Northern Michigan University and Northwestern Area agree to share logo

MELLETTE, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - A local school and a Michigan university have taken a lemon situation and turned it into lemonade.

The copyrighted logo of the Northern Michigan University Wildcats will continue to be used by the Northwestern Area Wildcats in Mellette.

Northwestern inadvertently was using the same logo with the same colors, which was a trademarked symbol of NMU.

"We were made aware that the Wildcat head that we had, it was copyrighted and trademarked by Northern Michigan. Once we found out that was the case, we reached out to Northern Michigan just to say, 'Sorry, we didn't know this was the case, is there something we can do so that we can continue to use this? Can we get some agreement?'" said Northwestern Superintendent Rob Lewis.

The resolution was announced in a school-wide assembly on Monday at Northwestern. The copyrighted use of a logo between Northern Michigan University and Northwestern Area was agreed upon.

"Well, I'm thinking it's Wildcats for Life. We are going to invite every single one of their students to come visit, come enroll. We already have one student that's applied, so that's great. And today, we're here to do kind of a pep assembly. I'm calling it a little bit of an 'adoption ceremony' because they're part of our family now," said NMU Marketing Officer Derek Hall.

The agreement is mutually beneficial.

"I thought it went really well. You know, Derek and Mrs. Graff have done a lot to kind of make this go. The students were great. It's kind of a nice little opening for the kids to explore a part of the country most of them probably haven't been," said Lewis.