We respectfully request that the Board vote to rename Lane Community College to Kalapuya Community College, effective on a future date to be set in consultation with campus and community stakeholders.

The Kalapuya people cared for the Willamette watershed for millennia. Recognizing them in the college’s name affirms our commitment to place-based education and inclusive excellence.

The college’s strategic goals call for deeper equity, stronger community partnerships, and curricula rooted in local relevance, all of which a name change would reinforce.

A name that reflects local Indigenous heritage can bolster the college’s appeal to prospective students, faculty, and funders who value culturally responsive institutions

We ask the Board to direct staff to design a phased rebranding plan that aligns with scheduled signage, print, and web updates so that additional costs remain minimal.

We urge the Board to pass a resolution that:

1. Officially adopts Kalapuya Community College as the institution’s name.

2. Directs the president to develop and publicly share a fiscally prudent implementation plan.

3. Establishes an advisory committee including tribal representatives, students, faculty, classified staff, local employers, and alumni to guide the transition.

Lane is a problem due to it being named after Joseph Lane, who was unbelievably pro-slavary. 

In 1860 he ran for U.S. vice-president on the break-away Southern-Democrat ticket that wanted slavery legal in all federal territories. Contemporary press accounts quoted him praising slavery as a “beneficent” institution and defending the right of states to secede rather than submit to abolition. 

When southern states began leaving the Union, Lane told Oregon newspapers that the federal government had no authority to stop them, a stance that cost him his Senate seat and branded him a Confederate sympathizer at home. 

As territorial governor and militia general, Lane helped negotiate treaties that forced western Oregon tribes, Kalapuya among them, off ancestral lands under threat of force. Local historians note his reputation for “anti-Indigenous efforts” alongside his slavery advocacy. 

Oregon’s legislature adopted the name in 1851 specifically to honor Lane’s political power, even though his pro-slavery views were already clear. 

“Lane” commemorates a man whose legacy is inseparable from white supremacy, Black enslavement, and the violent suppression of Indigenous sovereignty. Keeping it on a public college asks Black, Indigenous, and allied students to celebrate the very forces that once sought their destruction.

The Kalapuya stewarded the Willamette Valley for thousands of years, managing camas prairies with fire, engineering wetlands for wapato, and shaping the oak-savanna mosaic settlers later coveted. 

Kalapuya descendants today belong to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and of Siletz; the name affirms their ongoing presence and rights.

Replacing a pro-slavery honorific with the name of the first caretakers signals an institutional commitment to restorative justice rather than symbolic diversity.

A “community” college exists to serve all of its community; placing Kalapuya in the masthead turns every diploma, web page, and street sign into a reminder that higher learning must reckon with history and ecology together.

A college devoted to critical inquiry cannot continue to lionize a defender of bondage.

Names shape who feels welcome in a classroom; “Kalapuya” invites Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized students into a narrative of shared stewardship instead of exclusion.

Taxpayers should see their institutions aligned with democratic values, not white-supremacist nostalgia.

Re-naming to Kalapuya Community College is not cosmetic. It is an act of educational honesty and communal healing that replaces a symbol of racism with one of ecological reciprocity and inclusion, precisely the future a public college should teach.