Pittsburgh, PA—(ENEWSPF)—November 22, 2011.  On Thanksgiving Day (November 24, 2011), Occupy Pittsburgh will observe the national holiday with the help of American Indians.  Starting at 3pm, indigenous groups from the Pittsburgh Area visiting the Occupied Encampment downtown will share music, dance and tell stories. 

Occupy Pittsburgh member Jimmy Blue Thunder, a Delaware Indian known by most as Blue, will perform a ceremony called Kukna, meaning “First Mother, Mother Earth.”  The Kukna is a way to pay respect to the earth and give an offering to it.   

Blue hopes that those who attend the event will “not only enjoy the drumming and singing, they’ll get an education.”  A focus of the day is to explain the real history behind the Thanksgiving holiday.    

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a reminder of early colonization.  Popular representations of the holiday that depict friendly relations between settlers and indigenous people distort history.  The truth reveals egregious historical treatment of the American Indians. 

A sign outside of Blue’s tent reads, “Reclaiming the Lenapehoking,” or land historically inhabited by The Lenape people later called The Delaware by European colonizers.    

About Occupy Pittsburgh

Known in New York City as Occupy Wall Street, there are now more than 1400 cities in the US and overseas where some sort of occupation-style movement has begun. Occupy Pittsburgh has been developed by residents of Southwestern Pennsylvania in harmony and solidarity with the 99% Occupy movement.

Banding together under this theme are people from all age groups and most levels of society who have one thing in common: the desire for a future free of the corporate greed, corruption and undue political influence which has destroyed the economy and made the poor and the middle class poorer while the super- rich continue to thrive.

Source:  www.OccupyPittsburgh.org