After 1 PM on Wednesday, Columbia University shut down its administrative services. The campus seemed to slow it all, the library doors prepared to close, leaving a rush of bodies behind. I wondered why it couldn’t have been 4 PM. Yet, I left. As I moved toward the train, in my head, I am thinking about what stop would be better. I choose to prepare myself for my usual transfer before Penn Station? Whenever I don’t set a stop before boarding the train I tend to lose myself in a book or in reading people’s behavior to better understand them. To have time to make my time, I decided to have a long walk, take a different path. Not the familiar Broadway route, but another side of the campus—one that skirts the quieter edges of Columbia, by Morningside. There I saw a sign. An acknowledgment. A reminder. « This is Indigenous land. » The words sat unmoving in my head. It is Thanksgiving, The idea stays unflinching. It wasn’t there just for Thanksgiving; as a show, a spectacle. it had been there long before, noticed within orientation time, in my earlier haste. But now it spoke, a quiet refrain. The voice of one of my professors surfaced—prof. Yolanda Ruiz. In September, at the start of her class, she had said it plainly: “We are on Indigenous land.” The statement was neither rhetorical nor a ceremonial sight, meant to linger. It did. Though I eventually left her class due to the constraints of the double major of the MA, those words of hers followed me, and now they met me again by this sign, speaking through an imperialist language, through its silence: Thanksgiving. A slaughter day.
Even the stock market halts, giving traders and capitalists alike a moment to retreat into a mythology of gratitude. But this day masks centuries of violence, dispossession in the warmth of feasts and laughter. A holiday built on forgetting, on consuming the spoils of conquest.
The sign reminded me: « This is Indigenous land ». The acknowledgment seemed hollow when measured against the enormity of what had been lost. At the same time a quiet voice asked: Do we intend to give it back? I walked on, carrying the thought like a weight in my chest. I had no plans for a feast, no table where laughter and gratitude could be. Of course I have a family here. I too have a family, friends, mother and sisters. In the name of will we have a seat? For being there? What will we celebrate while as the gangs a US ambassador had federated displacing more people?
Will be I grateful for that?
What will we celebrate? Here not elsewhere? Gratitude felt misplaced, even dishonest.
Grateful—for what? At whose expense?
To the Indigenous peoples of this land, I can only say: I am sorry.
Sorry for living on land that was violently taken. Sorry for walking on part of a structure that benefits from your dispossession. Sorry for the silence that surrounds the loss—the land, the culture, the futures erased.
And yet, despite all that has been stolen, the indigenous still teach us still. Resistance and survival are acts of defiance, a reminder of what settlers refused to learn: the value of letting others be, of living in harmony with the land and one another.
But Thanksgiving does not speak of harmony. Its story is built on the myth of the “promised land,” a metaphor for imperialism. . A land gifted—but to those who arrived bearing their m flags and violence.
As immigrant, I stand in the shadow of this imperial logic: Forgetting.
I should be a shame as I, too, have been displaced—not by settlers, but by the systems of power that fracture nations, exploit resources, and leave ruin in their wake. My displacement is not the same, but it offers me a glimpse into how imperialism operates across borders, stealing not just land, but also language, memory, and belonging. In one the change the context.
I cannot say I am grateful for leaving a country behind. Gratitude feels like betrayal when home becomes uninhabitable, when survival demands exile. Imperialism forces this choice: to leave one’s land and settle on another, perpetuating cycles of displacement. It rewrites identity, casting immigrants and settlers alike as pawns in its endless game of conquest.
Thanksgiving asks us to gather, to celebrate abundance, but beneath its veneer lies exclusion, silence, and mourning. To live on stolen land without acknowledgment is to perpetuate imperialism greatest weapon: forgetting.
I too see you, the people this day erases.
I too see the grief beneath the myths.
I too see the resilience it takes to endure.
Let this be an apology and a refusal to forget. Let there be no feast without mourning, no gratitude without humility.
May we one day learn, truly, what it means to let one another be.
And to those who ask if I will celebrate, I answer:
« Sorry! Immigrant does not mean Settlers».
Aurélien Aurélien