Oregon bans Native American mascots

In a landmark decision, Oregon schools have been instructed to do away with Native American-themed mascots and nicknames. In possibly the strictest rule in the nation, schools will have to comply with the ban or lose state funding. The Oregon State Board of Education passed the policy last Thursday in a 5-1 vote.

It’s about time.

This is not a new debate, with teams like the Washington Redskins famously winning to keep their name and mascot some years back. In 2006, a former Taft High School student, Che Butler, raised the discussion locally to the board after his school played sports against the Molalla High Indians.

Butler told The Oregonian that, during the game, a student dressed in buckskin and feathers was performing stereotypical Native American dances. The school’s mascot, a Native American man, was complete with face paint and headdress. Though school administrators insist there is no more dancing at games, the mascot and name are very much still intact, as are a totem pole and teepee on the soccer field.

Examples like this confirm that the board got this one right, and, to echo Chairwoman Brenda Frank of the Klamath Tribes, “It’s been a long time coming.”

It is mind-boggling that the use of such blatant stereotypes has been allowed to last so long. That we continue to represent a population of people in our country with a singular, banal image is unacceptable.

As Keith Woods said in his 2005 article published by the Poynter Institute “Nicknames and Mascots: Complicity in Bigotry,” nearly every representation we have “freeze[s] Native Americans in an all-encompassing, one-dimensional pose: the raging, spear-wielding, bareback-riding, cowboy-killing…warriors this country has caricatured, demonized, and tried mightily to exterminate.”

Our country has successfully dehumanized the native people of our land, perpetuating a bloodthirsty warrior image that is, as some psychologists suggest, a common practice used during wars to help justify killing people.

In wars, we want nothing else than to see a caricature of those we are fighting; the minute we see them as human beings, we find it harder to think about them being on the other side of our guns. Our country ended its wars against Native Americans less than a century ago, yet we have never ended the war on their identity—denying them the equal honor, dignity and respect that every human deserves. It is as though the nicknames and mascots remain in place to continually justify what we can never justify.

Opponents of the ban claim that the use of native images and names in fact honors the members of tribes. First of all, it’s hard to believe that sports teams really care that much about honor. They want to win games. They want to thunder down the field, at break-neck speed, with their thick locks of hair streaming out behind them, fire in their eyes, spears brandished, “savagely” destroying their competition. Oh, sorry, what were we talking about?

But seriously, perhaps it would honor them more to create space for a full, diverse and multi-dimensional expression of a people whose very land we inhabit and choose to ignore except in old Westerns and at football games.

There’s another dimension to the honoring concept—that is, we honor in the way we see fit, using symbols we want to use. Native American poet, writer, comedian and filmmaker Sherman Alexie said in an interview with CBS, “[Mascots] are our religious imagery…Feather, the paint, the sun—that’s our religious imagery. You couldn’t have a Catholic priest running around the floor with a basketball throwing communion wafers.”

We have chosen the customs, traditions and dress to represent the image we have of Native Americans and then have the audacity to suggest we’re honoring them. In his 2007 Grand Forks Herald article “Viewpoint: A genocide of the mind,” writer Chase Iron Eyes says that “a transformation happened when a collective Euro-American consciousness began to dictate what is the essence of an American Indian…This transformation can also be called objectification.”

Another main concern opponents have had with the board’s decision has been, predictably, about money. It will cost some schools thousands of dollars to switch out mascots and redesign uniforms. Well, perhaps this can be a teaching moment. Where better than at a school to model for students that upholding the dignity of human beings has no price tag and that the monetary inconvenience is absolutely minuscule in the grand scheme of things?

Besides, they have until 2017 to comply. Five years seems like an unnecessarily long time to bring about this change—but at least that gives schools ample time to run plenty of bake sales to cover their costs.

Some have said that the changing of mascots should hardly be a priority when our schools continue to produce curricula with a one-sided, diminishing and downright inaccurate history of the American Indian. If students are fed bigoted viewpoints of a people throughout their entire high school education, doesn’t the changing of a team’s mascot seem trivial in comparison?

Well, yes. The fact that we’re having this discussion at all is sad and shows we have a very long way to go yet. Dean Azule, Native American student services coordinator at Portland State, knows a thing or two about that. This issue was being discussed when he served in the Oregon Indian Education Association 25 years ago. Though he said he is glad the topic has been resurrected, he pointed out that unless there is a “move to truly address curriculum that reflects Native American people appropriately, we still will have attitudes of racism existing.”

In a situation where one group of people have seen promise after promise broken, only time will tell if this decision will be followed by any real change. As Azule said, “It is a great first step.”

May there be countless more.