07/15/2021
Tonight, the Lamar School District Re2 will be holding a community meeting to gather feedback and share about what steps the Board will need to take in the next year in regards to the mascot. Our coalition of Lamar High School alumni crafted this statement which was sent to the board this week:
Lamar High School Alumni Statement:
Dear Lamar High School Board Members,
As alumni of Lamar High School, we acknowledge the long history of its mascot and the meaning it has held for generations of Lamar students. At the same time, we recognize the derogatory nature of the word "savage," and cannot ignore the testimony of American Indian peoples both in Colorado and around the country calling for its retirement.
If local legends can be trusted, Lamar created Colorado’s first American Indian mascot. It appeared, perhaps not by coincidence, a mere twenty years after the Sand Creek Massacre, and less than forty miles south of the site where John Chivington’s militia committed acts of utter savagery against a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment. It should be noted that as of today, leaders of both the Cheyenne and Arapaho have made public statements denouncing Lamar’s mascot.
Lamar formed while the Colorado Wars were ongoing, and erected its first school building shortly thereafter. Town legend suggests school officials wasted little time deciding on a name for a sports mascot: the savages. The term was unequivocally in use by 1910, when it was mentioned in one of Lamar’s oldest surviving high school yearbooks.
That same year, three Indian Boarding Schools operated across the state—the Grand Junction Indian School, the Fort Lewis Indian School, and the Southern Ute Indian School. These institutions aimed to “civilize” Indian youth by forcing them to relinquish any tribal identity and to give up any inherited customs, thus insisting they assimilate to majority white culture. So while young American Indian children were coerced into renouncing their families, changing their appearances, and giving up their culture and language, students in communities like Lamar and Galeton (which would later merge with Eaton) were dressing up in war bonnets at pep rallies that they called “pop-wows,” where they performed their best impressions of snake dances to the cheers of their families.
By the time of the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s, the first wave of American Indian activists began calling for an end to Native mascots. By the end of the 90’s, only three Colorado schools listened. Arvada and Montbello changed their mascots, while Arapahoe sought out an endorsement from the Arapaho Nation for their “Warriors.” Other schools, like Lamar, opted for incremental adjustments to their imagery or language to project a more “respectable” front, hoping to assuage critics. Even after the turn of the century, organizations like the National Commission on Civil Rights, the NAACP, the National Congress of American Indians, and the American Psychological Association published statements condemning Native mascots. Still, Lamar would not take heed.
In 2015, Gov. Hickenlooper signed an Executive Order to establish the Commission to Study American Indian Representations in Public Schools. In a press release, Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia stated the goal of the commission was to “bring people and communities together through dialogue about the issue of American Indian mascots.” He said he hoped that "Open, honest dialogue, free from the threat of penalties, can result in new paths forward and avoid future deadlock.”
The Commission—composed of American Indian leaders from across the state—visited those Colorado schools who wished to be a part of this dialogue. There were only four: Strasburg, Loveland, Eaton, and Lamar. After visiting each of these communities (and being met at times with hostility, as was the case in Lamar), the Commission’s highest recommendation was to phase out American Indian imagery and nomenclature entirely.
Since then, among the schools visited by the Commission, only Loveland has made an announcement to change (with Eaton in discussions). La Veta, not included in the Commission, made the decision to retire their R*dsk*ns mascot in favor of the Redhawks, and several other schools, with pressure from SB21-116—a bill signed by Gov. Polis eliminating Native mascots in Colorado—have moved to retire their mascots also. Although grassroots efforts in other places like Lamar have been ongoing, change remains elusive, and the roots of hostility run deep.
We recognize that the costs required to change the mascot are significant, and public concern about costs is valid. As alumni, we desire the best for all Lamar’s students, and wish to find funding so that no student’s educational experience at Lamar would suffer because of a mascot transition.
We are also aware of funding opportunities available to the Lamar Re2 School Board if we take the initiative to change, have agency in forging a new path forward, and accept responsibility for where we’ve come. We know this is possible, since Lamar is the community that taught us initiative, agency, and responsibility.
We also recognize the importance of ongoing education concerning the history of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples in Southeast Colorado, and encourage the Board to move in partnership with federally recognized tribes to ensure that future Lamar students receive robust knowledge and experience about the history of the lands upon which the town now stands.
We ask that the Lamar Re-2 School Board take this important step for the benefit of all Lamar’s students, and move to retire its current mascot.
