Editor’s Note: This letter has been republished with the permission of the Indigenous Alumni Affinity Group. It has been adjusted for formatting and readability by the editors of The Clarion. The original version can be found here.
To the Chancellor,
We are writing, as University of Denver (DU) alumni and more importantly as alumni of the Native Student Alliance (NSA) leadership, in deep concern for the Native students on DU’s campus. During our time at the university, we were active members of this group and held leadership positions.
We have seen firsthand the culmination of microaggressions, macroaggressions, discrimination and inaction. This has led to NSA demanding action from DU to directly support Native students currently on campus, as well as those who come to DU in the future. That is why we are writing to you today.
We want to acknowledge the Native American graduate student experience differs drastically from that of a Native American undergraduate student who has lived on campus 24 hours a day for four years, which is why this letter was written by those who have been a part of NSA leadership. We also want to highlight that this is not a new phenomenon for Native American and Indigenous students on campus. We speak from three generations of NSA leadership and 12 years of experience and institutional knowledge.
We have been pushing this issue consistently, just to be given the same answer by the Board of Trustees (BOT) and the Chancellor since 2008. We are writing to bring attention to the continuous pattern of cyclical violence directed at Native American students on campus for the past 12 years that needs to be addressed and confronted at its core.
Chancellor Haefner’s email addressing the demands of Righteous Anger! Healing Resistance! (RAHR) and NSA was performative and tone-deaf. The actual demands of NSA and RAHR were not addressed clearly. This email is seemingly good-intentioned and diplomatic. But it shows the years of emotional labor students have taken to educate others were for naught, as they are not being listened to thoroughly.
It shows that the words of the Indigenous community, on a campus that stands on stolen land and has a legacy of genocide, are not being heard but instead actively ignored. It shows the interests of the university lean towards the side of money and power. It is not with marginalized students on campus who do not possess the capital to make decisions for the university.
We cannot deny that the “Pioneer” nickname will hold a different meaning to those whose ancestors were not harmed by the historical definition of the word. Their ancestors were not murdered and assaulted by pioneers. However, stating the word has a dual meaning will always disunite the campus body and place Native and Indigenous students as the “other side” and in a position of “marginalization” within the conversation.
This consistent divide labels Native American students as “the reasons we have to have this discussion” and “the reason people don’t like the term Pioneer.” We argue this has and will automatically separate Native students from fully participating in their educational experience with the greater campus body.
We have outlined how we have personally been “othered” on campus and how being this voice of the “other side” has been met with trauma, brutality from campus safety, racism and campus violence. We have NSA alumni who are still paying their debt to DU. We must take a step back in advocating for Native American students to come to DU until we confront the cyclical violence within the campus environment.
Simply put, there is no way to reconcile the history of the word Pioneer. In the Chancellor’s email, he tried to say the way DU uses the word is separate from its history—but as a university that is founded upon the genocide of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, that is not possible. By keeping the Pioneer moniker, DU is telling its Native students, alumni, staff and faculty that they are not willing to reconcile its violent legacy and, in fact, want its legacy of genocide and harm to continue.
Pioneers killed Native people and stole Native land. That is the beginning and end of the word. It is not on non-Natives to claim that they can re-appropriate a word that continues to harm Native people. It is not their decision, so any justification for reconciling its meaning is simply not okay and continues to harm DU’s Native community.
This harm against Native people is not unusual for DU. Besides their violent legacy, there is a consistent pattern of anti-Native rhetoric that has circulated within the DU culture for the past decade. The NSA co-chairs have felt the brunt of this harm and labor the most institutional trauma. We want to remind the BOT and DU community this has been a long-time conversation NSA has been laboring for the campus community by “educating the other side.”
Why We Stand with Current Native Students and Their Demands
We know that NSA has been met with continued hostility. Through using intellectual theory, we know settler colonialism and settler society will always see Native peoples as “in the way” because it is our land that is being sought after and desired for control (Deloria & Tuck). Our experience at DU as undergraduate students has stayed with us, and it is why we stand with Native students today. We affirm every single one of their demands, and we believe that each demand must be completed in order for DU to become a safe and healthy place for Native students and other marginalized students.
As a group, we address that the opinions on the LetsGoDU site do not speak for our stance. We completely agree that more work needs to be done beyond a name change, but considering how many years of harmful and violent encounters that surround this conversation that is supposedly occurring on an intellectual campus, we ask: how will you protect our Native students?
