To the editor:

A couple of months ago when the 10th U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled against the South Lawrence Trafficway appeal in Denver, money spoke. As someone who’s read books like “Anti-Indianism in Modern America” by Dakota professor Elizabeth Cook Lynn and “Like a Loaded Weapon” by Lumbee professor and attorney Robert A. Williams Jr., I knew the U.S. Supreme Court to be no friend of Native peoples.

Justice William Rehnquist tutored current Justice John Roberts as a clerk and the racism of Justice Rehnquist against Native peoples was apparent in one of the first sacred sites cases in the Supreme Court. This case was Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery in 1988. The five justices in the majority ignored the religious rights of indigenous peoples but the U.S. Congress ruled the area in question as part of the Siskiyou Wilderness and nixed the road anyway. This Supreme Court  likes Native American cases as much as they like health care bills.

The question remains though. Baker University has done much to disrespect the religious beliefs of the peoples whose land their school sits upon for the SLT. A campaign of disrespect and dismissal which I’ve witnessed firsthand after being war-whooped by Baker students at a Baker-Haskell basketball game a couple of years ago with parents of Haskell players and alumni witnessing this racism. Tribal lands were acquired partly through the manipulation of tribal governments by Protestant denominations and their missionaries in the 1850s. I guess college biologists do the dirty work now.