sover 990,000 acres of stolen land from 230 Indigenous nations, the largest beneficiary of Morrill Act. Similarly, decades of uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing on Navajo Nation lands have left people with disproportionate rates of cancer, while the vast majority of Six Nations residents have unreliable access to clean water as companies like Nestlé extract millions of gallons from their watersheds for profit.
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This global pattern extends to institutions like Cornell University, granted over 990,000 acres of stolen land from 230 Indigenous nations, the largest beneficiary of Morrill Act.
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This teach-in highlighted how settler colonialism and capitalism operate globally to gain power and profit, dispossessing Indigenous people and exploiting natural resources. It also reminded me of an event from my own family history. My mom is from Kalmykia—a republic in Russia and the only Buddhist region in Europe, home to nomadic Mongols who settled in the Caspian steppes in the early 17th century. As a Kalmyk-American, I knew disappointingly little about the historical context and ongoing impact of the forced deportation of Kalmyks to Siberia, so I did some research.
Flag of the Republic of Kalmykia. The center lotus represents Buddhism.
I learned that on the December 28, 1943, at the hands of Stalin's USSR, the entire population of 100,000 Kalmyks were forced to leave their homeland within three days in the middle of winter and relocate over 3,000 kilometers away to Siberia. This was an act of collective punishment for a few thousand Kalmyks’ participation in the German army against Soviet Russia during World War II. Faced with unprepared long travel in the middle of winter, one-fifth of the population died along the way. As an ethnic and religious minority (Kalmykia is the only Buddhist republic in Europe), this event was also an attempt of ethnic cleansing. When they were allowed to return fourteen years later in 1957, Russian settlements populated their homeland. While my grandparents met in Siberia, my mother was born in the Republic of Kalmykia, only six years after the Kalmyks were allowed to return. In the aftermath of this event, Kalmykia is one of the poorest republics in Russia, though we are still rich in nomadic traditions and Tibetan Buddhist culture. After learning about the historical and political context of Kalmyk dispossession, my participation in the Free Palestine movement became much more personal. It showed me how education on the shared histories of oppression across the world has the power to unite people across different backgrounds in mass movements like Free Palestine. At rallies and vigils, people would often share prayers and words of comfort from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. I wanted to The Buddhist Sangha at Cornell to join the Coalition for Mutual Liberation, but wasn't sure how we could contribute. The language of liberation work so often reminded me of Buddhism. At a rally regarding the encampment, Professor Russell Rickford said, “the liberated zone is a state of mind”. To me, this sounded a lot like the concept of enlightenment, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice where one is liberated from the cycle of samsara (suffering). Fall 2024 Issue
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