Why Indigenous Communities Don’t Celebrate Thanksgiving and What We Must Learn

This month on Storytellers of Color, KGNU’s Rossana Longo Better sits down with Renée Chacón, an influential Indigenous leader, educator, artist, journalist and environmental justice advocate from Commerce City. As co-founder of Womxn from the Mountain, Chacón works at the intersection of cultural preservation, land and water protection, community healing, and the continuation of Indigenous teachings across generations.

With Thanksgiving approaching, a holiday often framed through myth rather than truth, Chacón offers a grounding reminder of what this time of year means for many Native families: a moment not of celebration, but of reflection. She describes it as a time to honor survival in the face of historical trauma, to acknowledge the resilience of Indigenous peoples, and to confront the inequities that persist today, from environmental contamination to erasure of cultural identity.

In our conversation, Chacón shares the realities facing communities in places like Commerce City, where extractive industries and polluted air have long shaped residents’ everyday lives. She connects these injustices to a broader pattern of broken promises and disproportionate harm inflicted on Indigenous and other marginalized communities, a pattern she has spent years challenging through education, advocacy, and cultural revitalization.

Chacón also speaks about the healing power of ceremony, ancestral memory, and land-based practices. She reminds us that Indigenous knowledge is not a relic or metaphor, but a living system of relationship between people, place, water, and spirit that continues to guide movements for justice and belonging.

And she offers a call to action: to listen more deeply, to understand that Indigenous rights are community rights, and to recognize the leadership of young people who are rising to protect what remains.

It’s a conversation rooted in truth-telling but guided by hope the kind that emerges when communities reclaim space and voice, when history is confronted honestly, and when healing begins with acknowledging those who have carried these stories for generations.

KGNU’s Rossana Longo Better talks with Renée Chacón about survival, resistance, environmental justice, and what it means to practice gratitude in a country still learning how to honor its first peoples.