Thom Ranger
Navajo Coyote Canyon, Navajo Nation, N.M.
It’s interesting to see how one of the current professional baseball World Series teams, the Cleveland Indians, is supported here at BYU. We endorse an “Honor Code” here at BYU that is supposed to make us “a better or a peculiar” people above the general population or other universities. At the same time we allow students to wear caps, shirts, and jackets demonstrating the racism in sport team mascots.
It’s interesting to note that we as Latter-day Saints subscribe to Christlike virtues, yet endorse this outright racism and stereotype of Native American peoples. As a full-blooded Native American, one of the few on this campus, I find it appalling and demeaning. I am the father to full blood Native children that I have to un-teach these racist views and stereotypes each baseball and football season. You see, small children have a difficult time in determining what they see in regard to reality. The questions I have to explain are that we are not big-nosed buck-teeth people, we are not tomahawk chopping people, we are not at the level of other mascots, i.e., bulldogs, donkeys or animals. The hardest part of teaching my children here at the Lord’s university is that my children are aware of the fact that most of the students here are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and because of this they are held to higher level of honesty, respect, dress and commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’ve told my children, “Yes, they are members of the church, and yet they have no regard for our people by wearing such apparel.”
They then wonder why such students would go contrary to what Jesus Christ taught while here on earth and among our ancestors with the full endorsement of the university and the board of trustees. It’s a difficult lesson I must continue to teach my children and will continue to do so the next few years while here at the Lord’s university.
