My ten-year old daughter, Jessie, is a fifth grader at Bugbee Elementary School, and her teacher Anthony Weber regularly asks his students to research and report on any aspect of the news. A little over a week ago Jessie found one of many newspaper articles about the controversy concerning Native American team names and mascots used by West Hartford’s high schools, Hall and Conard. Jess and I discussed the issue, and I told her that on Feb. 12 there was going to be a meeting about the subject at Town Hall. We decided to go. I thought it would be a great learning moment and help Jessie to see that every news story has at its heart real people with real concerns.

We sat in Town Hall and watched as speaker after speaker – students, athletic coaches, teachers, alumni, moms and dads, all of them concerned citizens – rose to the microphone and made impassioned pleas. Jessie and I listened, kept count of how many people were opposed or supported using Native names and mascots, and, most importantly, considered their reasons.

Those opposed spoke of the horrid treatment of Native Americans throughout our nation’s history; the theft of tribal lands, questions of genocide, and the continuing economic and social plight of so many native peoples. In these speakers’ opinions, using Native names and mascots was misappropriation of another culture’s heritage and utterly devoid of the very real and well documented history of American oppression. As an historian, I know this history well and am often amazed at how many of our citizens don’t understand or acknowledge that this, along with the history of slavery, are some of the darkest moments in our nation’s past and run headlong against the philosophical underpinnings of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.