End Racial Bigotry NOW

End Racial Bigotry NOW

Schools Displaying Racial Mascots

by State


  • On a recent radio talk show I spoke with a young lady who had been a cheerleader for a team called the Indians. She said, "when I put on my feathers and war point, donned my buckskins, and beads, I felt I was honoring Indians." I asked her, "if your team was called the African-Americans and you painted your face black, put on an Afro wig, donned a Dashiki, and danced around singing songs and making noises you thought were African, would you be honoring blacks?' Her answer was No - of course not. That would be insulting to them." End of discussion.
    Tim Giago, Lakota
    Publisher, Lakota Times

  • One does not ask white people if something is offensive to Indians - just as you would not ask 100 men if something is degrading to women.
    Dennis White (Ojibway)

  • How can you be honoring people while they are telling you that what you are doing is demeaning to them.
    John Benson
    Superintendent of Wisconsin Schools

  • The message sent to Indians is "If I don't feel it - you don't feel it". This 'my way or the highway' attitude denies Indians the human right to feel the way they truly feel.
    • Patricia Parker Levi

  • These people keep telling us how much they love Indians, yet when we criticize the mascot, we're hushed like small children or harassed by the community.
    Charlene Teeters (Spokane)

  • I'm sure they felt they were honoring us by having our scalps on their walls, too, or by taking our land.
    Susan Shown Jarjo (Cheyenne Moscogee)

  • We don't want to be mascots for America's fun and games.
    Clyde Bellecourt, National Director, AIM

  • I'll decide what honors me and what doesn't ..... minority groups have had enough of whites telling them what to think.
    Richard MacPhie

  • Redskins is not a term fashioned by American Indians. The nickname was assigned to them just as the pejorative designation "darkies" was once imposed on African-American slaves. That was wrong then - this is wrong now.
    Washington Post Editorial

  • Tradition is no reason to be trapped in the past - no reason to be racist
    Melea Powell
    .

  • Two hundred years of tradition does not make using Indians as mascots right.
    Tim Giago

  • Slavery was a tradition that was something we needed to get rid of. Just because it's a tradition doesns't mean it's good.
    Bernadine Vigue (Oneida/Menomonie)

  • The use of American Indian team names and much of the use of native American symbols and images promotes stereotypical thinking. Many Americans seem to think Indians no longer exist, or tha tif they do, they are broken and destitute skeletons of the formidable "noble savages" of the past.
    Gary Sandefur (Chicsaw)

  • Education does not take place through antics of racist mascots. it causes the opposite effect.
    Fred Veilleux

  • We're really in trouble when student's main expossure to Indian culture comes in the form of a sports mascot.
    Will Antell

  • A name which refers to an individual's skin color is a racist characterization: good intentions do not make it otherwise.
    Carol J. May

  • When someone says you are hurting them by your action, if you persist - then the harm becomes intentional.
    Barbara Munson (Oneida)

  • The attitude that fans mimicking Native Americans at sporting events is allin fun....it is racist.
    Aaron Two Elk

  • Only the people affected know how demeaning and degrading the impact is.
    Osie Davenport

  • There is something obscene about naming franchise mascots after human beings.
    Harry Edwards

  • When it is permissible to make fun, dehumanize native people in America, then, all of the other things - poverty, denial of rights, thievery of land - all of those things are sanctioned as well.
    Susan Shown Harjo

  • If we could stop racial and cultural slurs in sports, then we would have a better chance of stopping racism tht keeps us in poverty and ill-health and keeps our treaty rights under attack.
    Gaiashkibos (Lac Courte Oreilles Chippewa)

  • Try understanding that the mascot issue is only the tip of a very huge problem of continuing racism against American Indians.
    Glenn T. Morris

  • People say that Indians have bigger problems than mascots and the use of Native American images, but I disagree. If you cannot see me as an individual, then how can you understand the problems we have as a people? >Frand Le Mere (Winnebago)

  • To these teams and their fans, Indians are buffoons to be cartooned, non-people who just don't matter. We object.
    Richard MacPhie

  • If the logo is so trivial - why can't they change it?
    Phil St. John

  • War-bonneted apparitions pasted to football helmets or baseball caps act as opaque impermeable curtains, solid walls of white noise that for many citizens block or distort all vision of the nearly two million Native Americans today.
    Michael Dorris

  • It is dehumanizing, derogatory, and very unethical. It extends a portrayal of Native American people as being warlike, aggressive - of having a savage approach.
    Aaron Two Elk

  • We are saying - start playing football (baseball and hockey) and stop playing Indian. Stop this dehumanizing, degrading, and despiccable exploitation of our culture and spiritual life.
    Vernon Bellecourt

  • The use of dance, music, symbols or other behavioral representations of Native Americans trivializes that culture and is offensive.
    Athletic Policy of the University of Iowa

  • To see someone put on feathers and paint their face and play Indian is a mockery of our people.
    Hugh Danforth

  • The printable answer to this piling-on trivializtion of Native American concerns is that 49er, Vikings, Pirates, RedWings, Saints, and the like have not been widely disrespected and abused in this country.
    Eric Zorn - Chicago Tribune columnist

  • Comparisons to the use of Steelers, Cowboys or Packers as good reasons to use Indians as mascots insults our intelligence.
    Tim Giago

  • Native Americans comprise 0.9% of the population of the United States. That our education insitutions are bastions of racism and bigotry is an affront to the dignity of all humans regardless of ethnic background. Talk about playground and school yard bullies!
    Catherine Davids
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