While we appreciate the intentions behind bringing new faculty, raising the Native American task force back up and providing full tuition to Native American students moving forward, we question if cycling colonial trauma inflicted by the campus environment is ethical. We see little recognition of past or present inaction and harm towards the Indigenous community on campus.
It is difficult to be heard in a predominately white institution that caters more to the majority as opposed to the minorities, the latter of which allows you to use “inclusion and equity” terminology to describe DU.
A memorial site dedicated to Sand Creek, within Pioneer Nation, will not bring justice to our community. We will continue to be reminded each day of a painful past without first allowing healing or envisioning a hopeful future. We ask that you reevaluate your dedication to upholding a violent legacy of colonialism and create true healing from past harms for your former and current Indigenous students. Most importantly, we ask that you create a safe space for Native students currently attending DU and for those to come.
Part of learning comes from activism and larger dialogues. We know realistically under the structures of capitalism and settler society, in order for the university to change the mascot name, money will have to follow. Given the structure of systemic racism and inequality, we do not possess this capital. However, it is within the constitutional rights of an individual to protest, which is fundamental within American society.
For alumni who do not understand this is part of what conversations with different opinions looks like, it is not about bashing or condoning students for having a different opinion than you. It is not about suggesting that Dr. Ramirez or faculty who do not agree with you should be fired.
Facilitating greater conversations and educating through activism is the foundation of academic learning and the role of an educator and intellectual. Social change in America has been accomplished through movements and collective voices. Students should have the ability to learn these skills, which are imperative to the reality of today’s social climate. We stand by Dr. Ramirez.
We want to contextualize our timeline experiences in the following letter. There is a reason the NSA has consistently gone to the front lines of these discussions. We do not try to be confrontational, but there has been no other way we have been able to be heard by administration. Our “No More Pios Campaign” PowerPoint was presented in front of USG, passed along to administration and met with inaction.
We are the smallest body on campus, therefore our voices are restricted and we have consistently been told that there are not enough of us to make a difference. Higher administration always argues that Native students are a small population of the student body, and as a result, our voices don’t matter. They have used this argument to weaponize their power over NSA and dismiss anything our group has to say because we are insignificant in number and money to support the university.
That argument alone shows where the power in the university lies and the value of Native students is placed. We ask that if you continue to read from here on out, be open to understanding and learning about the history of DU from an NSA perspective.
2016-2020 — NSA Elk Era: #NoDALP and #NoMorePios
We were informed by former Vice-Chancellor Lili Rodriguez at one point the only thing NSA could do to change the Pioneer name was to graduate, come back as alumni, and continue this conversation where it needs to happen. We are now the recent undergraduate alumni of DU, having graduated in 2019 and 2020. We have experienced trauma after trauma our entire four years attending the university. We are here to tell those stories today.
In the same year as the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock in 2016, DU agreed to host the annual Pipeline Leadership Conference on campus. This was a conference that included the company responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). This was a slap in the face to Native students on DU’s campus, who had to take time from their studies to quickly plan a protest against the event.
At this protest, DU Campus Safety and the Denver Police Department (DPD) threatened students with arrest and labeled the group as “out of control.” Community members and DU students were met with riot gear, mace guns and other weapons used to intimidate students.
A retired Native American faculty member, Dr. Tink Tinker, was called “a jerk” during the protest by the DU Director of Campus Safety, Don Enloe. This was after Enloe seemed to imply that he was going to measure out the distance that was appropriate to stand in front of a DU building to protest.
A year later, during the DU Pioneer Frozen Four game, DU students lit a mattress on fire, blocked Evans Ave. and were later congratulated for their win by DPD. “Pioneer Nation” got to walk away with tweets of support and zero conduct cases, while Native students were met with threats from Campus Safety and members from our protest were pushed and regulated.
A few months after NSA’s #NoDALP protest, in January of 2017, DU’s Board of Trustees decided to continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry. To this, NSA responded with a letter about how the fossil fuel industry commits violence against Indigenous communities beyond the destruction of land. The letter emphasized that by investing in these companies, DU is complicit in violence against Native communities the university claims to be trying to heal its relationship. Neither the Board or Chancellor Chopp responded to the letter.
In the fall of 2017, NSA launched a campaign addressing DU’s use of the nickname “Pioneer.” In March of 2018, DU Student Activists (DUSA) teamed up with NSA to host a “blackout” at DU Hockey’s last home game of the season. Protestors dressed in all black and filled the student section of the hockey game. Every time DU’s team scored, the group held up a banner that read: “Pioneers stole Indian land and killed Indian people. #NoMorePios.”
