001okay okay we are streaming let me [Music] me all right are we ready to go now jonathan you're on mute so i don't know if i if we are or not give me the thumbs up if we're ready and we're ready to go okay excellent so i'm going to call um this the june 22nd meeting of the dartmouth school committee uh to order um since the last time we met some provisions around open meeting law have changed are you ready to go now jonathan i'm hearing myself twice so i just wanna that's me okay all right um i just wanna i'm gonna read a few things because i want to make sure i'm not really sure under open meeting law right now what i need to say so i'm gonna say a bunch of things
002and hope we cover our bases um previously we used to need to say that per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of open meeting law gl 30 c g l c 30 a section 20 the public will not be allowed to physically access this diversity committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at www.youtube.com dhstv media the school committee reserves the right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as possible open meeting law regulations governing remote participation remain in uh in effect but we must also comply with a few provisions as the legislature has updated them first all votes must be taken by roll call and it says at the start of the meeting we must announce the name of members
003or members who are participating remotely such information must also be recorded in the meeting minutes we are all participating remotely so i will ask dr gifford to just note that all members present were remote in her minutes without having been done because we need to do everything be a roll call thank you i will um do a roll call of all members to ensure that everyone is present i'm going to call people who are not present so we know that they are not here mark hayes ross tebow here uh kelly bloom here lily chamberlain here diane massari here julina pamphile here jada walker elizabeth murphy shelly scott here kathleen amarill and shannon jenkins i am here okay so we have two things on our main items on our agenda for this evening um the first
004item is the approval of our minutes um we'll do these separately because we'll need to roll call each of them so i will entertain a motion to approve the minutes from the may 4th meeting of the equality and diversity committee do you need a second i need someone to move it first i'll move it thank you shelly all right so shelley moves and can i have a second i'll second it thank you mr tebow all right now i will roll call mr tebow yes uh ms bloom yes here uh lily chamberlain yes uh diane massari here uh julian julian pamphile here hi uh you can say yes or no because we're doing the minutes here um shelly scott yes uh and then i will also vote yes okay so then our second order of business
005will be i will entertain a motion to approve the minutes of 5 25. that was our second meeting anyone move that for me so moved thank you lily and do i have a second i'll second thank you mr tebow um is there any discussion i should have asked that last time sorry if there's any discussion we can go back to that but is there any discussion on the minutes all right hearing done we will roll call these minutes as well mr tebow yes uh ms bloom yes miss chamberlain yes uh miss masari yes uh miss pamphile yes um [Music] miss scott yes and i will also vote yes did i get everyone i didn't miss anyone okay so that's the first item uh of business off our agenda the second item on our agenda for
006business today we discussed at our last meeting um that we would have people give us presentations to i think as miss chamberlain made the suggestion um to sort of educate us a little bit about um issues around native mascots so we have joining us today mr kempton campbell who i believe kept in your graduate of the dartmouth schools um he now attends uconn and he is also chair of the youth commission um kempton has been doing some research um around this issue um as part of his work at uconn and he's going to talk to us a little bit about um the history of mascots here in dartmouth he's done some good research on that and some of the arguments around that we're also joined with by dr laurel davis delano who is at springfield
007college um and who does research on the uh psychological effects of um and native american mascots um so she's going to talk to us a little bit about that i've asked them to give to do you know try around 10 maybe 15 minutes presentation and then we will have time to ask them questions and so i believe um kempton you are going to go first yes um so i will hand it over to you and i think um jonathan has enabled you to share your screen with us all right oh it says he has disabled participant screen sharing all right so we'll have to hold on we'll work on that for a sec jonathan are you still there yes i am uh you should be able to do it now thank you very much all
008right are you able to see my screen now yes perfect um so as dr jenkins said my name is captain campbell i am a town meeting member i am the chair of the dartmouth youth commission and i'm a graduate of dartmouth high school i graduated in 2019 um so now i am actually a student at the university of connecticut where i am a double major in political science and human rights um before i continue i do want to reiterate that i am here as a student of uconn and an alumni and not as the chair of the youth commission um so the opinions that i give here tonight are no way indicative of the opinions of the youth commission with that being said i'm here because over the spring semester of 2021 i participated in
009an independent study at the university of connecticut with the director of dodd-impact which is a leading center for human rights not only in the united states but also throughout the world it's actually dedicated to thomas j dodd who was one of the leading prosecutors at the nuremberg trials but he was also later the senator from connecticut um so with that i studied uh the history of native american mascots the psychological effects behind them as well as some of the arguments used in opposition to retiring native uh mascots and so tonight i'm going to be going over some of the history that i've found as well as the arguments that i've read extensively about throughout the semester and i wanted to sort of leave the psychological effects or impacts of native american mascots to dr davis
