Saturday, July 3, 2021

Colorado bans Native American Mascots and Offers In State Tuition to members of Federally recognized Tribes

The caption goes a long ways towards providing the basic information on the story.  

Representatives of Wyoming's Arapaho Tribe went to the signing ceremony and expressed the hope that Wyoming may follow suit.

Regarding the tuition, this is an excellent idea, and perhaps ought to go one step further with the legislature exploring ways to encourage Native American students living on the Wind River Reservation to enroll in the university for careers with needed skills on the Reservation or which would otherwise serve and assist it in some fashion.  Encouraging enrollment in law school provides one example.

On mascots, I'm not hugely familiar with the state's high school mascots so I had to look that up.  I'd note that grade schools and middle schools also have mascots, so that hardly amounts to a full exploration of the topic. Schools which appear to use Native American mascots are Star Valley (Braves), Worland (Warriors) and Wyoming Indian (Chiefs).  Wyoming Indian is in Fremont County School District No. 14 and ironically has a student body that's either 100% Native American or nearly so.  It is located on Wind River.

Wyoming Indian has had its mascot name used for the name of a well respected documentary about its high school basketball team, which is almost always excellent.  For that reason I'd think that there would be some reluctance on its part to change the name, but it deserves some slack for obvious reasons in this area.  I'm somewhat surprised that the other schools haven't already changed their names.

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