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Redmen/Redettes should remain

To the Journal editor:

The entire issue of changing the Marquette Senior High School Redmen nickname is ridiculous.

Two Northern Michigan University professors have harassed the trustees of the Board of Education at MSHS for years until they brought the issue forward apparently thinking no one cared.

They used a complaint from 1 high school senior who identifies as Native American as the predicate to start this preposterous controversy that has smeared the community as racist and seeks to invalidate 100 years of pride in their school by alumni and residents of Marquette.

The Facebook Group “Save The Redmen” has over 2,400 members and a petition to save the name Redmen, signed by 2,700 Redmen supporters.

The claim is that the nickname Redmen creates an “adverse learning environment” because using the name Redmen causes low self esteem in Native American students at MSHS.

However, they produce no victims, nada, zero. The student who filed the complaint has a 4.0 GPA and has been accepted to every single college that she has applied to, along with Scholarships. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had such adverse learning experiences?

The only “adverse learning environment” is the one experienced by students and teachers who are being called racist for exhibiting school pride as Redmen.

The Native American student population at MSHS comprises 3% of the total student body which is 90% white. There is not one single Native American student that has complained or accused MSHS of having an “adverse learning environment.” It simply is not true.

Their entire basis for changing the name is based on “research studies” that are more opinion based than scientifically verifiable. Who would bother to do “research studies” contradicting this nonsense? What a waste of time.

Sixty percent of the graduates at MSHS don’t even take the SAT or ACT to go to college. Yet we aren’t having any meetings to improve that unsatisfactory statistic. Yet disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of MSHS alumni, family, community and other supporters of their Redmen nickname is a great idea according to NMU professors without one single victim.

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