Update: Officials from the New York State Education Department reached out after hearing the segment and shared the information below: 

"Additional guidance from the Department is forthcoming but that guidance will mirror the language in the regulation. Each district will need to review the history and current potential of its team name, mascot, or imagery on a case-by-case basis. The Department can provide assistance to any school or district that have questions. The Department’s position is that any team names, logos, or mascots that contain vestiges of prohibited team names, logos, or mascots will not be considered acceptable."

 

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Let's imagine for a moment that the historical shoe was on the other foot. It's 1492, and some Lenape explorers, people from around here at that time, set sail across the Atlantic Ocean looking for China.

They land in England not knowing where they are. They assume it's China. They start calling the Englanders, the Chinese. They start to set up shop among the Natives. They take some of the Englanders as slaves.

The diseases they brought from here wipe out many Brits. The Native Englanders resist having their land taken by the Lenape, and put up fierce resistance. The Lenape label them savages, but the resistance is to no avail.

The settlers rename London New Manahatta. The Lenape settlers declare themselves in charge and eventually declare that they have a manifest destiny to spread their political control throughout the British Isles. Eventually, that happens and the Natives are relegated to certain isolated areas they call Englander reservations or China reservations from the geographical mistake they made.

The Natives don't have to live on the reservations, but if not, they're expected to assimilate into Lenape culture and accept the name New Manahatta for what they used to call London as normal and just. Then all over the country in areas where hardly any Englanders live anymore, the Lenape have taken over and wiped them out.

Schools begin to choose Englander-related names as School Mascots and for their sports teams, they call their teams, I don't know, the Wasps or the Pale Faces. Many of the teams are called the Chinese from that original error. Sometimes that comes with logos like bowler hats associated with the Native Englanders.

Bowler hats like you might see in Halloween costumes when Lenape kids would go around as Wild Englanders asking for candy.

Centuries pass. The remaining Englanders so marginalized for so long, begin to raise their voices and demand more respect. They don't go so far as to try to reclaim the name London for their capital. They don't have enough political power to do that, but they ask the government of New Manahatta to at least stop calling their teams the Stinging Wasps and the Pale Faces, and the Chinese at the public schools that are supposed to respect all the citizens of New Manahatta, including the Native Englanders.

The government agrees, but some communities, mostly in overwhelmingly Lenape neighborhoods, resist saying it's too politically correct, too woke to make them change the names. It's tradition. Besides the names were taken to honor the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and their courage in battle not to demean them. Same with the bowler hat logos and stinging wasp logos that they don't want to give up.

Back to reality. That's our little alternative history, our little piece of shoe-on-the-other-foot fiction. How about the real world where pro sports teams like the MLB Cleveland Guardians and the NFL Washington Commanders have abandoned their old native names?

Here's the breaking news. Here's why we're doing this today. Last Tuesday, the New York State Board of Regents ordered all high schools with Native American team names or imagery to replace them in the next couple of years. On Friday, just before the weekend, the state issued specific guidelines about how this is to be done.

Then a few communities, including on Long Island, are resisting. Massapequa for one a 91% white community, according to the 2020 census, is considering taking the state to court to keep the name The Chiefs at Massapequa High School. They say it's more than a symbol in Massapequa. It celebrates the rich history of the town and honors Chief Tackapausha. Who's he? Many of you never heard of him. The Point Lookout Historical Society on Long Island says in 1656, Indian Chief Tackapausha gave white men a deed to the land that would become Massapequa Park.

Let's talk about all this with John Kane, a Native activist who is a Mohawk member of the New York State Indigenous Mascot Advisory Council and host of the shows Let's Talk Native and Resistance Radio with John Kane. John, thanks for coming on today. Welcome to WNYC.

John Kane: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Does that alternative history put it in a mirror, reflect to you at all what's happening? I just made that stuff up yesterday.

John Kane: It almost seems too absurd to even consider until you realize that it is exactly a mirror image of what Native people have experienced here.

Brian Lehrer: Why is this important as you see it?

John Kane: Part of the issue is that Native people experience almost a unique form of racism. These Mascots are just an example of that. We are treated oftentimes as if we no longer exist. In fact, there is a fairly substantial percentage of the population who don't know native people still exist in the world, that we survived 500 years of genocide.

Those that do think about what the identity of a Native person is, they're grabbing it from Hollywood. They're grabbing it from television in comedies. They grab it from these schools that continue to represent us as relics of the past. They're almost always 18th-century depictions of something.

Most of the time, they're pretty inaccurate. For most of this period of time where Native people were used for Mascots, it was almost always the Plains Indian headdress Hollywood version of what a Native person was with the full array of feathers and that kind of stuff, which isn't even an accurate depiction of what Native people on the East Coast would've even looked like.

