American Indian reservations face epic challenges: suicide and other mental health crises; substance abuse; unemployment and poverty; failing schools – the list goes on. All undermine everyday life on reservations, including in Colorado.

So, you’d think the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs would be making headlines with efforts to address those perennial woes. Instead, it has been making headlines with an effort that will do nothing whatsoever for Native Americans – other than to erase their identity from Colorado’s public schools.

An arm of the Lieutenant Governor’s Office, the commission is charged with implementing a dubious policy adopted last year by the legislature banning the use of American Indian-themed mascots by public schools. About 25 schools around the state are affected although some already have adopted new mascots under threat of a $25,000-a-month fine starting this June.

It was clear from the beginning that names like “Indians” and “Savages” – the mascots, respectively, at schools in Yuma in northeast Colorado, and in Lamar along the lower Arkansas, as well as in other places – were doomed under the edict.

But last week, the commission doubled down and announced out of the blue it might add another seven Colorado public schools to its list of banned mascots. Their transgression? All call themselves “Thunderbirds.” Yep, like the U.S. Air Force’s precision aerial demonstration squadron – and like the mascots at hundreds of other schools across the country.

A thunderbird is “a bird that causes lightning and thunder in American Indian myth,” according to Merriam-Webster – though a lot of Coloradans very likely never associated the image with American Indians at all. For many, no doubt, it’s just an awesome nickname.

The original premise of the new policy as adopted by the Democratic majority at the Capitol – and of others like it around the country – was to banish images that offensively characterized American Indians. Thunderbird, by contrast, doesn’t even refer to American Indians themselves. Nor is it offensive; it was a character in the mythology of some tribes.

But don’t expect such plain logic to give the commission second thoughts. It’s on a roll.

The legislation was a mistake from the start. It tramples the local control that was constitutionally guaranteed to the state’s 178 wide-ranging, diverse school districts. And it is so subjective it cannot be enforced consistently or rationally.

Public sensibilities on the subject – including among Colorado’s American Indians – are a lot more complicated than the legislature seems to grasp. That explains why an American Indian organization sued last year in an attempt to let some schools actually keep their mascots.

The commission will reconvene in May to decide whether to lower the boom on the seven schools bearing the Thunderbird image as well as any other schools that were on the original list and haven’t yet changed mascots. That would give those schools only weeks before the June deadline to expunge the offending imagery from the walls of their gyms as well as from their uniforms, pendants, t-shirts, letterhead, etc.

The extra hassle and expense mean little to commission members. Their fringe politics – part of Colorado’s own “cancel culture” – blinds them from such everyday realities and shields them from common sense.

The law enacted in 2021 was bad enough as an exercise in legislative overreach. The commission is now behaving as if it were a revolutionary tribunal. And it is bent on purging so much of the past it no longer has anything credible to purge.

Denver Gazette editorial board