When we raise our voice as a campus, it is not met with dialogue and conversations. This protest consisted of students from NSA and other affinity groups, and they were faced hostility, aggression and reaction from a crowd of adults who yelled and heckled us. We were told to “go back to where we came from,” which would be funny to Native students whose ancestors were here long before theirs were, except for the fact that we had multiple international and immigrant students in our group.
Eventually, we left the hockey game for our health and safety. We got up, held hands and left the game together. That night, we made sure no one walked home alone. There were some folks that worried for our safety. This reaction was expected, so much so that Vice-Chancellor Lili Rodriguez and other DU staff came to chaperone the protest. DU never condemned these actions from alumni and Pioneer sports fans.
Those memories stayed with us for months after the protest, as pro-Boone and Pioneer alumni started sending threats our way and created rumors about the protest. We began to plan carefully about when and where we spoke up against the nickname, making sure we felt safe to do so. At times, we even dropped the campaign until things died down on campus and we felt safe again.
Earlier that year, NSA was asked if we felt safe attending the Homecoming Parade. We were confused as to why we wouldn’t, but the Office of Campus Life and Inclusive Excellence (CLIE) offered to have additional security around our float if we chose to participate. The wording alone did not make NSA feel safe or want to be there, as staff were already thinking in that manner.
When articles were published in the DU Clarion about student support against the Pioneer nickname, there were many harmful comments. They asked why we were at the school if we didn’t like it and made statements such as “these students should go back to the reservation” and “Native Americans should have been genocided.”
NSA members faced multiple instances of harassment from pro-Boone alumni during this time. One Native student, who worked at the DU Clarion, had comments cursing and harassing her specifically. A pro-Boone alumnus called her boss in an attempt to get her fired.
LetsGoDU, run by the same pro-Boone and Pioneer alumni who threatened us, made an organization chart in 2018 asking “who did it?” about the recently-enacted No Mask Policy. This policy was implemented by the DU administration due to safety concerns surrounding those who wear masks on campus to harm other people while remaining anonymous. The policy banned masks on campus, which included the alumni-funded Daniel Boone Mascot’s mask and made alumni upset. In their chart, they identified NSA as one of the causes for this change. This same website continues to put up hateful articles about our Native students, including pictures of our students’ and elders’ faces in them.
In 2018, an alumna from the Graduate School of Social Work—Alyssa Willie—conducted a research paper about how the Pioneer nickname affected Native American students. She included interviews with student organizers. The paper concluded that NSA students were hypervigilant struggling with mental health effects from the Pioneer nickname such as anxiety, feeling unsafe on campus and not feeling a sense of belonging. Native students felt subjugated to microaggressions from other students, staff and faculty. They were constantly asked to be the spokesperson or interviewee for various students’ research papers.
2012-2015 — Boone Protest Era: Continued Campus Safety Violence to NSA
In 2014, alumna Amanda Williams led the first ever No More Pioneer protest on DU’s campus. The action was held during the creation of a Harlem Shake video that used Daniel Boone as the school’s mascot.
Amanda Williams, Julia Bramante and Jozer Guerro held signs against the Boone character in front of Sturm Hall to demonstrate their disapproval of Daniel Boone in the Harlem Shake video. They were not there to stop the event. They wanted to show the campus was not being inclusive and the video being shot did not represent all students who attended the university.
As more people showed up, the organizer for the video called security and stated that Amanda, Jozer and Julia were being disruptive and prohibiting the video from being filmed. Campus Security came, and all three were then questioned if they had “permits” or “authorization” to be on Driscoll Green because the organizer of the video had a permit to film. Later, a letter from Campus Safety admitted this claim was false.
We were the only students asked to provide student ID to prove our identity as students. We were escorted off campus by Campus Safety because one of us did not have an ID card to “prove” we were DU students, even though the other two did.
We were placed on student conduct alert and were unable to register for courses until Chancellor Coombe made a phone call to the Student Conduct Office to release our records. During this time, Jozer Guerrero received threats from alumni that they would find out where he lived and harm him.
Guerrero said that while they tried to “reason with” the filmmakers and guards, the guards were “rude and disrespectful” and used “excessive force” on the shoulders and arms of the students during the incident. DCS Public Information officer, Sgt. Banet, said it was a use of “reasonable necessary force.” There were over 100 students apart from us there for the video, and many of them shouted racial slurs as we were forced off Driscoll Green.
