In North Carolina, 34 public schools have American Indian logos or mascots. That’s according to the State Advisory Council on Indian Education.
Since 2002, the council has called for public schools to stop using American Indian mascots, calling them “detrimental to the self-identity, self-concept, and self-esteem of American Indian students.”
Now, more than 20 years later, state lawmakers are considering a bill that would ban them for good.
WUNC’s Will Michaels spoke with Mary Ann Jacobs, chair of the American Indian Studies department at UNC-Pembroke, about the effort to ban Native mascots.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Some of the 34 schools have mascots like ‘Warriors’ or ‘Braves.’ Others are ‘Indians,’ and by my count, at least three still call themselves ‘Redskins.’ What are some of the effects that this has on American Indian students?
There was an excellent article that came out 2020. The findings from academic research on the effects of Native American mascots suggest that regardless of the stated intent of those who support those mascots, like honoring Native Americans, these mascots induce or correlate with negative psychological outcomes: low self-esteem, lower community worth, less capacity to generate achievement related possible selves — like ‘I can do well in school’ — and greater levels of negative affect, that is their feelings.
There is a monetary mechanism in this bill where, if schools don’t change their mascots, the superintendent in that district will just stop getting a paycheck. Do you think that that’s enough to compel schools to comply?
It depends. I mean, would the school district then pay their superintendent through other fundraising that they do with their parents and in their community? I mean, people might see it as a continuation of cancel culture. It’s become like a way to fight in public, on social media.
UNC-Pembroke’s mascot is the Braves. This bill would not apply to universities, and it’s worth mentioning that Pembroke, Robeson County, and the entire surrounding area is inextricably tied to the Lumbee. But do you think that an institution like UNC-Pembroke should change its mascot?
I’m open to it. I don’t think that opinion would get a lot of support in the alumni community, but I see my students using the term ‘Native American’ rather than ‘American Indian.’ I see my students questioning, why do we have a mascot?
But people are very confused about UNCP. They think that UNCP is somehow a tribal school, and they don’t understand that UNCP was created to train public school teachers during segregation, to create teachers who could teach in one-room classrooms for Native Americans around the State of North Carolina. We teach the history and culture of the Lumbee in this department because we want our students who graduate with a degree in American Indian Studies to be able to discuss the history — and it’s a complex history — of the Lumbee people. But this school has always been about having the same sort of curriculum that any other public university would have.
