Dear Editor,
While visiting the Baker Library recently I saw the Baker Orange newspaper and the article entitled “Diversity” on the front. This article got me writing.
When I attended Baker University in 1988-89 there were athletes of color and students of color, but I remember one student of color in the Zeta Chi fraternity who seemed to be the only visible minority in a Greek chapter.
Before I left Sigma Phi Epsilon, I had a pledge brother who anglicized the pronunciation of his Hispanic last name to fit in. My father, a Baker alumnus, actually had two Sig Ep brothers who were tribally enrolled in that fraternity house in the mid 1960s. I didn’t publically announce my own native heritage because the 1980s weren’t a time to do such a thing. Conformity ruled and multiculturalism did not.
I now see many more students of color than I ever did two and half decades ago. That’s progress. However, Baker University needs to have academic curriculum and professors that mirror this progress. I commend professor (Leonard) Ortiz for his work in the History Department. I about fell out of my chair in the library when I heard a small group of students talking about a project on the Five Civilized Tribes and Removal. Nothing like that existed in my day. However, I didn’t really feel at the time like these students took this project seriously.
Baker University has a problem with Native peoples. The United Methodist Church was in Kansas in the 1830s-1850s working with and taking advantage of Kaw, Shawnee, and Wyandotte tribes at the behest of the U.S. government.
I went to a reconciliation ceremony on the Baker campus with Shawnee and Wyandotte peoples hosted by the late Brenda Day some years ago. Baker sits on what was Kaw and Shawnee land. Baker University also took advantage of Haskell Indian Nations University with the wetlands acquisition in the 1950s when the Bureau of Indian Affairs run by white officials gave away Indian lands without asking permission to do so in a paternalistic manner.
Baker University is surrounded by what was Shawnee, Ottawa, Sac and Fox and Peoria lands in Baker’s early years. There’s a functional disconnect in respecting native culture and beliefs at Baker, which is troubling to me.
I attended a Baker-Haskell basketball game some years ago and our people were war whooped in a racist manner by some Baker students, and I confronted former head basketball coach Rick Weaver about this at half time of that game.
I also find it troubling that this school had someone as esteemed as the late Art History Professor Alice Ann Callahan, who was Osage and wrote a book on the In’ Lon Ska’ Osage dance and mentioned the effects and damage done by Indian boarding schools and yet this disconnect was evident in destroying the wetlands anyway.
For progress to be fulfilled, Baker has to be part of the self determination of college attending minorities and expand the scope beyond the Euro-American textbook cultural history that existed in my day and probably still does today.
In my father’s day, professors at Baker opened his eyes to the greater world and its injustices, and for this my father was a United Methodist minister for four decades. I don’t see this world view expansion now at Baker.
I expected the experience of academic mind expansion that my father experienced when I arrived at Baker in the fall of 1988. I left after that one year seeing this wish nonexistent. I instead memorized over 500 tribes, taught myself conversational Choctaw and indigenous ethnology and studied Indian Law motivated by a feeling that Baker let me down over the next two decades. Please make the promise of functioning diversity in academia real, Baker University.
Sincerely,
Mike Ford