous migrations, trade routes, ecological systems, and communal worlds.
So this week, we return to Austin’s deeper truth: to remember the cities that died so we stop building toward collapse.
To honor Indigenous survival and land stewardship as the foundation and not the footnote of this place.
To acknowledge how migration, forced or chosen, shapes the stories we inherit and the futures we are responsible for, to listen to the land’s long memory, to the stories beneath the stories, to the people for whom this day is not a celebration but a reminder of all that was taken and all that continues to live.