010delano um i think it's she's more qualified to speak on that matter so with that being said we'll jump right into my presentation so throughout the course of my study i focused specifically on looking at historical yearbooks from dartmouth high school's past specifically looking at them at the southworth library they have a great collection um that spans from 1922 all the way up until 2004. so it gives us a very good timeline and so i think this picture shows um a rough estimate of when the native mascot truly became ingrained within the dartmouth public school community so we see that in the 1970s the the mascot really became ingrained and that's when we first started to really use that and that's that's obviously been going on up until today now i'm not going to go
011through each and every one of these pictures but i'm going to give you a second to look at them so throughout the 30s and 40s dartmouth high school didn't necessarily use a native mascot they instead used the words dartmouth on all their uniforms it wasn't something that was necessarily um within the public school community at the time and then if we transition into the 50s that's the first time that the native mascot and using natives for our own purposes and rallying our own purposes really became a part of the high school community so in 1953 we actually had a yearbook that was themed native americans where we each identified as native people and in order to rally ourselves and our community we see the dartmouth high school students in 1958 dressed up as stereotypical native
012americans um and they that's not traditional wampanoag upon against a wampanoag where it's it's uh it's a stereotype of what it means to be native and then 1960s it continues on so that's when we first adopt native mascots onto our uniforms and we continue on so we see that dartmouth high school girls hockey team and the dartmouth high school baseball team each adopted either a symbol of a native american or the word indian on their their uniform also the dartmouth high school majorettes was a big player throughout dartmouth high school history they were a cheer type squad who would dress up in the stereotypical native wear with with traditional headdresses feathers things like that i'm going to go into more detail about them later on and i'm not going to continue on but through the
01370s that's really when it it officially became ingrained and that's when we continue on we see in 1974 that's actually the symbol that we use today and so that was adopted around that time period and it's continued on until today and then the 80s we continue on having that that logo and using the native mascots the 90s the same thing 2000's the same thing native dress wear the stereotypical dress wear feathers war paint things like that and then today obviously each of the dartmouth high school athletic teams have adopted some sort of indication that we are the dartmouth indians whether that's the logo or um just the print of indians on um our uniforms so i wanted to talk about dartmouth high school major arts because i think that's another big indicator of sort of
014the history and timeline between how um the native theme has been engraded within dartmouth high school's history and so one of those is through the dartmouth high school majorettes which was a sort of cheer squad that dressed in stereotypical native wear headdresses whatnot so that continued from 1960 around that time period up until um the late 1990s early 2000s and so we see that the native identity and and calling ourselves native as a way of rallying our community has been something that's been especially ingrained into our community and it's been built upon um and so we still continue to use that to this day and so now that i've gone over a little bit of the history i was very brief i know but i wanted to give some time to talk about sort of
015the literature that i've read throughout the semester um some of the ongoing debate arguments um in opposition to retiring native mascots and so throughout this i'm going to be going over arguments that i've heard and trying to sort of um regurgitate what i've i've read and what i've learned to try to pass it on to to the committee and so the first big argument that i've heard is that native american mascots you know they're not offensive um and so with each of these arguments i'm giving um just a quote anonymously from a community member um so this one is there's no derogatory side to the name or the logo chosen as a sign of respect for the town's original inhabitants so that's specific to dartmouth however these arguments apply to the nation um more generally
016when it comes to professional sporting teams and so some of the literature that i've read and the responses that i've read to sort of this argument is that these mascots perpetuate stereotypes of what it means to be native it essentially boils down their identity to um a caricature of what it really means to be native either whether that that could be whether it means being a warrior or being noble or being a savage it really just it creates a reality in which it's very hard for native people to escape the sort of stereotype that we've created for them and so not only that but these stereotypes also misinform the community dartmouth high school community and the dartmouth community in general and it leads to an environment that's more conducive to further stereotypes that desensitize the
017community members to insensitive behavior and so an example of this is that dartmouth high school since we have adopted a native mascot we are more likely to see students dressing in feathers or war paint or things like that because of the mascot we even if we say it's not okay and the administration says it's not okay to dress in this it still has created that environment which it's become accessible and they start to do it on top of this there are serious psychological consequences that i'm gonna i'm gonna let dr davis delano um explain later on another common argument i hear is that these these mascots allow us to remember our history and that when you erase history you forget history then you repeat history and so that's obviously that's something that i've heard a
