HANOVER — Town officials plan to alter Hanover’s official logo, where necessary, to remove a Dartmouth College weather vane after college officials this week acknowledged it was offensive because of its depiction of a Native American.
The Hanover Selectboard discussed the issue on Monday night, and Town Manager Julia Griffin said the board “wants us to amend our logo going forward with no weather vane.”
The logo, which features Dartmouth’s Baker Library tower, appears in several places, including on police cruisers, letterhead, uniform patches, trailheads and on the Hanover website.
Dartmouth said it will replace the 600-pound weather vane atop the Baker tower after Native American students and some professors said it depicted racist stereotypes, including a Native American sitting on the ground smoking a pipe below the seated college founder, Eleazar Wheelock, with a barrel of rum nearby.
Griffin said via email that many of the logos in town show three pine trees on the weather vane, rather than the more troublesome figures. For now, those logos won’t be changed, she said.
“On signs that are more formal with a clearer depiction of the two people and the rum barrel, we will be painting out or otherwise eliminating the portion of the weather vane that has drawn the protest,” Griffin said.
Dartmouth plans to form a working group to assess iconography around campus and suggest a replacement for the weather vane.
Steven Malcolm Jump-Mora, one of the Native American students at Dartmouth who objected to the weather vane, said via email, that “going forward, we hope that the college can find an Indigenous artist to create a piece that will reclaim the highest point on campus, continuing to decolonize Dartmouth, and to represent its ever-developing commitment to Indigenous populations.”
John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com or 603-727-3217.