Grace Benally
Special to ICT
Indigenous communities have continuously fought for change regarding the representation of Native mascots across the U.S. since the 1960s.
They advocated against Native mascots by filing lawsuits, starting petitions, showcasing artwork and protesting outside professional sports stadiums.
The fight has not changed in decades, but the strategy and tactics for change have.
Diné activist Lily Joy Winder is working to get rid of as many high school Native mascots as she can. How is the 19-year-old doing this? TikTok.
Winder, or @sheshortnbrown on TikTok, has constantly shared her mission on her platform in hopes of educating and creating change against high schools that use Native American mascots.
Winder has more than 295,000 followers. Her message: People, Not Mascots.
“I know what it’s like to go to a school that does not respect your humanity,” Winder said. “I grew up in a very racist high school.”
Attending a high school that was predominantly White and middle-class, Winder found herself to be the only person of color in her AP courses and often overheard other students make insensitive jokes about her culture. Winder is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“I realized how unsafe school was for me so I created a student union so that Native students can come together and be in a safe space,” Winder said. “That’s also a part of the reason I’m so passionate about the #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS movement.”
Through her platform, Winder talks about how there are still too many high schools across the United States that use Native people as their school mascots. She shares this content using the hashtag #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS.
Winder did not plan on utilizing her platform to spread awareness on Indigenous issues until she posted a video talking about the exclusion of Native American communities on the app.
“I was already making comedy videos before that, just posting my life and doing whatever. I didn’t download the app TikTok and think I could use it to mobilize a bunch of people, it just kind of happened,” Winder said. “Then from there, I’ve been able to see the power that social media has to make a concrete difference for people.”
Since early 2022, TikTok has been the most downloaded app, with more than 175 million downloads. At least 32 percent of users are between the ages of 10 to 19 years old and users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the app.
Winder’s effort is part of the growing trend on the popular app where many creators are finding ways of utilizing the app to push their advocacy efforts onto the app’s For You Page to a larger audience.
It started with Winder creating a Google document to store all of the online petitions she found that involved getting rid of Native mascots.
It snowballed from there, Winder said, and that would motivate her to develop a website to share all of the petitions as well as educate people about the Native mascot issue.
Winder created the #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS website and it features a map that showcases what high schools in all 50 states have a Native mascot.
“We recognize that high school Native mascots do not accurately represent the richness and diversity within Native cultures,” the website states. “Join us as we condemn racist mascots, and declare our Native children People, Not Mascots.”
On the website, Winder also encourages people to contact their state representatives about abolishing the mascots.
One in every 19 secondary schools nationwide has a Native mascot, the website states. There are only four states across the U.S. that ban the use of Native mascots. Those states are Washington, Maine, Colorado, and Nevada.
“Native people have been working to get rid of racist caricatures since 1968,” Winder said. “I am simply carrying the torch of everyone that has done so much work before me and I am so deeply grateful for the work they have done.”
One of the oldest and largest leading voices in the opposition against the harmful stereotypes of Native people within sports mascots, media, and pop culture is the National Congress of American Indians. The organization has been advocating against Native mascots since 1968.
There are 1,914 schools across the U.S. with Native American mascots which span 973 unified school districts, according to NCAI’s database that was updated in August.
Twenty-three are tribal high schools that are operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Education and serve a student body of predominantly Native American students.
Winder believes that tribes should have a right to say whether they agree with a Native mascot existing or not. The issue she is fighting for is to have all the Native mascots condemned by local tribes on the land they live on.
Researchers have reported that Native mascots don’t do justice to respectfully portraying Native American culture, spirituality, and tradition, according to the American Psychological Association.
For example, there is a school located in Texas that features all of these harmful stereotypes.
“Scalp ‘em, Indians, scalp ‘em.”
That is what hundreds of people heard on a sunny day as a high school band and group of cheerleaders performed at Disney World back in March 2022.
The festive band and cheerleaders adorned in fake Native American headdresses were walking down the parade route at Disney replicating Native American traditional dancing and kept chanting.
The various schools that have Native mascots often showcase them by using racial caricatures of Native Americans.
The mascot is usually presented in culturally inaccurate headpieces, students will often use face paint as a symbol of “war paint”, and in some cases, they will chant inaccurate tribal songs.
“Scalp ‘em, Indians, scalp ‘em,” can be heard as part of the performance put on by the Port Neches-Groves High School band and “Indianettes” from Texas.
Video footage of their performance at Walt Disney World made its rounds on social media and it reignited the discussion of how Native Americans are being presented as mascots within schools and organizations.
Cherokee Nation’s Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin responded to the performance.
“For the past couple of years, we have written to the Port Neches superintendent and school board asking them to cease using this offensive imagery, chanting, symbolism and other practices in their school traditions as this does nothing but dishonor us and all Native American tribes who are making great strides in this country,” Hoskin said in a statement.
The offensive depiction of Indigenous people and communities doesn’t stop at the Texas High School’s band and cheerleaders. At Port Neches-Groves, the school refers to their football stadium as ‘The Reservation’, their school news site is known as the ‘NDN Press’, and they named the school’s yearbook ‘The War Whoop.’
More research has shown that Native mascots are detrimental to Native children.
“It has been scientifically proven by the American Psychological Association, who said that Native mascots are harmful to Native children and make them want to distance themselves from their culture,” Winder said.
In high schools across the United States, having Native American mascots can not only be harmful to the people who are outside of the school, but can harm those inside the school as well.
It leads the children to avoid learning about their own culture and traditions, Winder said because Natives have been purposely erased throughout history.
In 2005, the American Psychological Association documented the negative effects Native mascots have on high school students, both non-Native and Native.
“The use of American Indian mascots as symbols in schools and university athletic programs is particularly troubling because schools are places of learning,” said Ronald F. Lavant, the former president of the American Psychological Association.
“These mascots are teaching stereotypical, misleading, and too often, insulting images of American Indians,” he added. “These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students; they are sending the wrong message to all students.”
Learning more about the impact that Native mascots have had on Indigenous youth and communities is what lead Winder into advocating for the demolishment of Native mascots in the first place and what guides her work for #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS.
She hopes her work with #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS will eventually lead to a collaboration with sports companies that want to get rid of Native mascots.
For instance, Winder said that Adidas stated in 2015 that they would sponsor any high school that needed to get rid of their Native mascot.
Through Winder’s #PEOPLENOTMASCOTS campaign, she has stacked up almost 3 million views on TikTok, and her goal is to get rid of Native mascots across the nation.
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