"Since 1970, Indigenous people & their allies have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native people do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims & other European settlers. Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Indigenous ancestors and Native resilience. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide."
National Day of Mourning
Thursday, November 27, 2025
12:00 Noon
Cole's Hill (above Plymouth Rock), Plymouth, MA
Over the course of my adult life, I have on multiple occasions had borderline nasty arguments with people who excuse climate crisis inaction by stating confidently and emphatically that "we" don't care about climate crisis. The trick there is to ask "who is "we" in this scenario?" Reactionary billionaires don't care, and neither do the governments or for-profit media outlets they own; but everyday people increasingly living in the fallout of an unfolding climate catastrophe certainly care - and polling has been bearing that out for over a decade or two now. This is particularly magnified if you study opinions about climate crisis and the need for action on a global scale instead of just in the so-called West, as a recent study reveals:
The 89%: New Media Collaboration Calls Attention to 'Climate Change's Silent Majority'
"Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: "Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren't you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren't you doing this?"
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election."
Look, I'm all for a global project to speak the reality that humanity as a whole is worried about, and wants solutions to the climate crisis and our boiling world. By that same measure however, I don't think any analysis that doesn't incorporate the reality that our ruling classes and the institutions they own are absolutely planning on running the species right off the ecological cliff while claiming it's our fault because we didn't want change hard enough or something, can truly be considered complete. These people mean to kill you and your children for five pennies a share and they're more or less openly admitting it now; signing up all the progressive media orgs and the one corporate outlet that does take climate crisis seriously to talk more about why humanity does care about climate crisis, isn't going to change the fact that the guys who own everything know, and have picked genocide over surrendering the capitalism that's killing us.
With all that having been noted however, I still support this discussion for the same reason I'm sharing this article with you; it's important to understand that literally 89% of the people on the planet do not support going gently into that good night so billionaire nazis can keep doing capitalism. I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty confident that 89% of roughly 8 billion people is more than enough people power to overthrow a capitalist order controlled by less than 4,000 billionaires. The question then becomes, how bad does that 89% want to solve this life or death crisis? And how long will they wait before they accept that the ruling class isn't going to do anything to mitigate climate catastrophe, but is rather building out fascist police states, curtailing our civil rights, and hardening borders to stop us, that 89%, from doing anything about the shallow graves they intend to lay billions of us in for the money god?
For all our sake, let's hope the answer isn't "too long."
If you are unable to participate directly in the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, MA, here are seven ways you can stand in solidarity with United American Indians of New England (UAINE) and the National Day of Mourning.
Watch the National Day of Mourning livestream from Plymouth beginning at 12 noon on November 28.
Help to spread the word about National Day of Mourning on social media. Would you rather support National Day of Mourning in Plymouth than engage in a celebration of white supremacy, the theft of a continent and the genocide of Indigenous peoples? Say why on your Facebook page, Twitter or Instagram account.
While we are grateful for your donations to UAINE, this year we want to urge everyone to make donations to
organizations that are currently able to have a direct impact on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Here are a few that have been recommended: Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, ANERA, Middle East Children’s Alliance, 1for3.org, Gaza Mental Health Foundation, MSF, Crips for E-sims, CareforGaza.
Use Thanksgiving Day as a ‘teachable moment’ and educate family and friends. If you gather for a Thanksgiving meal, read aloud to your friends and family about the real history of Thanksgiving and National Day of Mourning before you sit down to eat. Matthew Hughey’s “On Thanksgiving: Why Myths Matter” is one possible text that is just about the right length for a pre-meal reading. You can also read the suppressed speech of Wamsutta Frank James, the founder of National Day of Mourning, and check out the UAINE website. You can watch the livestream from Plymouth. If you or your family members are hungry for more truth-telling, you can recommend books for further reading such as Our
History Is The Future by Nick Estes, An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and David Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World.
Spread the truth and give the “hidden” story of Thanksgiving a human face by arranging for a member of UAINE to give a talk at a school, church or community center near you. Email [email protected] for more information.
