In what’s become somewhat of an annual controversy, a high school is refusing to allow a Native American senior to wear a sacred eagle feather at graduation.

“It made me really upset because it made me feel like I have to hide who I am,” Waverly Wilson, a senior at Lakes High School in Lakewood, Wash., told KIRO-TV. She was referring to the principal’s initial suggestion that she wear the feather under her gown, rather than on the tassel of her cap, as she had wanted to do. Later, when Wilson was told she could wear the feather, a gift from her uncle, as a hair ornament, the student said she would not accept the compromise. “It’s not an ornament,” she said. “It’s so much more than that. It’s representing who I am, and what all I have worked for.”

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Earlier this year, school districts in Oklahoma and North Dakota also told Native American students they could not wear eagle feathers at their commencement ceremonies. Similar cases made headlines in 2013 — most notably that of Chelsey Ramer, whose Alabama private school attempted to fine her $1,000 for wearing an eagle feather on her mortarboard after being warned not to do so.

In Native American culture, receiving an eagle feather as a gift represents “the greatest honor that an individual can have,” Ray Ramirez, spokesperson for the Native American Rights Fund, tells Yahoo Parenting. “So when an individual achieves something the tribe considers significant, such as graduating high school, he or she would receive the eagle feather.”

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Neither principal Karen Mauer-Smith nor a spokesperson for the Lakewood school district returned calls requesting comment from Yahoo Parenting. But in an email forwarded to Indian Country by Wilson’s mom Andi Dillon, a member of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, Mauer-Smith wrote, “I am sorry but the Eagle Feather cannot be worn on the outside of the gown or the cap, as per district policy. I have had students in previous years ask the same question and the answer has been the same.” The district bans students from altering the appearance of their graduation caps and gowns in any way.

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Ramirez was not surprised to hear about Wilson’s situation, as he says the NARF, a national organization based in Colorado, hears of “dozens of cases that come up every year.” Just last week, he says, the organization filed lawsuits against two districts in Oklahoma about eagle feathers at graduation. In January, it succeeded in getting a North Dakota school district to allow eagle feathers to be an exception to its “non-adornment” policy of graduation caps and gowns.

“It should be very clear cut, and there shouldn’t be any discussion about it,” he says, noting that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act — as well as many legal precedents citing the religious significance of eagles and eagle feathers in Native American culture — should make the student’s right clear.

But Perry Zirkel, a professor of education and law at Lehigh University, isn’t so sure. In general, he says, matters of school graduation dress codes, legally speaking, “favor the district because graduation is a school sponsored event.” Thus, a student’s potential First Amendment expression claim “would likely lose, because the district only needs a rational, not compelling, basis — here, decorum, if not safety.” Wilson arguing a First Amendment free exercise of religion, he adds, “would likely lose, because she apparently would not be claiming a genuine religious tenet (unlike, for example, the dress of a Sikh), and it would be difficult to argue national origin discrimination because the policy applies to all.”

For Wilson, it’s simply a matter of pride. “Just to be able to wear my eagle feather on graduation day would just mean the world to me,” she said. “It’s honoring my ancestors and my elders, and basically who I am — Native American.”

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