To the editor:

In Mr. Boyd’s letter and almost every other pro-SLT on 32nd Street letter, there’s something missing – respect. Respect for other cultures. We are not your scientific guinea pigs to study and exploit. The lands where our ancestors were taken to boarding schools to have the Indian taken out of them are not your highways. Nor will they become your highways. Their resting places will not become your highways.

There is an insatiable desire to deny a history that non-Native people don’t want to deal with. People like me who do research to discover the law Baker University broke to acquire the wetlands area will continue to remind the larger culture of history that they cannot rewrite to cleanse their sins of omission.

Haskell Manual Labor Institute and countless other boarding schools were started to remove us from our cultures, our families, our people in the 1880s and 1890s. Oral tradition lives in the face of mainstream denial, and so do Okla Api Homi. Okla Api Homi Holitopa micha anumpuli mat. (Translation: and so do Indian people. Bless Indian people and their speech.)

Mike Ford,

Bonner Springs