Students, alumni and Native Americans petitioned Arcadia High School to change its mascot from the Apache this past July. Arcadia’s petitions reflect a national issue as to whether schools should appropriate Native American culture and tribes for spirit. In a time of racial reckoning, schools must remove culturally demeaning Native American mascots.
With European colonization, the Indigenous population of the Americas declined by 90%, or 130 million people, from disease and war. During the Gold Rush, Californian death squads murdered nearly 100,000 Native Americans, a third of the total population. By the 1900s, starvation, massacre and forced labor cut the population down to 16,000. Here in the San Gabriel Valley, Californians enslaved the Kizh peoples to build white settlements. It is the greatest insult to the descendants of Native Americans to misuse their culture for school spirit.
Students can see Apache culture appropriation everywhere in AHS. Their T.V. news program is called the “Apache News,” their auxiliary members are referred to as “Apache Princesses” (though the Apache never had royalty) and the school newspaper is the “Apache Pow Wow” (though the paper is currently looking for new names). The real Apache tribes suffered defeat and humiliation from the U.S. military. White Americans forcibly assimilated Apache children, tearing families apart. Early American filmmakers, like in the 1913 silent film “The Battle at Elderbush Gulch,” then stereotyped them as brutish. Stylizing the Apache as feathered warriors demeans their culture and memory.
Schools like AHS must acknowledge how their appropriation of Native American culture trivializes a very real genocide. They must consider the views of those Native Americans and change their mascots. The country as a whole has to recognize the effects of widespread cultural insensitivity.
Proponents of appropriation argue that most Native Americans either support it or don’t care. However, according to a UC Berkeley study, 67% of Native Americans polled who “frequently engage in tribal cultural practices” felt insulted by the depiction of Native Americans in the Washington Redskins football team. In fact, the polls justifying their name are inherently flawed. A Washington Post study, finding nine in ten Native Americans unbothered by the Redskins name, surveyed 504 self-identified Native Americans. This self identification was not confirmed because the survey was held over the phone. Most of the people actually depicted in these mascots report feeling insulted, and many polls that find otherwise are deeply flawed. Why, then, do schools continue to appropriate their culture? It demeans the opinions of the very people who became mascots.
In addition, even the justification for AHS’s Apache pride is flawed. In 1999, AHS gained the blessing of White Mountain Apache tribe leaders in Arizona to use their imagery. However, many students at Alchesay High School, AHS’s sister high school on the White Mountain Apache reservation, found the mascot offensive.
When pressed on the issue of using Apache culture, Arcadia Unified School District spokesman Ryan Foran said the school would add the problem to a list of priorities including COVID-19. But this should have been resolved years ago. It does not take months to replace insensitive caricatures of Native American culture. All it takes is for AUSD to listen to Alchesay High School students when they say the Apache mascot is insulting. Likewise, all it takes for institutions across the U.S. is to listen to and respect Native American voices. Flaunting Native American culture is the greatest insult upon centuries of injury.