District moves ahead with potential North Central mascot change
Some tough conversations lie ahead as the North Central High School community considers a change to its Indian mascot.
Those conversations will move forward after the Spokane Public Schools board on Wednesday night unanimously approved public hearings on an issue that spans a century.
After those hearings, the board will decide whether to change the mascot. If it does so, the school community will begin steps to choose a replacement.
Ivy Pete, a junior at NC and a student adviser with the board, shared some of NC’s history with board members.
Pete, a member of Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, impressed the board with a recollection of the NC’s adoption of the Indian mascot in 1923 and how “school identity became deeply intertwined with the use of these symbols.”
She also recalled the measured progress made a generation ago, when NC students voted in 1999 to do away with the “dehumanizing image” of the dancing, headdress-wearing Indian at athletic events.
By the spring of 2019, Pete was a freshman at NC and the issue had become personal, with the stereotypical Indian mannequin near the front entrance an insult.
“As a student, it makes it difficult to validate my own identity,” said Pete, who joined a student-led group organized the previous year by Principal Steve Fisk.
“Over an 18-month period we did some really integral work over our symbol,” Fisk said.
That work was interrupted by COVID-19. But with students back in school, he felt it was time to renew the effort.
“What we are doing tonight right now is a culmination of generations of work,” said Pete, who recalled that in 1993, the state urged school districts to consider removing offensive Native American mascots.
Few did so, because the change was merely a suggestion.
That could change this year, thanks to a bill in the Washington Legislature that would outlaw such mascots. It won easy passage in the House and is now in the Senate K-12 Committee.
Pete spoke to legislators when the bill was introduced early last month, but the bill didn’t come up Wednesday night.
Pete said that the initiative “is not an attempt to erase North Central’s history.”
“We have some people who are very prideful of our symbols, and we have to honor their words and hear their words and come together as a school-based community,” Fisk said earlier this week.
Reaching back again, Pete evoked the school motto: “We are family always.”
“I can tell you that many of our indigenous students do not feel this way,” Pete said. “We are not being listened to. We are a community that has been silenced for generations.”