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SARATOGA SPRINGS – The Saratoga Springs Participatory Budgeting Committee has decided not to send to voters a proposed project suggesting the city hold a symposium to discuss the potential redesign of the city seal’s imagery.
The idea was submitted by former Public Safety Commissioner Robin Dalton. The Saratoga Springs seal shows Native Americans drinking water at High Rock Springs. The same image is painted in the City Council chambers.
Dalton said she submitted an idea to hold a symposium that pulls in historians from other municipalities to talk about their seals and discuss the history of the city seal, noting the current seal is not the city’s original one. She said the idea came from an earlier conversation the City Council had in April about the image.
“Taking a more history-based approach rather than a political approach, I thought, might be a better first step to this discussion in general,” she said.
Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi said the proposed project is outside the scope of the committee.
“We are not the proper channel to go through,” Sanghvi said.
Under the city charter, the seal falls under the Accounts Commissioner’s purview. Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran said he isn’t planning to look into changing the seal at this time.
“Robin Dalton was in office for two years and did nothing about this,” Moran said. “She’s trying to cause problems where problems don’t exist by essentially creating this issue.”
Following the participatory budgeting committee’s decision, Dalton said she has no plans to bring the idea to the city council.
“I have no interest in being a part of some political argument regarding the city seal,” she said.
Moran said the seal is not at the top of his list of items to address in the city, noting he is focused on issues such as short term rentals, the roll out of the adult-use cannabis market and homelessness.
“I don’t know how a white person can talk about what the image of another race can be,” he said. “She’s way out of line.”
Moran said he’s had “personal conversations” with Joseph Bruchac, a member of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation and the city’s poet laureate, about the subject.
“I understand how complicated and how invested a lot of people are in that imagery and that’s not to say it’s good or bad but rather to say it’s a complicated issue that deserves time, attention and focus,” he said.
Bruchac said the image depicted on the seal and mural are stereotypes of Native American people and display an inaccurate picture of what the familial relationship was like among Native American tribes. He said the image implies subservience by native women to native men when culturally they were seen as equals or in some cases the woman had more say than the man.
“I think you could find a Mohawk artist who would be glad to redesign that city seal with the sort of same native people at the spring image, but more accurate,” he said.
The proposal comes at a time when several Capital Region school districts, including some in Saratoga County, are changing their school monikers after the state’s Education Department handed down an edict requiring all school district’s to retire all nicknames, logos and mascots associated with Indigenous culture. The town of Niskayuna in Schenectady County is looking at a redesign of its seal after people noted inaccurate depictions of Native Americans.
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