“This country was built on stolen land and stolen labor.”-Eric Cheyfitz

I find it so interesting that we do not know the history of the land we are currently on.  When Cheyfitz said that we were on the land of the Cayuga People, land that had been taken from them, I couldn’t help but feel uneducated and ignorant in a room full of scholarly Cornell students.  It is true, in high school we are only ever taught the basics of the history of what our country destroyed in order to build itself.  We spend months learning about the horrors of African American slave labor but we never hear anything about the centuries long genocide of Native Americans.  We don’t even hear the word genocide when talking about their history.  It is as if the United States declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” unless you were on the land before us.  The Indian people are living in two worlds both of which are undefined and vague.  They are a different people with their own laws and culture but they are not a sovereign nation allowed to do as they please.  Instead they belong to the United States which turns a blind eye on the very irony of what it has done and “hopes the Indian people move off the reservations and assimilate into society” as Cheyfitz had said.  For a nation that promotes the freedom of other groups it is ironic that we have an enslaved group of people in our country.  For a group that has been in this country since the beginning, how is it that we know so little about our intertwined history?  How is it that we were never taught the struggles of the Indian people?  That the news does not cover the extreme levels of poverty, rape, crime, and murder that has fallen on a people that has so much knowledge, history, and culture?  How is it that the United States can continue to ignore the millions of deaths that occurred and push aside the force it used to take over land?  These are facts, according to Cheyfitz, that the United States is not even able to recognize.  While the Indian population is only a small fraction of the total population of the United States they make up a huge part of our history.