Since posting our open letter to the campus community onto two blogs — Critical Spontaneity and I’ll Get There. It’ll Be Worth the Trip. — on Monday night, a community of supporters has joined us in taking a stand on the student referendum to reinstate the Chief, and we are incredibly thankful for them. On Tuesday, University administrators confirmed the referendum has no authority or capacity to bring back the Chief as an official University symbol. The administration’s statement on the Illinois Public News is clear: It encourages all of us to accept our history and begin to move forward. 

Moving forward begins with seeing one another as human, realizing that each of us has a different history that informs what we know and who we are. We must recognize many Native Americans have real lived experiences that the Chief does not portray. We cannot honor people by rewriting their stories or claiming them as our own. The image of the Chief does not honor the culture of Native Americans — it further steals and erases the multiple rich cultures of the autonomous nations that form Native America. By continuing to use the Chief as a symbol, we are taking something that is not ours. It is time to give back what we have taken to truly honor the members of our community, past and present.  

We tend to judge ourselves based on our intentions, while we tend to judge others by our perceptions. Sometimes the best of intentions can hurt others, and “instead of using defensiveness and ignorance to protect ourselves from seeing the pain that other people feel, we need to open ourselves up to discomfort,” as suggested by Kaytlin Reedy-Rogier, a University alumna. 

We need to see one another as part of a shared community, and in doing so, seek not only the safety of ourselves, but of all of those in our classrooms or residence halls. In the words of Masood Haque, junior in LAS and Illini Media employee, we need “solidarity between all individuals, whether directly affected by an issue or someone just watching and letting it happen … fighting for what is in fact right, versus what has just been a tradition bred out of a place of unknowing.” We must sometimes stand against the majority opinion because if we never do, “can we be certain that the popular vote would uphold even the most basic rights?” asks my friend Joshua Ford. This is a question we must take seriously. 

We will all continue to hear opinions that make us question our own — and if we do not, maybe we need to listen with more care. And in that moment of dissonance, we must decide where we stand. This is where we will start to hear our own voice as we embrace our ignorance and recognize our knowledge as incomplete. 

We come from different places and are thrust onto one campus together as we make sense of ourselves and our roles in a rapidly changing world. Higher education is not simply about sitting in a classroom and spitting out information. It’s about engaging with other learners and rethinking what we have already come to know. 

Our time at the University is much more: It has helped us to become critical thinkers, holding multiple perspectives at the same time and deciphering the differences between matters that warrant truth with a capital “T” and matters that warrant multiple truths. We enter the University, and by the time we graduate, we are ready to put our learning into action. 

We have an opportunity now to enter a transformative moment in this University’s legacy. We can acknowledge our past, hold it tenuously and reject those parts of that history we recognize as damaging. We can move forward into a future that is informed by our past, transforms our world for the better and acknowledges the humanity of all people. We have the opportunity to be the leaders we have always been. 

The world is looking at us, University of Illinois, and we hope that we can make decisions that we can be proud of in the eyes of other universities and the greater community of higher education.

Suey Park,

class of ‘12 and graduate student

at Miami University

Thaddeus Andracki,

graduate student in library and information science