018lot um in this community specifically and so this sort of implies that mascots teach history in the first place but i would push back and say and a lot of people would push back and say that these mascots provide you know they provide no further context as the history or the culture of native peoples specifically indigenous ways of knowing and being within the world um and it really just it doesn't provide any context to the indigenous people within the region so it doesn't even provide the name in that in these instances um so how can we really learn and remember history that isn't taught through mascots so any history that is taught through these mascots it's most likely to be history that has been reshaped and oversimplified into a into a stereotype of what it
019means to be native so therefore we're misinforming ourselves by relying solely on native mascots to educate ourselves another argument i hear is that these mascots honor and respect native people and this sort of goes along with my last point this named logo for dartmouth is one of honor and prestige and is worn with pride another one is dharma stands for excellence and being proud and honoring the indians this is another one that i've heard quite often and i think we need to ask ourselves a few questions if we are going to rely on this argument and say that we're going to honor and respect native peoples one of these questions is like why do communities and schools adopt mascots in the first place um i would argue that we don't adopt mascots to honor the
020things that we are adopting them for um but instead we adopt them to use as rallying points for our community to provide a sense of belonging and purpose um so for example we have the the fair haven blue devils i i don't think anybody would argue that they we honor the fair haven blue devils we rather use it as a means to rally the community another question that we can ask if we are going to go along with honor and respect for native peoples these mascots have um is that our our mascots the epitome of how we can honor a people like our is that the is that how we can go about honoring native peoples to the best of our ability um i would argue that that's not necessarily true and that if we
021truly want to honor native people we can teach an accurate uh and historical perspective of what it means to be a native whether that's teaching the culture of native culture or if that's teaching the history of genocide and oppression of native peoples but then also if we go back to that lack of education surrounding um native peoples we truly don't know um much about native people because of the lack of education that we have about them and so in a sense how are we actually honoring and respecting native people if we know very little about them so in a way we're actually honoring and respecting a reshaped and oversimplified and stereotypical version of what it means to be native a couple more a couple more so if we ban this mascot what will we ban
022next that's another argument that is often often cited when it comes to native mascots it's the whole idea that if we ban this like we're gonna ban that and we're gonna ban this so a quote that goes along with that is what would be considered politically incorrect next the fair haven blue devils being anti-christian or the whereabout vikings being offensive to those of scandinavian descent and so i think that this argument it it fails to take into consideration the context to which native peoples have been used as mascots so such contexts include racial discrimination ethnic discrimination oppression and genocide in which native peoples have endured throughout the founding and expansion of this country so to compare them to the fair heaven blue devils or the warehouse vikings is to completely disregard um that history additionally
023um this is something that that um has been cited a lot within the dartmouth community um it's it's typically cited throughout the country as well is um people typically cite um a native person and they say so and so said native american mascots are okay so they must be okay and i think that one is that this this example is probably one of the most troubling um did anyone see the post from an actual dartmouth indian who lives locally she said she was actually proud to that we still use the logo and so this is sort of problematic because it implies that one native american's opinion can uh is indicative of all native people's opinions um on the matter and i think that that's especially troubling because they're just like you and i and that
024we both have sort of the same app we have different opinions um on different matters but it also doesn't take into consideration that the fact that these stereotypes and the subsequent psychological effects of these these native american mascots impact all native peoples and not just those living within the community so uh what troubles me is that if we were go to go to um the upon against wampanoag people and gain um some sort of um agreeance to using the mascot i i think that that would still be problematic in that our uniforms have the native mascot on it and have the words indian on it and so if we were to travel to other communities it's still going to have that that psychological impact on all native peoples to wherever we travel and lastly i
025this is uh one that's very important to this committee i think is that there are more pressing issues to attend to right now i know that we just we're coming out of covid and where we have a lot to deal with right now but this is this is something that um this argument is used and it presupposes that native american mascots don't have serious consequences to them so from the stereotypes and psychological consequences that i know dr davis delano will get into it denies sort of any harmful consequences in the it makes it so it's not a pressing issue and i think that it absolutely is um so with that and taking into consideration those arguments that i've heard um i think the best argument i've heard in favor of um keeping the native mascot
026is in the sake of um tradition um however i think that all the cons vastly outweigh the pros and that and so with that i asked this committee my policy my recommendations would be to retire the dartmouth indian once and for all but it's not only enough to retire the dartmouth indian i think it also is required that we should develop a curriculum that teaches accurate depictions of native culture and history specifically taking into account native communities i mean the founding expansion of the united states specifically taken into account the ethnic discrimination and genocide of native peoples but on top of that it's not enough to just educate um the school community i think it's also important to educate the dartmouth community in general and to engage in thoughtful discussions surrounding native american mascots and
