Native American

Kansas Citians who drive the highways around the area know billboards and signs featuring players or logos of the Chiefs are plentiful.

But where I-435 flies over East 104^th Street, just west of the Blue River, a new billboard has appeared. It’s red with yellow and white lettering, like so many others. Except this one says, “Change the name and stop the chop.”

Gaylene Crouser is the executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Four schools in the Shawnee Mission School District will have new mascots by the end of the school year after the district’s board of education voted unanimously last night in favor of a policy that bans what it calls derogatory or offensive mascots.

The change will affect Belinder Elementary, Rushton Elementary, and Shawanoe Elementary Schools, and Shawnee Mission North High School in Overland Park.

Black and Native American babies in Kansas die at almost twice the rate as white infants in their first year of life.

Out of every 1,000 live births, 11.8 Black and 10.4 Native American babies die before their first birthdays in Kansas. Meanwhile, only 5.6 out of every 1,000 white babies die in that period.