Professor Eric Cheyfitz, the former director of the Indian Studies Program at Cornell, gave a speech this past Wednesday at the Becker-Rose Coffeehouse about Native Americans. I was surprised to hear that Cornell’s campus is on the Cayuga tribe’s land and that the administration won’t acknowledge this at convocation and graduation. Simply delivering a sentence of thanks or even just including it in a program would be so simple and would go a long way towards giving these people the respect that they deserve.

I was intrigued when Professor Cheyfitz asked us how it is possible that we learn American history without native history because despite the settlers’ interactions with natives being a major defining aspect of America, it is not something that history classes focus on. It is important to remember and learn from our mistakes.  Instead, Professor Cheyfitz described a culture today that is aiming to systematically wipe out native culture through genocide.  Heritage is extremely important to the Native American identity script yet the US government often will not recognize their tribes. We live in a culture dominated by a black-white binary that does not consider how natives are ignored every single day.

Something Cheyfitz mentioned was that by ignoring the thought processes of these people, the West loses.  This is especially true considering global warming.  Because these people live so close to nature, they are adept at interacting with it in a way that does not simultaneously destroy it.  He said this to us as I sat freezing in the over air conditioned building, something that seems to be a major problem at Cornell.  I agree that we would do well to learn from the philosophies embedded in these cultures, something we can’t do if their cultures are wiped out.