027native american history and culture in that and so we also need to discuss the consequences um of these mascots to foster more humane and just citizenship i know you have very difficult decisions um to make as a committee and i know that uh people will be upset no matter which way you you vote and i think it's important that we educate the community or you educate the community as to why you made certain decisions and so with that i appreciate you letting me present here tonight i threw a lot at you um and i look forward to hearing your questions or comments so thank you thank you captain just i just want to make one point of clarification before i open it up to the committee for questions about this part because i think it
028might be good if people want to see images or whatnot that we allow them to ask that now i just want to be clear that this committee this committee does not make the decision right about the mascot that power rests with the school committee but this committee can make a recommendation to the school committee about what to do want to be just just to make that clear um so does anybody have any questions um i just want to ask well kempton still kevin i would like you to stay around as we discuss this but does anybody have any questions about any of the images that kempton um shared with us and they might like to see in further detail i can't see if you raise your hand so if you have a question just go
029ahead and start talking and we'll sort that out uh captain could you stop this is jonathan tech support uh could you stop sharing so then uh dr jenkins should probably see people a little easier yeah yeah i was just gonna i don't it doesn't sound like anybody has questions about the images i'll ask you um to stay around kempton um in case we have questions later for our discussion but for now i'll turn it over to dr davis delano to talk to us for a while about some of her research and activism around this issue okay so i'm a white sociologist i'm not a psychologist and i've been studying native mascots though for over 25 years and yet my research isn't in the piece that i'm going to be talking about because i don't study
030the psychosocial effects what i did was get together with two other scholars to produce a document that summarizes the psychological social psychological effects to aimed at educational decision makers um because uh we knew that it would be useful um and i also study other native issues so um but i'm not really talking about my own scholarship today um so i'm also a member of a 12-member steering committee of the massachusetts mascot coalition and um three of us are white like myself and um nine of us are not and six of the native people uh of the nine native people represent the tribes that have the letters um they were appointed by their tribes to our steering committee um and they're the six tribes that has have the letters in support of the mascot bill um
031so um one of the things that the steering committee does is we have been arranging some panels before school committees and i i just wanted to i thought i thought kenton did a really good job but i want to mention that one in in a recent um visit to a school committee some people from the school system presented native history of the area and then kind of like a slideshow like kempton did at the beginning of the imagery and it really upset a lot of the panelists um because they knew some inaccuracies in the history that was being presented and they knew more about the history than the people presenting the history because they were you know they they're from these tribal nations um and you know i thought kempton did a great job showing
032those pictures but those can be like you know they can have an effect on people just seeing those images and things like um the use of headdresses and so forth um so on the first thing i'm going to do is talk about the findings from that we report in in the research article um summary that i think you all have right do you have that piece yeah you shared that with with me earlier and so i shared it with the committee okay so i'll just kind of make it simple and do um a summary so the first point that we make is that educational decision makers should make decisions based on research findings and not opinions i mean like it wouldn't get put out um you know what what what way would you like us
033to teach reading let's vote about what you find the most pleasant um you know people will educational administrators they look at research findings and then pick you know what's effective um and so we think that that should you know that general principle of following research findings should be primary rather than looking at public opinion um and so here are the findings so um one set of studies is focused on direct effects on native students um and overall this set of findings shows that native mascots create a hostile climate um for native youth um and this includes youth um who aren't native youth as as uh kempton was mentioning you know there's a variety opinions but native youth who aren't critical of mascots the research finding shows are more negatively affected because they don't have kind
034of a critical lens to pres to um protect themselves um so um when you expose native youth to native mascots it decreases their self-esteem especially uncritical native youth um it reduces their capacity to imagine future accomplishments for themselves um it um also um triggers less confidence or faith in their native communities to be able to make a difference and another finding is that in one study exposure to the name the logos et cetera um increased negative feelings and those negative feelings were stress distress depression dysphoria and hostility um and in one study a different study um the students um tended to avoid um athletic events when there were native mascots there so there's a bigger so those are the effects on native youth there's a bigger body of research on the effects on non-native people
035and of course ways that non-native people are affected if they're affected in problematic ways um can indirectly be harmful to native people so the first set of studies shows that and the majority of non-native people in these studies are white although not all of them are um and the majority actually support native mascots um and think that they honor native people so even those folks or especially those folks actually um in implicit bias tests the research shows that the native mascots are associated with negative thoughts and negative stereotypes more the most significant findings are that when you expose non-native people to native mascots it increases their negative stereotyping of native americans also if you compare non-native people who oppose native mascots to non-native people who support native mascots um those who support native mascots are
