Board restores Indians mascot
Retired on July 1, another Cambridge school vote Thursday brings it back
For the third time in four weeks, the Cambridge school board changed its mind regarding the school’s mascot.
In another 3-2 vote, the board decided late Thursday to restore the “Indians” mascot that was retired on July 1. The difference this time: a newly elected board member, who supported the mascot, took office. He replaced a board member who had voted to retire the mascot last month.
Nothing had been done on July 1 to retire it. The image, of a Native American man in a headdress, was still on the school district’s website and social media pages, as well as in places more difficult to remove. It’s emblazoned on walls and signs.
Former school board President Neil Gifford acknowledged that he expected the new board to restore the mascot immediately. He was replaced as president by board member Jessica Ziehm on Thursday.
The vote was a foregone conclusion at Thursday’s meeting, but the board did not make a decision until about 10:30 p.m. It was the first in-person meeting held since the board began evaluating whether the mascot was derogatory. Dozens of people showed up, and the board let them talk for hours before finally holding the vote.
Speakers included several students who spoke favorably about the mascot as a symbol for their many athletic victories. One football player described honoring the mascot in a prayerful ritual involving blades of grass and a special tree before each game.
Another student said the mascot was inappropriate because of the area’s history of genocide and colonization.
Parents came out on both sides as well, with some saying the mascot helped remind people of the Indigenous people who lived in Cambridge first and honored them as positive role models for students. Others said no group of people should be a mascot, especially an oppressed group.
Nina Wugmeister challenged the board to consider the issue from a different perspective: What if a school in Germany chose a Jewish figure as its mascot, or if a community with a significant history in the slave trade chose “Negroes” as its team name, even if its leaders claimed they were doing so in honor of Black people?
“Would we think that is OK?”
she said. “We would think that was crazy.”
Differing views
But the word Indian has a complicated history.
New board member David Shay Price, whose swearing-in to the board Thursday gave the pro-mascot group the votes they needed to restore it, said he didn’t think Indians was a derogatory word.
“On an issue that has information coming in from all over the country, all over society, there’s no black and white answer,” he said. “I’m going to rely on the experts — all the Native Americans I speak to in Cambridge. They’re not ashamed to say Indians and they said that over and over.”
Nationally, a consensus is coalescing on the issue, in favor of replacing American Indian and Native American with Indigenous people. But the word Indian has been reclaimed by many Indigenous people, similar to the way in which gay people have reclaimed the word queer.
Native American newspapers have been grappling with the issue for decades.
In 2015, the Native Sun News editorial board wrote, “We have been Indians for a few hundred years and the name carries our history. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Little Wound all called themselves “Indian” and they said it with pride. Should we dishonor them by saying they were wrong? Political correctness be damned: We will use ‘Indian’ if and when we choose.”
But by 2021, they were using the words Native and Indigenous as well as keeping the word Indian for previously named groups and events, such as “the Indian Relay.”
Similarly, the Indian Country Today newspaper said it would keep using the word Indian for as long as there was an “Indian Country,” but in references to people it now largely uses the word Indigenous.
The trouble is that the words Native and Indian have a problematic past. Native was used in a negative sense for centuries and Indian was an incorrect word imposed on all of the groups living in North and South America as a whole.
University of Massachusetts professor Peter d’errico, who taught seminars about Indigenous people, wrote in 1995 that many names were problematic because they were imposed on the people from the outside. Even some commonly used tribe names like Mohawk came from the names given by their enemies.
“We have to discard both ‘American Indian’ and ‘Native American’ if we want to be faithful to reality and true to the principle that a People’s name ought to come from themselves,” he said in a seminar specifically about what names to use.
He later used Indigenous when writing in Indian Country Today.
Today, there are some Indigenous people who still call themselves Indians, while others prefer American Indian or Native American or Indigenous.
So the question becomes whether any of those names are considered derogatory if they are used by a person who is not Indigenous.
‘Fundamental difference’
On this, opinions are still divided.
Cambridge school board member Dillon Honyoust, whose family are Onondagas, uses the phrase American Indian. He said many people he knows call themselves Indians and have no problem with that word. He also said that tribal leadership appears to be out of step with tribe members by insisting that nonindigenous people stop using the word Indian and associated images.
Tribal leadership made their views clear in a letter sent to the Cambridge school board from the National Congress of American Indians, which is the official congress of the Tribal Nations.
“There is a fundamental difference between the National Congress of American Indians’ use of ‘American Indians’ and Cambridge Central’s former use of the ‘Indians’ mascot and associated imagery,” they wrote. “While the National Congress of American Indians employs an organizational name and logo that represent and have the formal sanction of hundreds of Tribal Nations representing millions of Native people, the recently retired mascot at Cambridge Central did not and does not enjoy the formal approval of any Tribal Nation.”
The National Congress of American Indians mascot is a traditional headdress, but the person’s face cannot be clearly seen.
The Onondaga Nation also opposed Cambridge’s mascot, calling it defamatory for a list of reasons but not objecting specifically to the word Indians. In fact, the nation used the word Indians in its letter.
Objections included the fact that mascots are described equally, comparing “the Indians” to animal mascots as if the two were on an equal level.“therefore you have the belief that the Bears are superior to the Indians,” they wrote, adding, “Often individuals ‘dress up’ like their mascot and act in ways which are not very honorable.”
While depictions of Indigenous people are the most common human mascot, they’re not the only ones. One student speaking Thursday noted that Notre Dame’s mascot is a leprechaun, and the teams’ nickname is the “Fighting Irish.” Notre Dame has received a great deal of criticism for that in recent years, but has not dropped the name. The student asked why Cambridge had to drop its name when Notre Dame has kept theirs.
The complex issue has left the community divided on how best to honor Indigenous people.
Former school board President Neil Gifford said restoring the mascot was a “shameful” act.
“Racism is in our choices, not necessarily what’s in our hearts or our intentions,” he said before voting no.
Honyoust, who voted yes, said the mascot is a deeply respectful symbol that ensures the people who first lived in the region are not forgotten. But he said he would be open to a different image with the same goal.
“The imagery is awesome but if we can grow it, make it better, it’s awesome. We’re not stuck in the sand on this,” he said.