College rallies for American-Indians over cartoon row

by admin
December 1st, 2006

A prestigious US college founded as a school for American-Indians has been roiled by controversy over the way some students are treating the very people the school was set up to help.More than 500 students, faculty and administrators at Dartmouth College rallied in support of the American-Indian community on Wednesday, a day after a conservative student newspaper published on its front page a picture of an Indian warrior brandishing a scalp with the headline, “The Natives are Getting Restless!”

The Dartmouth Review, an independent newspaper also published articles ridiculing Native American students’ complaints about a string of incidents seen as racist. Students said the latest issue of the paper, which has had a sometimes adversarial relationship with minority students, was the trigger for the demonstration. Earlier this year, American-Indian students protested a T-shirt design that was made for the college alumni. The shirts showed a knight performing a sex act on a caricature of an American-Indian.

The Review also has come under fire for distributing T-shirts emblazoned with the Dartmouth Indian, the college’s former mascot, which was discontinued after protests that it was offensive.