036more apt to hold stereotypical and prejudicial attitudes about native americans lastly two studies suggest that native mascot exposure can increase discrimination um perpetrated by non-native people against native people so overall um this second set of findings which is the effects of native mascots on non-native people um shows that they're actually harmful to non-native people because they're reinforcing or perpetuating or increasing uh negative stereotypes and prejudice that can manifest in discrimination and so and that of course not only is not educationally sound for non-native people um but it's also um can indirectly be harmful to native people so just to put this in context um the findings are not surprising to scholars who study native representations because most native mascots as kind of kempton was alluding to they they're all the same there's like if you
037look at the federally recognized tribal nations there's you know over close to 600 of them and they all have different cultures and the mascots tend to be this like hollywood version of like you know um pseudo native culture um and kind of this kind of erases distinctions also they're almost all male which is something schools should think about okay um the imagery um and most of them are warriors or chiefs now you can imagine just like any um group of people um there's like a huge range of occupations and tasks people do and so like button pulling you know or pushing native people into a warrior chief role only is erasing huge um aspects of people's lives um they're also all kind of nobody picks like a contemporary native soldier like from the us military
038right um they pick uh uh um people of the past and one huge representational issue uh related to native people that goes way beyond mascots is that there's very little representation in education curriculum in media or in other aspects of culture that are about contemporary native people who are like walking down my sidewalk delivering my mail um and um so um so it's like putting people in the past um and not recognizing what's going on today or even in the mid-1900s another reason why we're not surprised is and uh kempton um alluded to this as well that it involves non-native people usually white people in the origin of native mascots um taking somebody else's identity another group's identity and their culture or suitor culture okay um so representations of native mascots are representations of native
039american people and yet they're created by non-native people um and they're used by non-native people generally speaking um and they're used for the purposes of those non-native people and that's like the epitome of you know appropriation um okay so i was going to say a little bit um i i can if you ask me later ask uh talk a little bit about the attachment that a lot of people have to native mascots which is something that i study um but i want to say a little bit about decision making um so the one of the reasons why opinions like it's not a good idea for schools to uh or towns to survey their students about this issue or survey the community and the reason why is when that happens it implies that non-native people should
040be making decisions about representations that are not them a and b it ignores the research findings um and so i think that's a really important thing to think about um i just also want to mention that not only do we have six tribal nations from massachusetts that endorse the mascot bill um but so does um the national congress of american indians which is the largest and most representative body um that in of native americans period end of conversation um and they have lots of resources and if you reach out to them they can uh give you some can i resources you just one second real quick committee members and anyone in the general public who might not know that the mascot bill to which you are referring is a bill that's pending in the massachusetts
041state legislature that would ban the use of native mascots statewide i just want to make that clear sure i thought you all knew that yep right now it's in uh people may be watching live stream and they might not know that so i just need to clarify that thank you so much um it's currently in the joint education committee along with two other native bills um both of which are about native education um so there are also other native organizations like the native american journalists association and the um india um native um indian education association there's academic organizations like the american the psychological association the american anthropological association the american sociological association which is my association um and i i want to say something this is a little bit related to one of the points
042that kempton was mentioning um it's really important when you work on any native issues including this one to recognize the distinction between uh like native people there are bodies that represent them and those are the tribal nations right so the word of tribal nations is primary right um and a tribal nation might have people with a variety of opinion in it but its official body and its official body right that has some sovereignty um and also it's important to um distinguish between people who are enrolled in recognized native nations and people with native ancestry or in some cases say they have native ancestry um so thinking about that and thinking about representative bodies rather than individual native people um is really important like is this person speaking on behalf of their tribe okay um so
043i want to counter something a little bit that kempton said um one of the things that i've studied is processes of change related to mascots and i have discovered um that it's almost impossible to educate a community and here's why you can't get them there okay um and so um in turner's falls quote unquote around where i live the school committee sponsored like it was like four or five really great forums and they couldn't turn people out to these forums okay um because people didn't want to hear the information um it's easier to educate a student body because you have kind of a captive audience there um but it's really hard to educate um people on this issue in general and i'm you know i'm an educator i think we should but i just want
