{"id":53053,"date":"2020-06-26T19:31:48","date_gmt":"2020-06-27T01:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-city-council-plans-to-weigh-in-on-chief-sign\/"},"modified":"2020-06-27T01:31:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T01:31:48","slug":"durango-city-council-plans-to-weigh-in-on-chief-sign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-city-council-plans-to-weigh-in-on-chief-sign\/","title":{"rendered":"Durango City Council plans to weigh in on \u2018Chief\u2019 sign"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The \u201cChief\u201d has recently received attention from supporters and detractors, with thousands of residents weighing in on whether the sign should stay up or be removed from the west 100 block of Ninth Street across from Toh-Atin Gallery.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Durango City Council plans to take a stand on the controversial \u201cChief\u201d sign, but first councilors want to hear from those most affected.<\/p>\n

The sign, across from Toh-Atin Gallery, has drawn controversy sporadically over the years from some residents. And this month, two Change.org petitions began circulating online, drawing thousands of signatures. One advocates taking down the sign; the other, keeping it up.<\/p>\n

City councilors did not make an official statement when they met this week, but Mayor Dean Brookie said he plans to release a statement as mayor, hopefully with council support.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy sense is we have some urgency here to engage in this conversation, and I think the city has some responsibility to engage the property owner in an appropriate discussion,\u201d Brookie said.<\/p>\n

Brookie requested a late addition to the council\u2019s agenda Tuesday so councilors could formulate their responses in order to take a stand \u201con this one way or the other and then enter into some communication with the property owner,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The petition<\/a> that calls for the sign\u2019s removal is supported by those who see it as a racist, degrading and offensive caricature that reinforces stereotypes about Indigenous people. More than 3,500 people had signed the petition as of Thursday.<\/p>\n

The other petition <\/a>advocates keeping the sign up, saying it is a piece of history because it has been in Durango since the 1950s. That petition had gathered more than 2,800 signatures as of Thursday.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, someone vandalized the sign<\/a>. The gallery\u2019s owner, Jackson Clark, released a statement saying his family works closely with Native American people, and the owners do not view the sign as a derogatory image, as they know many people today who dress in the same way.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as the Chief being a symbol of racism, since he went up at the Chief Diner near 80 years ago, he has actually been a sign that welcomed Native people to the diner and, later, to the gallery,\u201d Clark said.<\/p>\n

Tom Stritikus, president of Fort Lewis College, and Ernest House Jr., chairman of the FLC Board of Trustees and member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, weighed in on the debate. They called for the Chief to come down in an op-ed published in The Durango Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The officials recalled the college\u2019s own process of removing whitewashed pictures of the Native American experience in governmental boarding schools from the FLC clocktower. They emphasized the importance of having a reconciliation-oriented discussion around what to do with the sign.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever action is taken or not taken by private property owners should not overshadow the important questions that must be asked and answered about continued racial inequality and disparities,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

The city of Durango has not received a formal petition from community members who support or oppose the sign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m looking for that milestone to happen, an official submittal to the city, so that we can officially react,\u201d Brookie said. \u201cIn the meantime, I think there\u2019s a number of conversations that the topic has brought up that we need to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the councilors\u2019 discussion, Councilor Kim Baxter suggested reaching out for more community input and reviewing the city\u2019s sign code to see if it has something about offensive content \u2013 whether it\u2019s allowed and how it is defined.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have competing interests here between what some people might find offensive and First Amendment controls over what people are allowed to put on signs,\u201d said Dirk Nelson, Durango city attorney. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t engage with property owners about dealing with signs that our community believes are inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Councilor Barbara Noseworthy suggested reaching out to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe or FLC\u2019s Center of Southwest Studies to discuss the sign\u2019s meaning to affected populations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an opportunity for a conversation around this,\u201d Noseworthy said.<\/p>\n

Center of Southwest Studies and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe who represented Colorado in the U.S. Congress from 1987 to 2005, said it is one person\u2019s rights against another\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince it\u2019s on private land and privately owned, I\u2019m not sure what input the City Council would have to say on it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He said Native American people might be reluctant to speak in public forums, in part because they are \u201ca people that\u2019s been beat down for generations and negatively stereotyped.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCity Council should hear from Native people personally, particularly tribes in the surrounding area. It should allow Jackson the right to bring in Native people who support the sign. Mainly, vandalizing the sign is the wrong way to make social change,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n

smullane@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018The city has some responsibility to engage,\u2019 mayor says<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53054,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1175,4912,1020,507,28,561,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-53053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-discrimination","tag-durango-city-council","tag-durango-city-officials","tag-headlines","tag-native-american","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53053"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=53053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}