Prior to this discussion, I had been aware of the reservations and the injustices imposed on Native Americans, but Professor Eric Cheyfitz shed a harsh light on the matter at Rose Café last night. He emphasized American ignorance and Indian resistance.

I learned that Cornell University sits on the traditional homeland of the Cayuga Indians. What’s more, no Cornell president has ever acknowledged this fact and very few Cornellians know the land’s possessive history. Today, in my Organizational Behavior class, we talked about ethics, its criteria, and events that have either followed or broke these rules. I spoke about the Indian reservations and the implications that have resulted from the federal government’s actions. I told the class about how poverty-stricken, economically unsustainable, and crime-ridden life on a reservation is, and none of them knew the true extremities of the situation. This goes to show how unknowingly blind some of the most educated are about the history of our country and the land we are sitting on. As a result, we unanimously declared the deeds done as unethical.

Professor Cheyfitz also shared a story that really struck a chord with me. He shared a story about his friend Catherine Smith, a Navajo woman. The United States’ government forced her to attend a boarding school that was intended to eradicate the Indian language and culture. For example, if she spoke Navajo in school, the teachers would clip a clothespin onto her tongue for the rest of the day. Catherine was also forced to wear Western-style clothes, and boys were told to cut their hair in attempt to brutally assimilate them into ‘American’ culture. Ever since Europeans seized the land from the Indians, they have fought to resist cultural genocide.

The United Nations defines genocide as “…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” Accordingly, I would argue that the United States is guilty of genocide. It’s unnerving that our country was founded as a safe haven for the persecuted, yet has and still is persecuting the original owners of the land. What’s even more unnerving is that it took an optional talk at an Ivy League institution for me to learn the true injustices of Indian life in the United States.