"Cracksgiving" party at Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College athletes to be disciplined for dressing as Native Americans at ‘Cracksgiving’ party

By Beth BroganFourteen members of the Bowdoin College men’s lacrosse team will be disciplined for dressing up as Native Americans at a November party known as “Cracksgiving” held in an off-campus house known as “Crack House” rented by members of the team.

As first reported in The Bowdoin Orient, a student newspaper, and confirmed Wednesday by college spokesman Scott Hood, Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster sent a campus-wide email Tuesday evening to inform the college community that Bowdoin will take disciplinary action against the students. However, Hood said no students will be expelled as a result of the incident.

In the email, printed in its entirety by the college newspaper and confirmed by Hood, Foster wrote that just prior to Thanksgiving, some members of the men’s lacrosse team who live in a residence known on campus as “Crack House” on Harpswell Road hosted “Cracksgiving,” and students were encouraged to dress up as pilgrims and Native Americans.

According to Foster, the invitation urged students to attend “wearing your finest Thanksgiving attire.”

Fourteen of the team’s approximately 50 members—some of them residents of the house—dressed as Native Americans, he said, “even after some of the team’s other members actively tried to talk them out of it.”

“Especially disturbing is that the hosts of this event knew—or should have known—that their actions would offend; yet they went ahead with their plans nonetheless,” Foster wrote.