Sep 13, 2013 10:53 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Protesters removed small American flags from Middlebury College's campus, which were meant to be part of a tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Middlebury Campus reported.

Two out of a group of five took 2,977 flags out of the ground because they said it was a sacred Abenaki burial site. The flags, planted in front of Mead Memorial Chapel on Middlebury's Vermont campus, were meant to honor each of the 2,977 people who lost their live that day 12 years ago.

Ben Kinney, president of the school's College Republicans, spent two hours Tuesday night putting the flags in the ground, an annual tradition shared by his club and the College Democrats at Middlebury. Wednesday afternoon, he happened upon the group stuffing the flags into black trash bags.

"I got there just as they were taking the very last of them out of the ground and putting them in piles," he told the Campus. "At first, I [thought] the group was comprised of College Democrats helping put the flags away before the rain rolled in, but then I realized what they were doing."

According to Kinney, the group was removing the flags in protest of America's sense of "imperialism." Julia Madden also said she saw the demonstration and wished she had been more aggressive with them, but she just asked why they were doing it. She also asked the group if they could put the flags somewhere else, but they did not answer.

Kinney said he had no knowledge of the school's 9/11 memorial, placed in the same spot every year, ever being torn down before.

Anna Shireman-Grabowski, a Middlebury student, wrote later that day about why she started the protest, Middbeat.org reported.

"Today I chose to act in solidarity with my friend, an Indigenous woman and a citizen of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who was appalled to see the burial grounds of another Indigenous nation desecrated by piercing the ground that their remains lay beneath," she wrote.

Middlebury director of public affairs told the Huffington Post the school does not have any proof of that specific area being a burial ground. The school's president Ron Liebowitz called the protest "disrespectful" in a letter to the community and announced the school would launch an investigation.

"Like many of you, I was deeply disturbed by the insensitivity of this act," he wrote. "Destruction of property and interfering with the rights of others to express themselves violates the standards of our community."

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