Will the Guilderland schools replace their Flying Dutchman with another symbol?

A Guilderland parent, Sara Kate Kanter, made the case for change at a February meeting to which some school board members sounded receptive.

We’re not advocating for or against a change although we think it is important to understand the history of the Flying Dutchman, unusual as a school mascot, before rejecting it.

Kanter has made recent thought-provoking comments to the board on other matters — she called the ThoughtExchange used to anonymously poll the community online about budget priorities “unkind and unhelpful” and, while she stressed the importance of school safety, she cited research showing that school resource officers “do little to reduce on-campus violence or mass shootings, and their presence is often damaging to students of color and students with disabilities.” 

Kanter was spurred to comment on the school mascot because of an article in a local daily on Union College, in Schenectady, looking to rebrand. Sports teams at the liberal arts college are called Dutchmen and Dutchwomen.

“It is clear that relatively few current students have an affinity for the nicknames, and they do little to connect the College to prospective students,” Union President David R. Harris and Mark Land, vice president for Communications and Marketing, wrote in an email to the campus community in early February. “Additionally, not having a strong nickname — and the accompanying mascot — puts the College at a distinct disadvantage from a marketing and branding standpoint.”

The college website goes on to say, “The move by Union to choose its own nickname comes at a time when the College is in the midst of a comprehensive branding update designed to strengthen how to communicate Union’s distinctiveness and the power of a Union education to prospective and current students, faculty, staff, alumni and the general public.”

Many small, private liberal arts colleges are facing an enrollment crisis, heightened by the pandemic and growing competition from schools that provide more direct job skills. A survey by the Federal Reserve found that half of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in the arts and humanities said they would now choose a different field of study.

So Union College has a reason to rebrand, as a marketing strategy, and hopes to do so by September.

Guilderland schools are in a very different situation. As public schools, they serve the students who live in the district and don’t need a brand that will attract more students.

Rather, the Guilderland mascot or nickname should be one that students — all of them — can be proud of — something to cheer for, if you will.

This leads to Kanter’s supposition that Guilderland’s Flying Dutchman uplifts colonialism. She quoted from the Union College statement that this part of New York is associated with Dutch heritage but the region is also the ancestral homeland of the Iroquois Confederacy, established well before the arrival of the first Dutch explorers.

After a New York state education commissioner, Richard Mills, more than a quarter century ago asked schools to do away with their mascots involving Native Americans, the current commissioner has finally made that a requirement — and rightly so. Such misappropriation of native cultures is demeaning to indigenous peoples.

Kanter told the school board she hoped Guilderland would think critically about using “nicknames that uplift colonialism, the impacts of which are still felt.”

She concluded, “Taking our cue from Union, now is a great time to start a district-wide respectful conversation, taking some time to reflect on and discuss who we uplift and honor and why.”

The school board had already decided not to acknowledge Columbus Day on its calendar alongside Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In the 8-to-1 vote, a former history teacher was the only dissenter, pointing out that the designation was to honor his exploration and discovery of a continent — although another board member did acknowledge that the designation would have given teachers an opening to educate students on the horrors of genocide as well as the heroism of discovery.

We all could learn from local Dutch heritage just as we could learn from local Haudenosaunee heritage.

This week, Charles Gehring is giving a talk for the New Scotland Historical Association. We were privileged to interview Gehring for an Enterprise podcast several years ago.

His life’s work has been devoted to translating the more than 12,000 pages of records that the English found in the fort at New Amsterdam when they took over from the Dutch.

 In 1999, the four-century-old pages he is translating were declared a national treasure by the United States Department of the Interior.

The parts of the 12,000 pages that had been translated previously over the centuries, Gehring told us, were what was of interest to the “great white fathers,” documents that have to do with land ownership and who was holding power.

But Gehring has translated, too, pages that describe more about the “social nature” of the Dutch colony, he said. Others had considered that secondary and not to be bothered with, he said. “I was amazed by the detail and amount of information in these records.”

Gehring realized “this would be an eye-opener” for people who thought of the Pilgrims as setting the course of American history. The picture of the society that emerges from the records Gehring has translated reflects the “Dutch freedom of conscience,” he said, as opposed to the narrow or intolerant views held by the Puritans and Pilgrims who had fled England.

Gehring notes that, after fleeing England, the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for 13 years where they were accepted but they left for the New World because they didn’t want to be assimilated into Dutch society; their children were learning not just the Dutch language but Dutch ways.

The Netherlands was multiethnic, he noted, as people came there from all over Europe. “The reason they left,” he said of the Pilgrims who journeyed to the New World, “was because they were basically intolerant and they didn’t want anybody to be sort of contaminated with other religious ideas.” The Puritans would severely punish or even hang those who differed from them on religion.