Again, it's always a depiction of what white people think Native people looked like in the 18th century. We aren't considered a contemporary people, and we're also the only people that are used this way. There is no other marginalized people who are used in this fashion and in such a vast sea of--

Brian Lehrer: A [unintelligible 00:06:50] way.

John Kane: Yes, it's incredible. There's no other mascot that evokes the same level of obsession by the alumni to want to dig in and get angry. It's funny. We saw a little of this when they took Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben off the boxes, or the Indian maiden off of the butter. It's like white people think that they are entitled to these imageries as a part of their history, and they don't even really consider what the marginalized people feel about it.

Brian Lehrer: To amplify one of your points, it is amazing how unique among all ethnic groups or other groups of humans the prevalence of Indian or Native American names is on sports teams. I read that with this ruling from the State Board of Regents, it will impact more than 130 schools with such names just in New York State alone, and actually looked up what names do minor-league baseball teams use?

The overwhelming largest group was animal names. When you think about the context, so many animal names and so many Native American names, and then very few of anything else, it's like, "What?"

John Kane: This is why we call it dehumanizing. It's absolutely taking at least a reference, if not any accurate depiction or representation of who we are. It's used for the entertainment and amusement of predominantly non-Native people. It is the definition of mockery because if you have a population who is not Native claiming that identity, and even if they're only claiming it as fans on the bleachers of a football stadium, it's still a mockery because they are claiming that identity for themselves.

I've heard many people say, "I've been chief since the third grade and I'm going to be a chief till the day I die," or "I'm going to be an Indian, or a savage, or a warrior," or whatever it is. We hear that over and over again with a level of obsession that we don't ever associate with any other type of mascot.

Brian Lehrer: Just to give people a few examples from Long Island where there's a concentration, I mentioned the Massapequa Chiefs. There's also the East Islip Red Men, and the Satche Flaming Arrows, also the Syosset Braves, just to name a few.

Listeners, we can take your phone calls on this for sure. Any people from any Native Nation who want to call in, you are certainly welcome. Anybody from Massapequa or anywhere else where there is such a team name right now with whatever your reaction is, 211-243-WNYC or a question for our guest, John Kane Native activist who is a Mohawk member of the New York State Indigenous Mascot Advisory Council and host of the shows, Let's Talk Native and Resistance Radio with John Kane. Full phone number 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

There's a defense I've read of at least the intentions of those who named these teams that says, "Look, nobody names their teams after something they consider bad, only after things that will help people root for them." At least on the original intent, do you accept that notion that it wasn't intended to be demeaning or dehumanizing?

John Kane: Yes, I don't think anybody picks up a Native mascot to be derogatory towards us, but the argument that they're doing it to honor us, I think is still farfetched because we weren't ever considered in any of those conversations. If you consider the time period that these schools adopted these mascots, native kids were being ripped from their homes and sent to residential schools or these Indian boarding schools funded by the government, run by churches where the native kids were beaten to have their identities erased.

When I hear anybody say, "Oh no, we did it to honor you," no, you didn't even consider what native children were going through. At the same time, the native kids are existing under this policy, "kill the Indian, save the man," little white kids could smear the mom's makeup on their face and beat up on their oatmeal canisters as they're little TomToms, and do it as a part of their educational process.

I reject the notion that it was ever done to really honor us because we were never considered, and certainly in the time period that these mascots were adopted, we were never considered a relevant population to even be considered.

Brian Lehrer: The other argument or another argument along that "it was taken to honor you" lines is I gather there's been a push to remove the name Rebels from some teams, especially in the South, because it seems to glorify Confederate soldiers, but the University of Kansas Jayhawks is okay because that glorifies union soldiers from Kansas known as Jayhawkers.

The assumption there is that team names glorify whatever they're named after rather than demean. Is that an inconsistency or complexity of how we view team names because there's also the move to remove Rebels because it seems to glorify them?

John Kane: Yes, I think there has been a push to do that, especially in the South. Even some of the school names, Robert E. Lee High, or something like that, or [crosstalk]-

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

John Kane: -there's an effort to change it. One of the things, I got to go back to this idea that it was about-- However it is intended, it isn't about us. It was always about the school themselves grabbing and essentially misappropriating a reference to native people and then imposing the identity or the imagery or the characteristics onto that mascot that may or may not be accurate.

Like I said, to represent native people all as warriors, all as fighters or as killers or whatever, in this very aggressive way-- I'm Haudenosaunee. I'm Mohawk. I live in Seneca territory, and part of our culture was more geared towards peace. As a native person, even if I use the word warrior within native culture, it is not about being warlike. It's about protecting our families, about that kind of stuff.

I think the representation that is oftentimes used, which is always masculine, it's always aggressive, it's always very physically imposing, I think that's a misrepresentation.

Brian Lehrer: It's only that one piece of the culture, that's a great point to make, that warrior aspect in a time of conflict.

