U-CF board urged to retire ‘Indian’ logo

The Unionville-Chadds Ford School Board is scheduled to vote next week on whether to accept a recommendation from the district’s administration to retire the controversial Indian sports logo and nickname, and to create a new mascot that does not carry with it cultural flash-points.

At its works session on Monday, the board heard from Patrick Crater,

the athletic supervisor who has been working for several months on the question of whether to retain the Indian moniker for the Unionville High School sports teams — as some alumni and community members had urged — or to retire it — as others including students and graduates had pressed the board to do for some years.

Crater, who had discussions with members of the current student body, district staff, alumni, and community members last month, said the “Indian” identity should be left behind, and in its place a new mascot and a re-invigorated effort to honor the culture of the Lenni-Lenape Native American community begun.

The district would “honor the Lenape Tribe by strengthening our relationship, listening, respecting, and learning their history and culture,” Crater said in his presentation to the board. It could do so “through education and incorporating their history and culture into our curriculum.”

In addition, the district could create a set of native gardens on the school campus that would further its commitment to educating students about the Lenape culture.

To illustrate his vision of the district’s efforts concerning its athletic presence, Crater told the board a story related to him by Robert Redhawk Ruth, chief of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania. It concerns the habits of geese — the symbol of the Lenape — flying in formation, and how they use one another to fly

faster and stronger.

The geese take turns leading in the front of the formation, and when one of the “Vee” would become disabled or sick, Crater said, two others would drop out of the formation and follow the other to the ground, where it could be protected.

“If we have as much sense as the geese, we, too, will stay together in difficult times, as well as when we are strong,” Crater said in his virtual presentation. “I hope we will take this wisdom from the Lenape.”

To retire the Indian from the district’s facilities, explained Crater, the board would have to approve displacing the current sports logo, which has a feather attached to the “U” initial, and stop using that term when identifying the football, basketball, and other sports teams. Uniforms and sports equipment would

have to be replaced, and the high school gymnasium would have to be resanded to erase the current logo.

Then, a group of an as-yet unidentified selection panel of students, staff, alumni, and community members would find a new mascot to cheer at athletics events. The new mascot would be chosen in 2021.

The board indicated it would include Crater’s recommendation on its voting session Aug. 24. It could decide to accept or reject the motion, or to set it aside for further action. One supporter of the Indian moniker, resident Scott Cousins, has asked the board to find a “third way” that would keep the logo and nickname while also finding ways to educate students and others about the proud yet troubled history of the Native American.

The Indian mascot — a headdress wearing person symbolizing the centuriesold presence of the Leni-Lenape Indian community in the Unionville and Chadds Ford area who would appear

at athletic contests — was dropped by the district several years ago after complaints from student activists and others. District officials had reached out to Lenape representatives who confirmed that the caricature present at football and basketball games was offensive to their community, and replaced the mascot with a more acceptable and simple logo of a “U” with a feather attached.

But the nickname “Indian” lived on, and more recently people in the community had reinvigorated the effort to have it dropped entirely because of the negative cultural implications. Unionville High is one of a number of institutions, including professional sports teams, that have gripped with Native American logos and mascots. In Chester County several area schools use such names as “Raiders” and “Warriors.”

Board President Jeff Hellrung testified at a court proceedings earlier this month at which Cousins unsuccessfully

challenged the effort to reinvent the athletic presence that the issue had risen back up after the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by police during an attempted arrest. “We heard from many of our graduates that this would be an appropriate time to reconsider the Indian name and the Indian mascot,” he said.

The school board chose Crater, its highly respected supervisor of athletics, to lead the review. Crater had been in touch with a variety of stakeholders in the district, as well as the Lenape representatives, and initiated a series of virtual “community conversations’ with those groups July 30.

He said those conversations had been beneficial to his understanding of all the viewpoints surrounding the issue, and helped inform the administration’s eventual recommendation for retirement.

The Unionville logo.