For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to break bread with family and loved ones, but for native people the holiday is forever associated with the legacy of violence wrought on indigenous communities since our country’s founding. 

Shailene Woodley, who has been one of most high-profile advocates against the Dakota Access Pipeline, is now speaking out about the sanitization of American history in videos released on Thursday at Standing Rock reservation.  

“Today is a day that many call Thanksgiving, and it’s a day where kids in elementary school in America are taught false narratives about our native brothers and sisters,” Woodley said, fighting back tears in an interview with TYT Politics.

The “Divergent” actress has joined thousands of activists in recent months calling for a permanent ban on an oil pipeline that would carry crude oil across sacred lands, potentially contaminating the population’s fresh water source and disturbing sacred grounds. 

“From the time we’re little kids, we cut out in cardboard paper pictures of pilgrims and feasts and turkeys, and yet none of our children know the truth about not only what happened to Native Americans when Westerners decided to colonize this country, but what is still happening to Native Americans” she continued. “Thanksgiving was founded on a massacre and yet we’re here with cops and snipers with rubber bullets and I’m sick of it.”

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