There's one exception to the rule in New York State. I see "schools that can get a written exemption from a state or federally-recognized tribe with established ties to the community." That's a quote from Newsday. ""Schools who can get a written exemption from a state or federally recognized tribe with established ties to the community.

The Newsday article refers to schools even going tribe shopping to try to get somebody to sign off on keeping a particular name. Have you heard of any schools shopping around to get approval from local tribes or any instance where that's actually legitimate?

John Kane: Yes. I actually did a show on this because there's a school upstate in the Mohawk Valley called Fonda-Fultonville. They actually solicited the signature of somebody they called the local chief, a guy by the name of Tom Porter, who has got this little, like Indian village kind of thing set up in Kenna Jahari, and they used his signature and they said, "We got permission from a chief to allow us to continue to call ourselves The Braves, and he is actually going to help us redefine the imagery so it won't have any native reference."

They tried to do two things. They tried to say, "We're going to call ourselves The Braves, but we're going to associate it with the Home of the Brave from the national anthem, but we also got permission from a chief. Of course, that got rejected out of hand, not only by our council but by NYSED anyway, because this guy was not a federally-recognized chief of a federally-recognized tribe.

So yes, it has happened, but I do know that there is one instance that permission may be granted. I got to admit, I hope they don't. The city of Salamanca actually exists on the Seneca territory of Allegheny. It's part of the Seneca Nation territory. That entire district is within the Allegheny Reservation, and I don't mean ancestrally, I mean, the city actually leases and the residents of that city leased the property from the Seneca Nation.

The superintendent from Salamanca is saying, "We're a unique situation because we exist on the Seneca Nation territory, and we have a rather substantial native population." He claims something like 38% of their student body is Seneca. I think that's an exaggeration. I would be more prone to want to see what is the percentage of your graduation rate? How many Seneca graduate as a percentage of your graduate classes?

He's soliciting permission from the Seneca Nation. Now, there are plenty of Salamanca's who went to school at that school. There is a debate that's happening. I don't know that they will get this permission. They've actually got to get it by next week or that window closes to even try to do this. In fact, it may be the reason that NYSED even put that rule in there, was to give deference in this situation to the Seneca Nation because of the unique status of Salamanca and where the school district lies, and the role that the Seneca Nation may- giving them essentially the right to approve or deny the use of Warriors.

Now, the other problem with Salamanca is that they have a chief for their logo, but the nickname is Warrior. There's even a problem with compatibility of the imagery that they have and the nickname that they have.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from a caller on Long Island who's kid's school is in the middle of this. Melissa in Woodbury. You're on WNYC. Hi, Melissa.

Melissa: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm a first-time caller.

Brian Lehrer: So glad you're on. This is about Syosset High School?

Melissa: The district in full, not just the high school. My children are students in the Syosset school district. There's definitely a large vocal community who have been attending board meetings who are resistant to the change stating "once a Brave, always a Brave," which I know was touched on earlier in the segment. Now they're pushing to make the name Brave as opposed to plural, Brave. I was just curious what their thoughts are on that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Melissa. You touched on that I think a little bit differently, Dave, unless I misheard it, that keeping the name Braves, but saying, oh, it refers to Home of the Brave. She's saying just change it to Brave to refer to Home of the Brave to a characteristic rather than a group of people. What do you think?

John Kane: The problem with that is-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: John [unintelligible 00:18:49].

John Kane: That's okay. The problem is that there's still a tendency to refer to the individual students as Braves. Like I said, when Fonda-Fultonville was trying do this, they were still going to use Brave, or pluralize the adjective used in the National Anthem, which didn't make sense. Frankly, both us as a council and NYSED rejected that whole idea.

The whole reason for doing this is to clean the slate. If you're a school that has been calling yourselves the Warriors for 60 years, and now you're going to try to say, "We're going to put a spartan in there now instead of a native image," the problem is that you've been doing this thing for decades, and that word is still going to evoke the same imagery.

Even with this school, if you think you're just going to drop the S on the name and that somehow that evoking of the image is going to change, that's where most of us have a problem. If you're going to do that, you're already going to go through the expense that many of these schools are complaining about. You're going to change your logo or you're going to change the name just ever so slightly, you're still going to paint your gym floor over. You're going to change your uniform.

You're going to do all these things, so why not just, as they say, pull the bandaid off and get rid of it completely and do something that is not going to be historically associated with what I still think is a fairly racist practice? The idea of utilizing a native people for the amusement and entertainment of a school district.

Brian Lehrer: Do I understand correctly that you started this current, I guess, path to the New York State Board of Regents deciding that all public schools have to change their team names if they're native related because you sued your former high school in 2020?

