After Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee and Margaret Pearce published their research on Land-Grab Universities in their exposé for High Country News in 2020, Cornell University could no longer hide. It damningly holds the title of being the number one beneficiary of the 1862 Morrill Act, a dubious accolade earned on the fact that Cornell singlehandedly seized 1/10 of all the Indigenous lands granted and gained 1/3 of all the revenues generated by the Act. On its own website, Cornell University observes — as passively and innocently as possible — that “we recognize that lands distributed to states to support the founding of universities were previously taken by the federal government.” The phrasing suggests as if, somehow, the grabbing of Indigenous lands was something someone else did, and it is only by chance that Cornell University, by the nature of it being in the populously settled New York state, benefited the most from Indigenous dispossession. But, as research by Professor Jon Parmenter demonstrates, Ezra Cornell personally speculated in the scrips from New York, Wisconsin, Kansas and Minnesota that would provide him with the landed wealth to establish his “any person, any study” vision for the academic institution that he founded. Cornell would not exist without the almost one million acres its founder personally helped steal from over 251 Indigenous nations and communities throughout North America. When Indigenous students and scholars refer to Cornell’s founding as genocidal, they mean that literally. The stripping of land, the reduction of Indigenous peoples to the smallest parcels of holdings on their traditional and customary territories, the forced assimilation and the loss of language was, in each instance, a violent, deadly endeavor toward the pursuit of — through any means necessary — the elimination of Indigenous peoples. 

I am a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, a nation originally in what is now Mississippi and removed to Indian Territory on “the Trail of Tears” in the 1830s. I am also an Indigenous studies scholar who works on Indigenous critiques of imperialism and settler colonialism as an associate professor in Literatures in English at Cornell. 

By sheer coincidence, on Oct. 11, I had assigned in my Intro to Native American Literature class Layli Long Soldier’s poem “38” that details in straightforward words and sentences the poetry of the Dakota warriors who, in retaliating against the settlers who had imprisoned and were actively starving the Dakota people within a 10-mile tract of what was left to them of their homelands, shoved grass into the mouth of Andrew Myrick, the Indian Agent who infamously said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” On Dec. 26, 1862, the same week he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln authorized the mass hanging execution of 38 of those warriors accused of the rape and murder of settlers. “‘Real’ poems,” Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) writes in her own poem, “do not ‘really’ require words.” If there are resonances with Israeli discourse about Palestinians, it is because, as William Faulkner observed from his occupation of Chickasaw homelands, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Though Cornell administrators might insist that politics do not belong in the classroom, there is no possible way of keeping politics out of literature.