“The Dutch never hanged anybody,” said Gehring, noting that seven of the provinces in the Netherlands had broken with Spain as it forced Catholicism; their pact stated “no one will be persecuted or prosecuted for their beliefs,” said Gehring.

Gehring said you can see in the early records “the embryo of certain ideals we have as Americans,” including not only tolerance but the idea of social mobility.

In England, he said, a person’s class is immediately recognizable by his or her language. In the Dutch colony, he said, there was a blending of different cultures. He contrasted that with the English colonies in Massachusetts. In the Dutch colony, people who started with little could become powerful and important.

Gehring cited a butcher from Lithuania who became one of the Dutch colony’s biggest landholders. “Social mobility is a major feature in America; if you’re smart, if you have ambition, you can rise to the top,” he said. 

Russell Shorto spent two years poring over Gehring’s work to write his book, “The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan & the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America,” which served as a megaphone for Gehring’s work.

Shorto posits simply enough that history is written by the winners and writes, “We are used to thinking of American beginnings as involving thirteen English colonies — to thinking of American history as an English root onto which, over time, the cultures of many other nations were grafted to create a new species of society that has become a multiethnic model for progressive societies around the world. But that isn’t true.”

Shorto goes on to write of New Netherland, “It was founded by the Dutch … but half of its residents were from elsewhere … its muddy lanes and waterfront were prowled by a Babel of peoples — Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Jews, Africans (slaves and free), Walloons, Bohemians, Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and many others — all living on the rim of empire, struggling to find a way of being together, searching for a balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression … This island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America’s shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world.”

The written records, translated by Gehring, allowed Shorto to write the narrative he did, correcting our view not just of New York but of American history.

But, as far as Guilderland school history is concerned, none of that is directly relevant.

The school mascot is a ship, the Flying Dutchman — not, as with Union College, Dutchmen or Dutchwomen.

The first class to graduate from Guilderland’s centralized school district was the class of 1955. On the golden anniversary of the commencement, we interviewed some of those class members.

Charles Pergl, now deceased, told us how proud the Class of 1955 had been of the new school colors it had chosen — red and white, brightened from the old Altamont High School colors of garnet and gray.

The late Frank Elliott had suggested the school’s symbol — the Flying Dutchman, a spectral ship said to appear in storms near the Cape of Good Hope, condemned to sail the seas against the wind until Judgment Day.

The Class of 1955 thought that the spectral ship would be a fearsome symbol as the school’s teams took on nearby rivals. The symbol of the ship survives on district documents.

But the symbol that seemed to matter most, a half-century out, for those original Guilderland graduates was the old school bell in the lobby of the modern centralized high school building.

“It came from a one-room schoolhouse,” said Pergl of the bell. “It was set on a stone monument with a plaque saying the names of all the schools. I went to Fullers .... There were schools in Dunnsville and at Osborne Corners and one at the top of Willow Street.”

It may be hard for current Guilderland students to imagine what it was like to be educated in a rural one- or two-room schoolhouse. Our history columnist, Mary Ellen Johnson, recently gave a detailed description of one old man’s memories of the Fullers School.

“Fullers had once been a prosperous little 19th-Century farming community with its own post office, general store, and railroad depot located on the Western Turnpike where it was crossed at grade level by the West Shore Railroad,” wrote Johnson. “By the 1930s, the businesses and depot had disappeared with the tracks now crossing overhead by trestle.

“However, the people living there continued to feel a sense of community, chiefly because their small one-room District No. 13 Fullers School continued to give the area its identity.”

That was true for each of the districts across Guilderland. Great pride — and sometimes fierce rivalries — were engendered by loyalties to the schools and thereby the places.

Centralization — at the time, a radical, even upsetting, notion — now seems the norm. Guilderland residents now, perhaps because of a central school system, often see themselves as part of a large suburban whole rather than being from separate distinct hamlets, each with its own identity.

The Flying Dutchman was part of that growing together.

When Kanter had finished speaking, the school board president, Seema Rivera, responded, “I know other people have mentioned the Dutchmen, actually not just the colonialism part but the gender piece too.” Board member Blanca Gonzalez-Parker mentioned earlier discussion, “before Lady Dutch was just Dutchmen, so I think this has been a sentiment for a while.”

The Enterprise, for each of the schools we cover, uses just the mascot name without appending gender. We would no more write “Lady Blackbird” than we would “Gentleman Blackbird,” for instance.

As the Guilderland school district and the community that supports it continues this conversation — and we agree with Kanter that it is a valuable one to have — we would urge, as we stated at the opening, an awareness of the current symbol’s origin. But, most importantly, we would urge choosing a symbol that calls the community together, much as the old school bell did.