CSU: Parent calls police on young Native American men on campus tour

A New Mexico mother believes her two Native American sons were the victims of racial profiling during a campus tour at Colorado State University on Monday.

Thomas Kanewakeron Gray, 19, and Lloyd Skanahwati Gray, 17, had saved enough money to drive roughly seven hours from the family’s home in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, to Fort Collins to tour the campus, Lorraine Kahneratokwas Gray told The Associated Press.

The family is Mohawk, and they lived in upstate New York before moving to New Mexico, she told the AP.

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In a Facebook post this week, Gray wrote that it was their dream to study at CSU, so they "scraped their dollars together" and took the family's van to Fort Collins for the tour.

Their trip was interrupted when a parent called campus police because she was nervous when the two men joined the tour, according to a letter sent out by CSU.

Can't understand the audio below? Read the transcript of the call here.

Police responded to the call by contacting the brothers. Campus police spoke with the students, confirmed they were part of the tour and told them they could rejoin the group. But by then the tour had moved on without them.

"The boys were shy and quiet, and weren't actively participating in the tour banter, so someone 'got nervous' and called campus police on them," Gray wrote in her Facebook post.

Gray told the AP she believes her sons were victims of racial profiling and she feared for their safety after learning about the encounter.

When the boys called to tell her what happened, she told them to "leave immediately," according to the post. "I felt they had been the victim of racism and that they weren’t safe there."

She later told the AP, “I don’t think they even grasped the magnitude of what happened to them until we talked.”

Gray describes her sons as teenagers who express themselves through contemporary music and traditional songs, according to the AP. The older brother is a student at Northern New Mexico College in Espanola, and the younger brother is a high school senior at Santa Fe Indian School.

“This incident is sad and frustrating from nearly every angle, particularly the experience of two students who were here to see if this was a good fit for them as an institution,” according to CSU's letter to students, which was signed by Vice President for Enrollment and Access Leslie Taylor, Vice President for Diversity Mary Ontiveros and Vice President for Student Affairs Blanche Hughes.

The incident comes in the wake of several other bias-motivated incidents on CSU’s campus.

Last fall, a paper noose was found in a residence hall.

Fliers related to an extremist white supremacist hate group have been distributed a couple of times on campus.

CSU President Tony Frank has condemned Nazi propaganda fliers that had been distributed on campus.

In February, protests around a conservative speaker at CSU turned violent when a group wielding riot shields and face masks emblazoned with skulls stormed a crowd while chanting a Nazi slogan.

To address those incidents, the university hosted a solidarity walk called CSUnite, which drew thousands of students, faculty and staff together to stand against injustice on campus.

The university has reached out to the students’ family and school community, according to the letter.

The Office of Admissions, Office of the VP for Diversity, Native American Cultural Center and campus police plan to meet to review how such an incident could be avoided or handled more appropriately in the future, according to the letter.

“As a University community, we deeply regret the experience of these students while they were guests on our campus,” according to the letter.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.