As we enter Native American Heritage Month, all we can see Cornell do to ‘honor’ Indigenous and Native people is: the same land acknowledgment that never turns into action, a section in their DEI blog, a page lying about their commitment, and perhaps an announcement celebrating Indigenous history. But these gestures mean nothing when the University continues to profit from stolen Indigenous land, represses student voices and turn away as genocide unfolds in Gaza. If Cornell truly honored Indigenous resistance, it would stand with all oppressed peoples, especially Palestinians facing annihilation under a settler colonial regime that mirrors the same logic this university was built upon.
Decolonization is not a holiday. It is not about pride or inclusion. It is about dismantling the structures of domination that make universities like Cornell possible. Cornell’s endowment still benefits from land stolen from the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʼ people through the Morrill Act of 1862, a federal policy that granted stolen Indigenous land to universities. Cornell received the largest allocation of any institution — more than 987,000 acres across 15 states — and continues to profit from mineral rights, leases, and investments tied to those lands today. This is the same colonial logic now justifying Israel’s destruction of Gaza: the seizure of land, the erasure of a people, the framing of resistance as terrorism. From the genocide of Native peoples on this continent to the bombing of Palestinians abroad, empire repeats itself under different names. To celebrate Native American Heritage Month while remaining silent on Gaza is to choose comfort over conscience.
Cornell’s silence is not neutrality; it is complicity. The administration has gone to great lengths to repress expressions of solidarity with Palestine, from restricting campus protests to disciplining students who speak against colonial violence. And one of the individuals at the center of that machinery is Vice President Ryan Lombardi, who says he supports students’ voices but later rejects their appeals for suspension. This is the same Lombardi now leading efforts to rewrite Cornell’s Student Code of Conduct, a project disguised as modernization but aimed at expanding administrative control over student expression and organizing.
This effort is not bureaucratic housekeeping but a deliberated way institutions uphold imperialism by regulating dissent. The administration’s push to update the Student Code of Conduct, justified by the claim that accountability must evolve with the times, is a rhetorical disguise to limit genuine student governance. Ryan Lombardi has claimed that the process is inclusive, yet only five appointed students have been included — hardly an example of meaningful participation. The University calls it modernization; in reality, it is centralization, an effort to protect Cornell’s image, not its students. Cornell’s claim that the process is inclusive is just like its claims of diversity and belonging: symbolic at best. In the most recent admitted class, fewer than ten Native or Indigenous students were accepted, a number that exposes how Cornell’s rhetoric of inclusion is always mere hypocrisy.
Cornell’s repression reaches beyond students. The university has targeted faculty who teach and mentor Indigenous students, Professor Eric Cheyfitz. The University suspended him following a discrimination complaint, then disregarded the Faculty Senate’s findings, eventually cornering him into retirement after asking for respect for Indigenous knowledge of Palestine and proper academic engagement. Punishing a professor who is immersed in Indigenous scholarship is institutional erasure. When a university disciplines the very educators who sustain Indigenous knowledge, it repeats the violence of dispossession by silencing truth and extinguishing the small spaces where liberation can still be learned.
Cornell’s land acknowledgment rings hollow while bombs funded by U.S. aid erase Palestinian land and life. The University aligns itself with the same imperial power structure that justifies mass death abroad and repression on its own campus. The hypocrisy is complete: Cornell claims to value Indigenous resistance while policing it, punishing it and profiting from the very systems that make resistance necessary.
Cornell’s ties to weapons manufacturers directly contradict its own ethical standards. The University maintains investments and partnerships with companies such as BAE Systems, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin; corporations whose weapons have been used to bombard civilian areas in Gaza, as well as with Technion, known for developing drone, surveillance, and weapons technologies used by the Israeli Defense Forces. In 2016, Cornell’s Board of Trustees established ethical divestment guidelines requiring the University to reconsider holdings in any corporation engaged in “morally reprehensible activities,” including genocide, apartheid, or systemic cruelty to children. Yet Cornell continues to ignore its own policy, profiting from and collaborating with industries whose actions stand in direct violation of those principles.
Decolonization cannot coexist with silence. It demands that Cornell speak up against genocide in Gaza, divest from corporations profiting from occupation and protect students instead of persecuting them. It demands that the University materially support Indigenous sovereignty and return resources to the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʼ people, not just acknowledge their name in a paragraph. It demands courage, not committees.
My Aztec ancestors did not survive genocide so I could stay silent as another unfolds. Their blood carries the memory of resistance, not submission. Indigenous people endure, resist and rise, and we will not allow genocide to continue, not on this land, not in Palestine, not anywhere empire plants its flag.
From Tenochtitlán to Palestine, the struggle lives, the people rise!
¡Tla tech tlankawetsa yes monoliniske, Tla tech tejtemowa pega tik mixnamikiske!
Translated from Nahuatl: "If they humiliate us we will unite, if there is oppression we will stand up."
Maria Lima Valdez is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at ml2297@cornell.edu.
