Indian Mascots Really A Matter Of Heritage

At the risk of taking up the paddle of a canoe already heading over the falls, I want to make the case for keeping American Indian names and mascots in our schools.

The argument to keep the Braves, Warriors and Chiefs on the walls and uniforms of public schools may already be lost. The patter of political feet running for cover on this issue has grown from a soft moccasin to something louder, like high heels making tracks on a marble floor in the statehouse.

The politically correct and the politically aspiring are running hard to claim their spot in the pantheon of those who see injustice where there once were only football jerseys. On Sept. 8, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted after 17 years of debate to eliminate American Indian mascots from L.A. schools.

In Washington state, the Colville school board is wrestling with the request made by some Colville Confederated Tribes members to change the Colville Indians to something else.

This drive to eradicate American Indian references from our teams and schools strikes me as both ironic and wrong.

The irony is that these school names carry with them great affection that crosses racial and reservation lines. The supposedly humiliating and offensive American Indian team names, in truth, have been held in high esteem in white and Indian schools alike.

If you attended a school where the Braves, Warriors or Chiefs were your team, you cheered. The team, and the team name, were a point of pride. The emblems were not erected to put down American Indians, but to project and honor qualities that are universally admired. Qualities like courage, honor, resourcefulness, personal pride, teamwork.

The push to eliminate American Indian mascots primarily serves political purposes, and doesn’t fix real problems. This makes the cause bankrupt and wrong. It’s designed to make white people and white schools feel guilty and, in some cases, to make American Indian schools and their leaders feel as if they have evened some political score.

Is justice being served? Are people better off because of this change? No. Eliminating every high school mascot with an Indian connotation will not produce one new job on the reservation nor provide a single scholarship for a promising American Indian student.

Rather than see some deep-seated racism costumed at a high school football game, straight-ahead people will wonder why their intelligence is being insulted by the suggestion that they cannot distinguish between someone dressed up in a costume and a real person.

Of course, many mascots are caricatures of real people and history. Fans in high school grandstands know this. Just as people don’t look at Mickey Mouse and say, oh, all mice talk and make movies, people who watch the Braves, Warriors and Chiefs understand that mascots in feathers and face paint aren’t men and women whose ancestors were American Indian.

To tie school mascots into white man’s oppression of American Indians is like saying Indian head pennies should be taken out of circulation because white guys have their pictures on quarters and therefore the American Indian is being undervalued. It’s a stretch that a great many clear-thinking people won’t make.

Traditions built up around the use of American Indian mascots in sports and schools have provided, and will continue to provide, tremendous opportunities to build understanding and to educate. Every school with a history of Braves, Warriors or Chiefs can use that tradition to open a discussion about the attitudes we have had in this country toward American Indians and what attitudes need to be changed.

The schools are a safe place to start the discussion because people of different colors, different ages, different backgrounds honored and cheered the Braves, or Warriors or Chiefs in the past. To politicize the mascot is to destroy it.

This is why a straw poll among Colville High School alumni earlier this year found 473 people voting to keep the Indians and only 17 voting to change the name. The mascot is part of tradition. The mascot provides a common threat over time to connect one generation with another.

One hundred years ago, the political mindset of America dictated that American Indian children shouldn’t dress in native clothing and shouldn’t speak in native tongues. Progress demanded suppression of all things Indian.

Now, a century later, the cycle repeats. Voices for progress demand that society purge itself of the metaphors and honorable memories of Braves, Warriors and Chiefs.

What an irony. What a wrong.

If the Braves, Warriors and Chiefs simply become the Bobcats, Wolverines or Cougars, the American Indian heritage once again will have been marginalized in the name of progress.

, DataTimes