044to say um here's why it's so hard um most people in that aren't native in the us they don't like know a little bit of native information they know some misinformation and so they're starting like behind not at the starting line but behind the starting line and of course you have to unlearn information as you're gaining information and that can't be done in an hour um and another problem is that most non-native people in the u.s have very little interpersonal contact um especially you know meaningful in-depth not little workshop thing contact with native people to kind of counter some of this um and there's huge invisibility as i was mentioning before of contemporary native re representations of contemporary native people in u.s culture and what exists in u.s culture is primarily stereotypes and primarily stereotypes
045of the past and the last big barrier is that people really do believe this honors native americans right um and so that's what sociologists and psychologists might call a positive stereotype and a lot of people don't understand that those beliefs are problematic so you know people might say women are nurturing but that stereotype leads women to to have more of a child care load right um or um you know african-americans are great athletes or asian americans are smart these if you look at their history and you look at how they operate today these are really problematic ideas um and so but it's hard for people to kind of understand those as problematic so um lastly um it's you know use the research use official representatives um the i think the best strategy you know education's
046fine create a website or or that kind of thing to educate your community but don't expect a big transformation or people showing up um and um you know you need to you can though do a really good job educating the school committee and then you can have their backs okay um and like be supportive of them and set up systems to be supportive of them um if you're going to bring in a panel there's no way it's really difficult to arrange these panels that you could bring one in for your committee and the school committee so you would need to bring it in for the school committee um and um and they would need to be close to ready to vote for us to want to bring them in or make the effort to bring
047them in okay so i will just uh to reinforce dr davis delano's point about education i believe someone texted me and said i think we have seven people um watching our meeting right now in our community of uh maybe with thirty thousand and one of them was the person who texted me who is a member who could not be here who is watching it via live stream while they're out and about so six people are watching it who are not actually on the committee um at this point in time although to be fair right it will be available we're recording it and we will make this available um thank you for that presentation uh dr david solano um do members of the school committee have questions for dr davis delano or mr campbell about what
048they've said this evening ms chamberlain dr davis solano thank you very much and i also read your article and and found it really helpful um i have two questions can you talk for just another minute about positive stereotypes and why they're problematic yeah okay well there's a variety of reasons why they're problematic but one one kind of obvious point is it puts everybody in a box and they can be looked at through the lens of that box so if we use the stereotype of asian americans is all smart and hardworking okay um you know or interested in technology that makes people think of them as a techie and not as a creative artist or as a you know particular type of athlete um and and then that can box their own thoughts in too right
049but what i think is problematic and people get treated based on how they're positively stereotyped so for example uh at many holidays many not all uh men just you know let their wives do the child care okay um because you know that's what they do that's what they're perceived to be good at um and then they have 11 hours of less leisure time a week okay um but the there's also like history about why the positive stereotypes are problematic okay so let me just use native americans and african-americans for a second so one defense of slavery was that um that african-americans have brawn but not brain right now a contemporary version of that is the stereotype of african-americans as athletic and there's some research showing that um when they're successful it's not usually attributed to
050their intelligence or their hard work because they're seen as natural so there it gets this it's rooted in historical oppression and then it can manifest negatively today if we look at native mascots okay let me go ahead and talk about this so um in general mascots get get picked because they're aggressive violent powerful those sorts of things so and most of the mascots are animals except for native americans um and they don't pick deer and rabbits right um people pick like aggressive types of animals like tigers or or whatever so one of the main forms of justifying genocide was what scholars call the bloodthirsty savage stereotype that native americans were horrific aggressive warriors and they were the ones that were perpetrating violence and therefore that justified violence against them and shoving them to other parts
051of the country and onto reservations and so forth like that's it's that stereotype which is what gave rise to the selection of native mascots which was happening um like during a time when like when they first rose up you know white people didn't think native people were really cool okay ecological whatevers um and so like right now that's perceived as positive like brave fighting strong warrior but it was previously used it you know in another way right in a negative way um and so um so positive stereotypes often have really oppressive roots and they often operate in ways that are extremely problematic today so for going back to the asian american one um you know the stereotype is that they're really hard working and dedicated students but that also leads people to believe that they're