During our meeting with the Chancellor after the event, we requested that the security cameras with footage of Sturm and Driscoll Green be reviewed to show what happened that day. We also requested the footage from the officer’s body cam. These requests were repeatedly denied.
Notably, the following year, another student organization on Driscoll Green requested to review security camera footage. Their request was immediately approved, and the footage was provided for them to review personally.
Jordan Ames, the administrative manager of the university’s marketing and communications department, lied to Westword about the event. He said the Harlem Shake group had a permit and Campus Safety was not aware of any complaints, despite the several made in writing by us.
During this time, there were efforts made to change the mascot. The university attempted to create a new mascot by forming several university mascot-focused groups (Mascot Steering Committee, Mascot Task Force, etc.). These groups were made up of alumni, undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty. The discussion within these groups, combined with the press surrounding the NSA and Harlem Shake video, led to conversations across campus regarding the “controversy surrounding Boone.”
It caught the attention of Facebook groups and alumni blogs. Offensive comments were made, such as: “Amanda, Jozer and Julia should go fuck themselves;” “These students should go back to the reservation where they came from;” “They should go and get drunk on their reservation;” “Don’t worry, this won’t be an issue anymore once all of the Native Americans die off.”
These types of comments were also made by the USG senior class president at the time, who went on to make senior t-shirts with Boone on them. A Native student had to work their way out of being in the same group project with this individual.
2008-2011 — Colonial-Embedded Values of “Playing Indian” Era
In 2011, the DU Homecoming theme was “How the West was Won,” which was approved by Student Life, the Office of the Chancellor and Alumni Relations. NSA and CLIE (at the time called Center for Multicultural Excellence or CME) brought up issues with this theme and its colonial legacy. We pointed out that “How the West was Won” resulted in the genocide and removal of Indigenous peoples, which is directly linked to DU’s history of the Sand Creek Massacre. Our complaints were ignored.
In October of 2011, right before Indigenous Peoples’ Day was officially recognized, the Vice President of Greek Life made racist comments about NSA’s celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day during a Greek Life meeting. They stated, “I just want to end our meeting by saying Columbus Day is a real holiday,” which was followed by more racist remarks.
If an ally in the Multicultural Greek Life SLB had not said anything, those remarks would have been ignored. Later in November 2011, a “Pilgrim and Indian Party” was shut down in the Art Department when an NSA member brought up the problematic issue of “Playing Indian.” We are grateful to the Art Department Dean for immediately shutting down the event.
In spring of 2012, a DU fraternity and sorority held a cowboys and Indians themed party where women dressed up as Indians and men came as Cowboys.
Native women have the highest rate of sexual assault and going missing in our communities. Native and Indigenous women are vulnerable under the structure of colonialism, which we see to this day with Indigenous women in North and South America. The hypersexualization of Native women depicted through costumes and as objects by settler logic causes harm to our community.
This event resulted in a public apology by Greek Life to the Denver Native community. They were forced to do community service at the DU Pow Wow in 2012. The sorority and fraternity volunteered for a few years, but over time expressed they no longer understood why they had to attend our Pow Wow and service our community.
Their main argument was that they were not the cohort of folks who attended and held this party. This demonstrates two things: some non-Native students are not willing to learn—unless they are forced to— about our culture and how to respect it. They do not want to continue the process of healing from the harm their predecessors caused.
There is not a culture of learning and mutual respect from past wrongs on our campus. How can we have a dialogue on campus about the term “Pioneer” if there is no such facilitation or environment for such conversations to happen?
After the university publicly apologized, the conversation moved to a digital platform, where many anonymous racist remarks were made to the Native students.
In the DU Clarion, one student made note, “If there were no Native students on campus, this wouldn’t be an issue.” Other persons added that “the Native American population will eventually decrease, and when there are no longer Native Americans anymore, this will no longer be an issue.” There was also an alumnus who made remarks on the comment section, stating, “we didn’t give out enough smallpox blankets to the Native Americans.”
Since the release of your email, we have compiled these events as oral histories to remind the community where we stand and that we will continue to be here now and in the future. Oppositional thoughts and conversations have always been a part of campus’s greater discourse. Yet, we want to call attention to the fact that NSA students are never safe when having these conversations that we are encouraged to participate in.
In solidarity with current Native students at DU,
Former Leadership of Undergraduate DU Native Student Alliance
Indigenous Alumni Affinity Group
