Why did it take a Becker-Rose Café talk with Professor Cheyfitz for me to find out I live on Cayuga land obtained through force and fraud? Why had I never before heard about the US being reluctant to sign the Declaration of Indigenous Rights? Why do we have phrases like “The way of the Indian,” which imply Indians are long gone? And most of all, why had I never had a desire to learn about these things?
Ignorance. This is just not something I have learned about in school. Like Professor Cheyfitz pointed out, I learned a lot about slavery as a part of U.S. history but it ended there. I never learned about where the land for slavery to even happen was gotten and what has happened to the people it was taken from.
It’s amazing how you don’t know you’re being ignorant until you learn what you didn’t know… like that 1/3 of Indian women are raped and over 80% of these rapes are from people OFF their site, that American Indians are recognized as a political entity and not a race, that Indians are the poorest communities in the USA, an that they did not ask to be citizens of the United States; it was imposed on them.
Professor Cheyfitz summed it up pretty well: If you want to know where you are you need to learn about where your land comes from and who else lives on it.
“It’s amazing how you don’t know you’re being ignorant until you learn what you didn’t know.” So true. It epitomizes American history and our educational system. Like you mentioned, I learned all about the slavery of African Americans in grade school, but merely grazed over the injustices and forced poverty the Native Americans face in the USA today. Awareness, reform, and change are needed.