052not socially interesting and so people then make less social connections and think they're less fun and don't invite them to do things so that was a long answer but that was just really interesting thank you very much and i just have one more question because i did look at your article and i can't say that i read every single article that was linked to it but i i read many of them and and i honestly didn't see any article that showed any positive impact from a native american mascot is that because there wasn't any article like that or was that because you were just looking for ones that were negative there are no i'm trying to get right about positive effects uh you know in general thank you i i thought that was the answer
053but i just wanted to be sure i think i want to add on to that throughout the course of my semester i i've read about three dozen different articles on this topic and i've never encountered a single one that talks about any positive impacts that native american mascots have had on a population um can i ask a little question to that one um uh i wonder if anyone's ever researched right we've examined sort of the effect of native mascots it increases negative stereotyping among non-native populations does that negative stereotyping extend beyond just native americans in other words oh okay do those implicit biases carry over to other racial and ethnic groups there is only one study that has studied this and we're all baffled about the finding so in this one study they exposed people
054to um non-native people to native mascots and it increased their stereotyping of asian americans i mean the stereotypes of asian americans and they're not the same as the stereotypes they're not parallel uh of native americans um but you know i don't know like the best that people can do is kind of like maybe this generates more simplistic thinking okay do other committee members have thank you have other have questions comments i just want to say thank you very much to kempton and dr delano for your presentations that was really informative and uh we appreciate your knowledge thank you yes ms scott you have a question um i think kelly and i are on the same page i just wanted to thank you it was very helpful to get perspective from both of you i took
055a lot of pages of notes because i think it's really helpful as things come up in conversation and as we're trying to do work to help people understand the issue so thank you mr tebow i would just like to echo that and thank both doctor davis delano and especially kempton um you know kempton having graduated just two years ago uh it's always nice to see a dartmouth high school graduate come back and and contribute to the community um and so kempton thank you for that i uh i thought you did a very nice job thank you yeah i would also like kempton would you be willing to share with us um your you can email that to me your final presentation um i would like to make that available as a public document i think
056in particular some of the the historical pictures are are really useful right i mean one of the arguments in the community has been this is a tradition but it's not always been that way not right i mean if you it's a if you go back a certain time it was present and not present and then present right so i think that's really uh important and those pictures help illustrate um that that story right i know there are pictures that i didn't add to the presentation that i think the community members might be interested in um but then honestly they're all available at the southworth library um you can go and look at it dr david solano's point though right if i mean it's hard to educate people absolutely yeah murder as an educator i know
057to get them to go to the library um to the extent that we're trying to collect these resources if you would like to share them with me i will also make those sort of publicly available so so that people can see them absolutely yeah thank you other questions so i'd like to just maybe sort of talk about and give you guys a we've had i think there's been a lot of food for thought here tonight and i don't i think i don't know i don't want to speak for the committee but myself i think i want some time to maybe think about and process a little bit before we come up with a a plan i might think we might talk about some possible plans that we could then i'll think of another next meeting
058have some discussion of all of this and talk about what our next steps might be um while we were while we were listening i was thinking about some possible ways that we can proceed um first we could i will give a sort of a very brief um update to the school committee on monday night about what we uh what we heard here tonight very brief um but we could um file an interim report with the school committee sort of summarizing some of the things we learned sharing that documentation with them that's one option two we could come together as a committee and make a vote on what we as a committee want to recommend maybe people know enough and again i'm putting these all out as possible um scenarios for us to consider um the
059third thing to consider is uh whether we want to continue to have more sessions um whether we want to have community input we've heard some arguments against that today right also we could talk about potentially scheduling a session with um native american panelists but i think we to dr davis delano's uh uh points um that would be need to be with the full school committee so these are all a range of options that we can consider i don't think we want to make a decision tonight does that seem fair to say about how we want to proceed we would have our next meeting have a discussion about what our next plan of attack is so that having been said my question for the committee now is are there any other sort of possible next steps
060that you think we might want to consider or discuss at our next meeting i was just sort of coming up with ideas as we move forward and so there may be other things miss anfiel i think and then mr tebow go ahead um maybe in the next meeting we can talk about how we're gonna educate students about american because i feel like in our school education we are we never talk about the history in americans really or at all so maybe bringing that into our curriculum or like thinking about we're going to do that as well can i say a couple things about what other schools have done so sure then i'll come back around it go ahead laurel okay so um one you know we've been doing panels and they usually get recorded and
