Nov 14, 2017 — Ask the students in the Mohawk Club at Massena high school whether they've been on the receiving end of negative stereotypes, and their answer is quick and sharp.

"We see that we're always the troublemakers or that we're bad kids," says Amanda Rourke, the club's president. Mallory Sunday adds, "they don't understand who we are as a people."

She and other club members live on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation right next to Massena, along the U.S.-Canada border and the St. Lawrence River. One-tenth of the student body at the high school is Native American.

A new survey found nationwide, three-quarters of Native Americans believe there’s discrimination against them today. The poll was sponsored by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

These Mohawk students are trying to fight that discrimination by sharing their history, culture, and food with their fellow students.

A chance to explain who we are

The Mohawk Club meets Thursdays right after the last bell and afternoon announcements. A half dozen students burst into the native resources classroom. The purple Akwesasne flag hangs on one wall, next to the United States one.

The students crow about last weekend’s fundraiser selling Indian tacos – tacos with Indian fry bread instead of tortillas. “A lot of people get really excited for it as soon as they hear that fundraiser,” exclaims Rourke. “Indian tacos!!”

The group raised $1,000 to put towards their Native American Day, an annual school-wide teach-in about Mohawk history, crafts, dance, and song. “It’s a really good chance to explain who we are,” says Sunday, and a way to combat negative stereotypes.

“Demeaning and disrespectful”

According to the new NPR poll, more than a third of Native Americans say someone has made negative assumptions about their race, something these students have personally experienced.

Racial slurs at sports games. (The Massena "Red Raiders" mascot name remains controversial, even after the mascot itself - a Native American head - was removed from athletic uniforms.) Jokes about teepees. Assuming the reservation is riddled with crime and poverty. “A lot of the friends that I have, their parents are afraid to come to the Rez,” says Rourke. “I’ve heard the saying, ‘oh you can’t go down there. You’re going to get shot, or robbed or jumped’.”

“It’s so demeaning and disrespectful,” says Keely Thompson-Cook, the Mohawk Club treasurer. “I get so passionate about it because I just don’t see where I shouldn’t have an equal right to somebody who maybe isn’t of my skin color.”

Here the club’s advisor, Robin Logan, who is also Mohawk, breaks in. She says no discrimination is right, but Akwesasne’s history plays a role in people's perceptions. She says these kids don’t remember the early 1990s, when factions within the tribe clashed over gambling. "Our people were split up against themselves," says Logan. There was actual gunfire. And a lot of non-natives remember that. 

Logan grew up in central New York, but she remembers visiting family in Akwesasne at that time. Once, she says a border patrol agents pointed a machine gun at her mother while they were chatting at "the point", a local swimming hole on the reservation in St. Regis. "Like a semi-automatic weapon, pointed at your mother, for no reason really," Logan recalls, turning to the students. "So there’s was a lot of tension here in Akwesasne, and you’ve got the parents of the kids that you guys are hanging out with that went through that."

The school’s guidance counselor, Julie White, says many non-native people in Massena haven’t updated their perceptions. "They’re in the community next door and having these opinions and then never educating themselves on where we went from there," says White, who grew up in Akwesasne.

Native American Day, the club agrees, is a chance to teach about Akwesasne today.

Institutional discrimination isn't ancient history

The students plan the schedule for the day — lectures about wampum belts and the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois,  Confederacy. Social dances. They settle on teaching students to make corn husk dolls for a hands-on craft. 

Mallory Sunday says corn husk dolls offer a lesson in humility. They tell the story of a girl who was always admiring herself. The Creator taught her a lesson. "She was staring at herself in the reflection of the water, so [the Creator] said, 'you shouldn’t do that', and he took away her face, so that’s why with the corn husk dolls, they don’t have a face."

The new NPR poll also found more than half of Native Americans say discrimination based on laws and policy is a big problem, too. These students are very conscious of that shaping their family history. For example, Amanda and Mallory say their grandparents were forced to go to Catholic residential schools in Canada. “They would be forced to speak English. They wouldn’t be able to speak their own language,” explains Rourke. “Or wear their own clothes, or have their hair long,” Sunday adds. “They would be hit with rulers.” Physical abuse and sexual assault was also common at the residential schools.

The last Canadian residential school closed in 1996, a fact Thompson-Cook says highlights how recently this overt institutional discrimination took place. “People think that this happened in the 1800s and it’s in the past,” she says, explaining that some non-native students can’t understand why the history remains so painful for many native young people. Canada didn’t officially apologize for the residential schools until 2008.

Native young people who feel empowered to speak out

Watching these girls talk, her eyes moist, is Julie White, a guidance counselor who’s also Mohawk. “I could not be more proud of them,” White says, her eyes moist. “I think I teared up a couple times just listening to them.”

White went to Massena high school, too. She recounts also being called racial slurs. These students, she says, are creating a new reality. “Some of the things they’re speaking out against, I guess we didn’t feel empowered enough to do those things when I was here.”

These students do feel empowered. They want Native American Day to be bigger. They want regular classes cancelled for the day.

Keely Thompson-Cook says last year, non-native students came up to her wanting to know more about her people’s history, culture, and traditions. That curiosity helps her fellow Mohawk students, too. “They feel more comfortable coming to school being Native American and being proud of who they are.”

That’s how the students in the Mohawk Club are flipping the script from native stereotypes to native pride.