Last week at the Rose/Becker Cafe Series, Prof Eric Cheyfitz, the director of the American Indian Program came to speak to us about some instances of Native American brutality in history, as well as today. He was very blunt when he said that he considers the US brutality on the Native American people as genocide. For example, the white colonists committed every forcible attempt to wipe out Native American culture; the settlers had the vaccination for smallpox, but they did not make those preventative measures available to the Native American people who were dying from disease. In addition to the physical violence, the greatest crime that the Native Americans suffered was federal neglect. The federal government made no attempts to protect the indigenous people, and recognized them as political identities to seize land from rather than a race of people. There were as many as 4-5 million Native Americans in 1492, and the population was decimated to a measly 250,000 by the end of the 19th century. They are now the poorest community in the US.

We’d like to think that this brutal and bloody history is done behind us, and that we’ve moved on from the racist, xenophobic attitudes. We’d like to think our society has become progressive and aware about the issues that plague the minority groups living in the US. I mean, just look at the online uproar and support for Black Lives Matter. However, as progressive as we like to think we are, the Native American community is still suffering from neglect, even today. The US government still thinks of the Native American reserves as domestic dependent nations, and tries to distance itself from the issues of poverty and injustice. I think the strongest example Prof Cheyfitz brought up that’s closest to home was that we are on the traditional Native American land of the Cayuga people today, and even though he’s tried campaigning for it before, it’s difficult for the Cornell administration to acknowledge that.

I remember that night how Prof Cheyfitz spoke about tragedy after tragedy, injustice after injustice, a lot of us felt uneasy and helpless. Hearing these stories makes us feel guilty, but guilty of what? The general US population doesn’t like to feel guilty, especially because the people now are so far removed from injustices done to the Native Americans. None of us have a particularly close connection, and people don’t like to feel guilty about actions they didn’t commit. These issues aren’t garnering a lot of attention simply because the Native American population is just too small to raise awareness about their history, unlike the vocal African American population. Prof Cheyfitz said that we think of racial tensions today and throughout history in a black and white binary, and we think of slavery as the primal crime in US history, but we forget about the Native American genocide. I appreciated how Prof Cheyfitz brought this up, because there are so many other minority groups whose stories need to be heard as well. I also appreciate how I was lucky enough to grow up in an educational system in which we talked about the brutality towards Native Americans and examined the errs of US history through diverse perspectives, instead of blindly glorifying the white colonizers. There may not be much we could do to fix the injustices done on the Native Americans today, but it helps to learn and pass on their stories as part of US history.