061one thing that um one school system did was they shortened up the panel and they showed it to um the student body and then um students wrote questions that were screened to two of the panelists who came back to the school so that they could answer the questions that the students um or the legitimate questions that the students had um the other thing i was just going to mention is if you know um which tribal nation or nations are nearby um we might be able to connect you to a single or two speakers um if you want to like bring that to you know uh i don't know whose traditional lands you're on i think i think we're the case at wampanoag i think is the is the current uh tribal nation charlie you're raising
062shaking your head yes does that sound right to you i know because it does sound right i'm not a hundred percent but yeah and herring pond might be nearby wampanoag so both we have tribal reps from both of those um tribes on our steering committee okay and they both have letters so i also want to point out mr chief i know you had something to add um just sort of also in response to ms tamfield's comment i agree with you but i would also say that i i think those might be they're related but separate issues right because whether or not whether or not we keep the mascot is one question right but how we do education around native american and our tribal neighbors is a is a question that we want to consider regardless
063of that decision right if we decide to keep it we should ask that if we decide to get rid of the mascot we should ask that right it is a question that i think this committee can look into um and so i think it's a good one to keep on our list of things that we need to talk about right there's lots about we've got a running list um but i so they're like related but distinct does that make sense right mr tebow were you gonna add a suggestion or a comment i was but i kind of lost it um i forgot what i was going to say so but do i understand that what you're suggesting is that we we discussed next steps for the next meeting is that i think that i think
064that perhaps we i guess my sense is personally and i'm i don't know if the community is i have a lot to think about and i'm not sure what the next right step is right i want to read more and think about it so that's what i was going to speak to um you know in kempton's um you know i it's a very complicated issue i get that but to me hampton made the point about what what is a mascot supposed to stand for it's supposed to be a rallying um point for a community and obviously the psychological impact that it has on native um people or non-native people well you know regardless it just seems to me that if you have a mascot that's this divisive then how can it ever truly achieve the
065purpose of a mascot to begin with which is to rally a school um and i just you know the rest of all of the other points are very important and worthy of discussion i just think that um at its simplest form i just don't know how we how keeping it is a real consideration um so that's i will also say mr chiba that's why i said one of like option two is we may at our next meeting say look this is what we've learned and we're ready to make a recommendation to the school committee on this issue we may be ready to take that step that you're talking about i'm not sure we're ready to do it right now but i wanna i think we should put that on the table for our next meeting
066that maybe we need to do more and take more steps but maybe we don't right maybe we're ready to have a vote and make a decision and do a sort of a full report on this issue to the school committee um again i'm not sure we want to do that tonight right um but i think if we maybe thought about that over the next couple weeks that's something we should discuss at our next meeting does that make sense another point is that if you wanted to have contact with uh native representative voices your group not the school committee could watch one of the recorded panels from one of the other towns i did i did share those recordings with the um with the committee so that that is that is available and we can share
067that with the community as well um it just seems to me that i think we all probably have a lot to think about and maybe at our next meeting the plan is the item on our agenda well two approved minutes from this meeting but then figure out what our next step is does that seem about right for everyone i see a lot of shaking of heads yes okay so then the big question is when would our next meeting be we haven't scheduled the next meeting tuesday seemed to work okay for everyone yes and i think we'd be looking in july i know it's summer and i'm asking a lot of you i'm sorry but um let me i'm trying to look at my calendar um july 13th that's a tuesday would that work for people
068luckily we can be remote so if some of you are away in fabulous places like miss chamberlain i know you don't have to but you can always dedicated committee members zoom in um from whatever fabulous place you might uh might be at but how about we tentatively schedule our next meeting for tuesday july 13th at 6 30 and we'll so far right now our items in the agenda will be to approve the minutes from this meeting and we'll talk about what we as a committee want to do next does that make sense for everyone i see lots of nodding heads so i just want to end by saying i want to say thank you to jonathan galashaw for arranging um the tech on our meeting tonight thank you to dr gifford for attending and taking
069um the fabulous minutes um thank you also to dr davis delano and mr campbell for presenting to us um i think we all learned a lot and it was good to hear from both of you this evening and so we appreciate you taking the time um to join us you're welcome thanks for educating yourselves absolutely thank you for having me and with that i will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved thank you mr tebow can i have a second please second second i'm miss masari all right thank you all right and now i get a roll call and um dr gifford before as i roll call out i just want to know that miss murphy joined us um if we can indicate that on the notes so all right on the motion to adjourn
070mr tebow yes uh miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss missari yes uh miss selena pamphilina okay uh miss murphy yes uh miss scott yes and i also vote yes thank you everyone for um your time this evening for spending time in your summers um to join us and i look forward to seeing you all on the 13th good night you