The High School in our lovely town's mascot is depicted as a Chief that they called "Indian". The name Indian is a derogatory term towards Native Americans and has been since Christopher Columbus set foot here. 

As someone who is from a (sadly extinct) tribe, moving here and seeing the use of a Chief as a mascot, along with the use of Indian to describe them, blew my mind. Native Americans are not your mascot, they're people. No one would like if we used "Caucasians" as a mascot, and there would most definitely be an uproar about how it's "racist" and "belittling" towards white people. As the protest from Native Americans comes to all the schools and sport teams in the US, using their culture as a mascot goes on, it goes ignored.

Thankfully, a few years back, Manhattan High School stopped using a ceremonial headdress, a traditional piece that is custom made for Native Americans for ceremonies that has different meanings depending on the feathers added to said headdress, as a costume during games and pep rallies.

Changing the mascot is a great step towards helping lower the amount of racist schools using an entire culture as a mascot. We can change the mascot to an animal like almost every other school in our town. We could change it to a dragon or a wolf and be one step closer to changing the way Americans see Native Americans and their Tribes in this country.