Help to champion Indigenous voices by supporting other Indigenous struggles. You can work to free the Native American activist Leonard Peltier freeleonardpeltiernow.org, who has been a political prisoner for 50 years. You can join the fight against racist and demeaning Native sports team mascots, name brands and products. You can support the fight to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day on the 2nd Monday in October. You can amplify Indigenous voices in raising awareness about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Relatives. Check out the UAINE Facebook group and many other social media outlets for information about what is happening in your area and what you can do to help. Express your solidarity, and urge others in your community (trade union, social justice
organization, religious community, etc.) to help, too!
Support Indigenous climate activists and landback efforts. Indigenous people are on the frontlines defending the water and land from pipelines, fracking, mining and much more. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas are fighting to stop fossil fuel extraction, megadams and mining and to preserve land, water and treaty rights. Support Indigenous-led climate justice organizations!
"Our Mother aches
Our claws dig until She breaks
And we bleed for this
How much is in her
I remember songs of the Sun
For those whose breath was stolen..."
I must confess that I found this recent longform essay about what Pig Empire governments making net zero pledges aren't doing, the nonsensical rational behind their lack of action, and what actually has to be done to tackle the problem of climate crisis, both vindicating and terrifying.
Reading it was vindicating because I've spent at least the past 8 years pointing out that all of these pledges are based on ideas that are at turns wholly monstrous, delusional, or openly dishonest. Promising to plant whole continents worth of trees in the developing world to offset the Pig Empire's carbon production is a license to commit genocide because those trees have to go somewhere and you can sure as shit bet we're not going to chase people out of the imperial core to plant them. By that same measure, putting our hope in junk science experiments like carbon capture, building gigantic mirrors, or literally blotting out the sun's rays by filling the air with even more pollutants is clearly more about justifying a continuation of fossil-fuel based capitalism, than providing any sort of solution. Finally of course arguments, favored by many Pig Empire politicians, that we have to extract even greater quantities of fossil fuels now, so that somehow we can magically burn less of them later, are clearly motivated lies being told for capital while the world continues to burn. The fact that this essay bursts all these bubbles by directly dismantling the false idea of "overshooting" our climate targets and relying on magic science beans to make up the difference later, is a welcome corrective to all of this nonsense.
As the authors of this essay note, there is no future for humanity and a world habitable by billions of humans that doesn't involve leaving fossil fuels in the ground, and with it surrendering the delusional capitalist faith in the genocidal concept of "endless growth."
The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
"The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on."
Which of course brings me to why this essay is also terrifying, because in it the authors more or less admit that it's obvious our leaders aren't confused about what combating climate crisis will entail, or ignorant of the catastrophic effects continuing to play pretend while the world burns; they simply don't give a fuck, and are happily steering us towards mass extinctions, the destruction of whole ecosystems, and climate changes that will almost certainly lead to the deaths of billions (with a b) of people. It's one thing for an anti-capitalist analyst like myself to draw these conclusions from a careful study of human history and the ongoing policy discussions I observe in the Pig Empire; it's entirely another level of existential terror when I can read mainstream scientists with access to all the evidence I don't have, repeating that same story back to me in real time.
Furthermore, while the folks writing this piece draw most of the same conclusions in terms of how to actually prevent hellworld from boiling itself to death for the profit of oil companies and billionaire investors, they still stop short of discussing what doing all this would actually mean for the capitalist order; namely its end. Despite all the green energy promises and science fiction fantasies our leaders have on offer, there remains no evidence that capitalist itself, which is underpinned by not only fossil fuel consumption but the wealth generated by the extraction of fossil fuels themselves, will survive these changes. Reading this, I find myself wondering if the reason the authors don't draw that conclusion is because they don't understand it, or because they're afraid to say it out loud.
One thing I can say however is that this essay isn't a nihilist capitulation that accepts the end of the world as inevitable. The authors are very clear that we can still stop the worst case climate death scenarios; but they also acknowledge that as of now, nobody in charge is doing so. Maybe it's time we make them, before it really is too late.