City of Moses Lake seeks to keep middle school name

MOSES LAKE — In a meeting with members of the Business Council overseeing the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, a delegation from Moses Lake has asked to keep the name of Chief Moses Middle School, according to Moses Lake Mayor Dean Hankins.

Hankins, speaking at a regular meeting of the Moses Lake City Council on Tuesday, said that he, along with Moses Lake School Board Member Shannon Hintz and Interim Superintendent Carole Meyer, met with Colville representatives in Nespelem to talk about land acknowledgments, the school district’s mascots and the damage to self-esteem team mascots can do to young Native Americans.

“Basically, what I had to say, if you live in the United States, you live on prior Native American land,” Hankins said.

Hankins said studies clearly show that Native American team mascots do psychological damage to Native American young people, so it’s in the best interests of MLSD to change its mascots.

However, Hankins said the delegation asked the Colville to possibly allow the town to keep the name of Chief Moses Middle School. The campus is named after a 19th-century leader of the Sinkiuse-Columbia people, Chief Moses.

“We don’t know for sure yet how that’s going to go,” Hankins said.

The city council also voted unanimously to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Moses Lake Irrigation District to study the creation of a city-wide irrigation utility that would provide lake water for parks, lawns and gardens.

The goal of the utility would be to replace potable well water used in the summer to water lawns and parks with some or all of the 50,000 acre-feet of lake water the MLIRD holds rights to.

“Whichever way we move forward, the MLIRD is excited to do that,” MLIRD Commissioner Kaj Selmann said during the meeting. “The MLIRD is prepared to go full steam ahead.”

After the meeting, Selmann said the MLIRD — which meets at the same time as the city council — also approved the agreement.

The agreement gives the city and the district the ability to explore what it would cost to create a city-wide irrigation system using lake water. Currently, the MLIRD has no way to distribute lake water to district residents.

Under the agreement, the city and the MLIRD pledge to split the cost of a study 50-50, noting that comparable joint irrigation plan studies cost between $60,000 and $100,000. The results of the study should be available by mid-2023.

Finding ways to limit the use of potable well water to drinking and bathing is something a number of towns in the arid Columbia Basin are either considering or have started working on. For example, the city of Othello has created an irrigation utility to use reclaimed and treated wastewater to irrigate lawns in new developments, and the city of Quincy is considering a municipal irrigation system possibly using treated wastewater as well.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com