Breakfast gives thanks to the first people of Seattle

Chef Kerry Lee Holifield piles china plates high with turkey, homemade stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, yams, mixed peas and corn, and fry bread, smoking hot out of the fryer.

Nobody bats an eye, eating all this at breakfast time, on the day before Thanksgiving. "We like to serve on the day when the land was still ours," Holifield says smoothly. And don't call it Thanksgiving. Here, at the Chief Seattle Club, it's Giving Thanks Day.

"We don't celebrate it here the same way everyone else does," said John LaPointe, a Swinomish tribal member and graduate student at Seattle University, as he stirs a vat of peas and corn. He volunteers at the club regularly, for the pleasure of seeing other Indian people in the city.

"It's not what we learned in grade school, the Pilgrims and the Indians," he says of Thanksgiving.

"It's a celebration of what we have: a community. We still have each other. We have survived. We are still here."

Holifield cooks a hot morning meal five days a week and Sunday dinner for 100 to 150 club members at the club in Pioneer Square.

They are primarily homeless and single Indian people in Seattle who need a place to get something hot to eat, wash their clothes, see a nurse, or get help with anything from finding housing to kicking addictions to getting a job. They get something else, too, at this private, nonprofit charity, which serves Indians exclusively: a sense of home.

Part of it is Holifield's meals, cooked from scratch. He says he cooks to honor his mother, a full-blooded Tlingit Alaska Native. So he cooks not just soup, jumbled from donations from the food bank. For him, it's real meals, dished up on china plates. Thanksgiving dinner is served to the members at tables with white paper tablecloths and tea lights.

The guests, more than 200 in all, are families with kids, old people, street people, all kinds of people. Mostly, there were big appetites.

Members of the club's board, friends, and even students from the University of Washington School of Social Work got up early to help out — serving, washing dishes, working in the kitchen, setting and busing tables.

"It's about time," said Paul Ahern, a non-Indian Seattle trial lawyer who came with his wife, Laurie, a board member of the club, to volunteer.

"It's just so great to be able to serve a nice dinner to the first Americans," he said. "We'll have to be doing it for several centuries to get close to even."

Ask Holifield as he works if Indians would still feed the Pilgrims, given how it all came out. He cracks up. He knew this question — the whole "what do Indians think of Thanksgiving" thing — had to be coming.

"You know, I'd do it the same way all over again; that's who we are," Holifield said.

"Natives have always shared their food. It's in my culture to share, and even though what has happened has happened, if someone was hungry I would feed them. White skin, black, it doesn't matter.

"It's the giving nature of the Native American people, and we are still the same people."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com