Bar New York schools from using Native American mascots

The Cambridge Central School District has been wrestling with our Native American mascot for a year now. The school board weighed the evidence and voted to retire the “Indians” mascot as of July 1.

This was the right choice, but this is just one district. It’s time for New York to end this practice statewide.

Native mascots cause harm: they harm Indigenous people, especially adolescents, by impacting their self-esteem, and all others who come into contact with the mascot, by teaching them that stereotyping is okay. The American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association and Teach for America, among others, have called for retiring these symbols. So have a host of tribes, including the Onondaga Nation, Oneida Nation, Seneca Nation, Stockbridge-munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians, and the National Congress of American Indians — which has been asking this for about 50 years. When people say what we’re doing is hurting them, the only appropriate thing to do is to listen, and to stop.

The process had a tremendous cost to our community.

My family and I chose Cambridge when we moved from

Washington, D.C., nearly eight years ago. One of the major challenges small towns like my adopted hometown are facing is attracting people to move to them, or to move back. The rapid changes due to COVID-19 could present an opportunity for communities like mine. Employers are now much more

comfortable with remote work, so it’s more feasible to live in a beautiful place and travel into Albany, Boston, or Manhattan occasionally.

The debate about the school mascot has been so ugly and so divisive about “hometown pride” and “insiders” versus “outsiders” (meaning transplants like me), I fear my community has squandered an opportunity to attract and retain the people we need to ensure Cambridge remains a vibrant community.

There is value in taking a hard, honest look at racism in our communities, but, in Cambridge’s experience, the debate itself was harmful, especially for marginalized people.

I’ve followed the mascot debates in other communities and it’s staggering how similarly it unfolds. It’s like there is a script: There are the reasons why it’s acceptable, here if not in other places, including a mythology about the origin of the mascot. “Tone policing ” — dismissing people’s speech because of the tone it’s supposedly delivered in — of people of color. Tokenism. Embarrassing yard signs. Objectionable comments in private Facebook groups. There’s the vitriol at the school board meetings; good board members may decide it’s not worth it, and there’s a risk of people running for the board on a single issue, when our students and our teachers need and deserve so much more. And then there are the concerns about safety for children and for people who speak up, especially for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, LGBTQA+ and other marginalized students and community members.

These conversations are coming — as they should — to the roughly 50 other New York high schools that have Native mascots. Any forward-thinking town or school leaders, parents, students, or community members should be writing to express support for legislation proposed by Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, D -Bronx, and Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, D -Brooklyn (A5443/S1549), which would require the state education commissioner to bar the use of Native American names, logos or mascots by schools. New York should follow the leadership in Maine, Colorado, and Nevada.

I’m hopeful that my community will move forward and begin to heal, but New York cannot afford to let what happened in Cambridge happen in these other communities.