John Kane: I didn't sue. I actually went to the board meeting, and I did a formal request that Cambridge Central School stopped calling themselves The Indians. I graduated from Cambridge back in 1978. My sister and I were probably the first native people to graduate from that school. I put it out there.

I had already been very much involved in many of these school debates across the country. It's one of the things that I do. I started the conversation back in 2020. By the end of that school year, so June of 2021, the school board did vote to retire the mascot, but then two people who would run solely on a pro-mascot platform got elected onto the school board. They reversed the decision. They offered no explanation for the reversal other than the fact that these two guys got elected and they were going to interpret that as some public referendum.

The reasons for retiring it were clear. The president, Neil Gifford, the president of the school board at the time, gave a long list of everything from every nation that has called for this removal, every child development expert, every child development association and psychological association, including the New York State Association of School Psychologists, calling for an end to this.

They gave this whole long list, but then when they reversed it, they gave no explanation. That enabled five families that I worked with in Cambridge to file a 310 petition with the New York State Education Department calling for the NYSED to force the school back to its retirement of the mascot due to what they called an arbitrary and capricious ruling of the board and an abuse of their discretionary authority. Dr. Rosa, the commissioner, she agreed with those families. She issued her ruling. Cambridge then sued and then lost.

I think between the laws that have been passed since Richard Mills called for this, a former commissioner 20 years ago, things like the Dignity for All Students Act and even the Board of Regents push for diversity equity inclusion programs in schools, I think the current NYSED administration basically felt they had not just the right to tell one school, but they had the right and the power and authority to tell all schools that they need to stop this practice.

Brian Lehrer: Among those pushing back is the Nassau County Executive, Republican Bruce Blakeman, who told Good Day New York on Channel 5 that he doesn't know any Native Americans who are "pushing this.' Here's just a couple of seconds more of County Exec. Blakeman.

County Executive Republican Bruce Blakeman: I think it portrays Native Americans as being courageous and brave, good athletes.

Brian Lehrer: We've been all over that argument in this conversation already. Do you find that support for changing the names or digging in against the change is falling along political lines of Democrats or Republicans, or do you see it as more politically nuanced than that?

John Kane: Everything in the United States has become a partisan divide for some reason. This isn't a political issue.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about tribes, right? That's the tribes in America today.

John Kane: Yes, exactly. When you say tribes, I agree with you in the most derogatory sense about tribalism, which I reject as a tag for us, but I think it's fine for them.

Brian Lehrer: No, I'm saying nations referring to you, but go ahead.

John Kane: Yes, no, and I realized that, and I appreciate that. No, I think the fact that the right has tried to turn this into some campaign for the woke liberal elite Democrats pushing their agenda. This was not a political issue. In fact, I avoided even trying to press this issue with the state legislature, and certainly with the governor, who, frankly, Native people have some major issues with. We don't exactly consider her the most Native-friendly governor. In fact, most of us consider her among the worst governors that we've had to interact with.

Look, we did not want this to be a political issue, and that's why using an apolitical agency like NYSED-- Most of the administration of NYSED, they're not even appointed by the current governor. For any of these politicians to try to make this a cancel culture or woke issue, look, this was always led as a push by Native people. The fact that the current Commissioner assembled this Indigenous Advisory Council is,` to me, her effort to try to keep us as a part of the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: NYSED, New York State Education Department just for those who didn't get the acronym. Before you go, I'm just curious how you feel about any offensiveness or not of place names relative to team names. On Long Island, where some of the political action is here that we've been discussing, there's a concentration of native names, Massapequa, Center of the Resistance. As I believe just an Anglicization of [unintelligible 00:26:00] the native name for the area, and Mineola was shortened from the native Miniolagamika and Sachem and Montauk. We could go on and on and all over the state and all over the country.

Is that a topic of conversation even for you in the context of naming for respect in full humanity, or it's not the same thing?

John Kane: Here's why it's not the same thing, because place names oftentimes are derived, even though they've been bastardized-- They bastardized the native languages that may have always referred to those places by a certain name, but place names are not the same thing as what I consider the identity theft that mascots are because you literally have students claiming to be and play Indian essentially. There's a little bit of a difference because it doesn't involve people claiming the identity.

Now I will say we have pushed back on place names that have some offensive references to them, like anything that had the word squaw in it. We had a debate out here in the city of Buffalo from an area that was called Squaw Island. We've seen the Interior Secretary has removed every name that had the word squaw in the name for any federally-controlled land and landmarks.

There is a place that we do raise an issue with place names, but we haven't gone after school names or place names or landmark names because that's not the same level of identity claiming that we see with the mascot issue.

Brian Lehrer: John Kane, Native activist, Mohawk, member of the New York State Indigenous Mascot Advisory Council and host of the shows Let's Talk Native and Resistance Radio with John Kane. Thanks for coming on with us today. I really appreciate it.

John Kane: Thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate it.

 

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