GOLDEN, Colo. — When Renee Hutchens rides her bike through the front range, she feels connected to her people, the Navajo Nation.
“The land is my people," she said. "It’s our culture. It’s our identity."
Born in Oklahoma and raised on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, Hutchens said she feels that she was "born into a battle" to fight for the rights of her people whose land was stolen and history forgotten.
“We’ve had the NFL and the Washington team recently end the battles there, we’ve seen Mount Rushmore," she said referencing the protests at President Trump's rally. "We’ve seen the colonialism statues being torn down. We have countless court cases that we fight related to the land and sovereignty."
Hutchens decided to start her own battle last week with a petition asking the Golden-based bike company, Yeti Cycles, to take the word "tribe" out of their marketing messages.
Hutchens said despite the good intentions of Yeti Cycles describing people who buy their bikes as a member of their tribe, they are participating in indigenous erasure.
“They don’t suffer from the fight that my ancestors have fought for hundreds of years to be sovereign nations so when I hear that it’s so belittling and dismissive of the blood sweat and tears that go behind our fight for sovereignty," she said.
A week after the petition circulated online, Yeti Cycles says they will no longer refer to people who buy bikes from them as a part of the "Yeti Tribe," and they will "no longer use the term 'tribe' in their marketing."
On their website, they replaced the word "tribe" with "us" for the hyperlink that leads to the page about people in the Yeti Cycles community.
In a statement, they wrote, "recently, we’ve learned our use of the term “Tribe” can be offensive to indigenous people, due to the violent history they have endured in the United States. The word “Tribe” is a colonial construct that was used to marginalize Native Americans and its continued use by non-indigenous people fails to accurately recognize their history and unique status as Tribal Nations."
Hutchens saw the statement on Tuesday morning and cried.
"It feels like justice for my people," she said. "I fight for this because my people belong in the cycling community. We are here in the cycling community"
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