Graduation Season Not A Happy Time For All.

It is now graduation season in many parts of the world. A time when graduating students are looking toward the future bright with expectation and new beginnings. It should be a happy time where students and their families can proudly celebrate accomplishments that have often required years of effort, study, determination and sacrifice. But not all students can celebrate their graduation in a way that is fully meaningful to them, especially if they want to make their cultural traditions part of their graduation ceremony by wearing culturally significant regalia or clothing.


Some states have enacted legislation protecting the rights of students to wear culturally relevant regalia to graduation ceremonies, if they choose to, but many states do not have laws protecting this right of choice, and school officials can and do remove such regalia from a student's person, sometimes forcibly.


Such is the case for Genesis White Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. As she was standing for the national anthem alongside her graduating class at Farmington High School in Farmington, New Mexico, on May 13, 2024, two school faculty members approached her and confiscated her graduation cap. She was told to remove it because it was embellished with an eagle plume and beaded around the rim. Her cap was removed and replaced by a generic graduation cap which she wore throughout the ceremony. Her cap was returned to her after the ceremony, but her mother reports a plume was cut off with a scissor and was returned separately.


This episode is a disgrace, and a violation of Genesis White Bull's civil rights, in my opinion. How awful for her to have her graduation spoiled in this way. Not only was she forced to wear a different graduation cap than the one that was of cultural importance to her and her family, expressing part of her heritage and ethnicity, but she was singled out in such a public way, with no real recourse, just as the graduation exercises were beginning. Furthermore, how anyone could see wearing a beaded cap with a feather, or even a few feathers, as being disruptive, is beyond my comprehension. My heart breaks for this young woman, and other students like her, who want, in a very small but meaningful way, to celebrate their cultural traditions at their graduation.

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