Well, I’ve been avoiding writing this. Professor Cheyfitz’s lecture was very uncomfortable because of its serious topic. I don’t like thinking about the injustice Native Americans/Indians have been put through over time, and how there is still a rather large ignorance of how huge of a role this injustice plays in US history. When Cheyfitz said that the biggest misconception Americans have is that Indians don’t exist anymore, that seemed very real to me. Although my education has made me aware of this past, there is little focus on considering Native Americans in the present. What is to be done? Can there be any sort of retribution? How do we address the poverty?

Instead of trying to answer these questions, I would like to explore how old this kind of conflict is. I am currently reading Virgil’s Aeneid in the class Introduction to Ancient Rome. Aeneas starts a war with natives of a land called Laurentum because he believes it is his destiny to found a city there. This origin story of the Romans acknowledges that there were indigenous people in Italy but the manifest destiny of this outsider Aeneas overruled their right to keep living there. This epic was finished in 19 BC, and I’m shocked at the similarities of the American unresolved conflict of manifest destiny and ownership of land. I will keep exploring these similarities in the hopes of finding some sort of answer to this moral dilemma.