By Scott Edger
Little Apple Post
At last Wednesday’s meeting of the Manhattan-Ogden USD 383 Board of Education, the boiling debate over Manhattan High School’s Indian mascot spilled over the rim and onto the public burner once again.
BOE Vice President Kristin Brighton brought up the issue during the meeting, calling for continued discussion leading toward the “respectful retirement” of the MHS Indian name and imagery.
Brighton said she is for respectfully retiring the mascot and would like to see a museum-type display discussing the use of the historical mascot, but also noting that as social norms changed, the way we talk about and treat other cultures in the United States changed as well.
“Society is completely different than it was 80 years ago,” Brighton said.
In 2017, the board voted to change the mascot from the Indians to the Wolves, but the plan was scrapped following heated opposition, with MHS ultimately removing Indian imagery from athletic uniforms and the football field logo.
Officials elected to retain the various large Native American “Chief” depictions on campus and decorating walls within the existing high school facility.
Brighton noted that as a marketing professional, “If a client says they are not using their logo because it's embarrassing or it's out-of-date, I tell them it's time for a new brand,” she said.
“I believe that the Manhattan High School brand needs an overhaul for 2022.”
While contemporary society reconsiders the historic treatment and current sensibilities of largely ignored peoples, the Manhattan community seems positioned in opposing trench lines.
Opponents of native imagery say that at a time of mass efforts to improve cultural awareness of myriad racial and ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples are all but forgotten.
Board member Brandy Santos was unable to attend Wednesday’s meeting, but said she is not a proponent of changing the mascot name or removing native images.
“I don't see it as disparaging and I'm not of the opinion that we should change anything,” she said.
Santos said that the imagery is meant to pay tribute to Native Americans, and naming a team the “Indians” is a matter of honor.
“When I hear the word Indian I don’t think of it as a word that reflects warriors and fighting,” she said. “I think of a good people who were here before my some of my own ancestors, people who persevered and had a positive influence.”
Santos points to the placement of a statue depicting a Kansa warrior on top of the capitol building in Topeka as indicative of the high regard in which native history and contributions are held.
“It’s our job to teach students that respect and honor,” she said.
Santos is open to discussions about the mascot .
“I would sit down and talk about it, but I’m not going to blindly vote to remove these images because somebody is offended,” she said.
Santos said that the solution is not erasing history. “We’ve got to come up with something better than that,” she said.
By contemporary social justice standards, the issue is not whether or not the use of native images is embracing and honoring Indigenous culture, but rather how it reinforces antiquated notions and whether or not Indigenous people want to be embraced and honored in that manner in the first place.
Dr. Alex Red Corn is an assistant professor at Kansas State University and co-chair of the K-State Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance.
Red Corn acknowledged the purported honor and respect bestowed on Indigenous populations with the portrayals.
“That’s a sticking point in a lot of communities,” Red Corn said. In the larger picture, Red Corn said that people are inundated with a “stuck-in-the-past" imagery of American Indians.
“It's not just a mascot problem,” Red Corn said. “It’s all over the place, it's a media problem, and it's also a curriculum problem. The conversation isn't just about the images, it's about the collection of imagery and stereotypes that we are exposed to.”
He noted that when student go through an institution all of their learning is based on the textbooks, standards, and curriculum available that outdated stereotypes.
“They don't have a modern, nuanced understanding of who American Indians are in the present,” Red Corn said. “Mascots are just one of a handful of things that are propping up these stereotypes.
Redcorn noted that Wichita North Atchison and Shawnee Mission North made changes after examining district policies and determining that using the mascots violated their own guidelines.
According to Red Corn, we are propping up the old stereotypes in state curriculum and textbook choices and modifying their curriculum to learn about the four tribes of Kansas in their modern context, and exposure to contemporary native authors.
“This helps paint a more accurate picture of who American Indian people are in the modern context,” Red Corn said, “because we all inherited this awkward and entangled history.
“The productive thing would to be focus on what does that look like now, and engage and expose our students to current Native issues so that when they go out in the world and they meet in American Indian they are operating from a better understanding of who that person is and not relying on an image of a stuck-in-the-past, feather-wearing people that does not exist in the present.”