Every time a marginalized group gets a moment of recognition, a familiar tactic shows up right on cue, and this Juneteenth it got dismantled in real time by a wave of Indigenous solidarity. On Threads, Meta’s text based platform, a user going by wchokett posted a question dressed up as innocent curiosity but built on bad faith. “What the heck is Juneteenth?” the post read. “No offense, as it is a national holiday, but my question is: where is the national holiday for the American Indian tribes, the original Americans? It just seems quiet right about this.”
The framing was the whole game. Rather than asking out of genuine concern for Native Americans, the post used them as a wedge, pitting Indigenous recognition against Black liberation in an attempt to shrink the meaning of
Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the end of slavery in the United States.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and it became a federal holiday in 2021. None of that history competes with anyone else’s. But the post tried to make it a competition anyway.
The Indigenous community on Threads was not interested in playing along, and the response was a clinic in Indigenous solidarity. A user named ding_gorgeous set the tone immediately. “Oh no, sir. As an Indigenous woman, a white man is not going to use my people as a prop to pretend we’re somehow in competition with Black Americans,” she wrote. “Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery. It exists because that history matters. Indigenous history matters too, but concern for Native people shouldn’t suddenly appear only when Black people are being recognized.”
Others came with the receipts the original poster clearly did not have. As tatortotztay put it, “We have Indigenous people day and November is national Native American month. Let our Black relatives have their holiday.” A user named roguefixation drove the same point home and exposed the hypocrisy underneath it. “Indigenous People’s Day is in October. If you didn’t know that, you don’t actually want indigenous people to get more respect. You just want Black people to get less.” Both corrections are accurate. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed on the second Monday of October, and November is National Native American Heritage Month, which means the very recognition the poster claimed was missing already exists.
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