Small-town School District Changes Their Mascot After Much Debate

by Maya Meade

Since 1956, The Talawanda School District in Oxford, Ohio, has been home to the Talawanda Braves. The image of the mascot was originally a man with bright red skin that wore an earring and feathers. Over time, adjustments were made to the image as progress as a community and nation took place.

In 2010, the Oxford Citizens for Peace and Justice (OCPJ), which serves to educate and act locally to make Oxford a peaceful place through social, economic, and environmental justice, recognized a need to address an issue of racial injustice facing the community.

The OCPJ asked that the Talawanda school board, and educators in general, consider the ramifications that the Braves name and image has on the students in the district. The petition they wrote was signed by 300 members of the Talawanda district.

According to the Oxford Citizens for Peace and Justice website, “In 2010 the board chose not to study the issue further stating, ‘the majority of the citizens in the Talawanda School District agree that the Braves mascot is not offensive and they favor its continued use.’”

In recent years, the use of Native American caricatures as sports mascots has seen an increase in scrutiny. For decades, American sports culture has relied on stereotypical and racist depictions of Native Americans with reddened skin wearing headdresses and carrying spears. Some of the most

famous teams to use racist mascots includes the former Cleveland Indians and the former Washington Redskins, both teams which only announced their plans to change names in the last year.

The contentious debate surrounding these mascots can be boiled down to whether using Native Americans as mascots is honorable or offensive. According to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the intolerance and harm that is encouraged by these mascots, logos and symbols have consequences for Native people.

“Derogatory ‘Indian’ sports mascots have serious psychological, social and cultural consequences for Native Americans, especially Native youth,” says the NCAI website. “Most concerning in considering negative stereotypes of Native people, are the alarmingly high rates of hate crimes... According to Department of Justice Analysis, ‘American Indians are more likely than people of other races to experience violence at the hands of someone of a different race.’”

Michael Crowder, who served on the Talawanda school board for 12 years, remembers the first time the mascot was really addressed in 2010.

“This issue came up several times during the 12 years I was on the board,” he says. “There was a group of students that were really pushing to get rid of the mascot, the Braves mascot, particularly the warrior head. And there was a large number of students that wanted to keep it. Then there were community members on both sides of the issue, too.”

Crowder was the deciding vote on the decision to officially change the mascot when the issue resurfaced during the 2018-2019 academic school year.

The divisiveness of the topic never changed. From that first time he heard members of the community speak in 2010 to the last, the community was polarized. Crowder says that in 2019, the community was split down the middle. Individuals in the Talawanda and Oxford community spoke at a board meeting in 2018 in which people within the local communities and from out of the state openly discussed their concerns about the change of the mascot to the school board. Dalton Norris, who graduated from the Talawanda School District in 2020, says at the time he felt hurt by the decision to change the mascot.

“I was very closed minded and my background thinking was that they were throwing away a rich tradition that my entire family had built,” he says. “The mascot meant so much to me. My entire family had grown up in the Oxford community. Being a part of the Talawanda Braves was all I ever knew.”

This was a running theme among the comments that school board members heard at their meetings. But other students and Oxford citizens like Ella Cope, who graduated with Norris, felt differently.

“I think that, while some would argue that all mascots are symbolic, the tokenization of Native Americans is anything but,” Cope says. “The dehumanization that occurs when diverse, rich cultures of people are reduced to a caricature to then be used by [mainly] white people has real impacts on the way those people are treated in society.”

Both the viewpoints of students like Norris and Cope were taken into serious consideration by the school board that year.

“I knew the day of the election of the new school board that I was going to be the deciding vote,” Crowder says. “What ended up swaying me in my vote was two things. One is that I knew there were middle school students who were Native Americans that were hurt by this. The reasons for why they were hurt, I didn’t care, but they were hurt that we were using a warrior head and Braves as a mascot for sports.”

The second reason that Crowder gives for voting to change the mascot is that he knew early on in 2019 that he was not going to run for school board again and he didn’t want the future board to have to deal with it again. The issue of Native American mascots took a toll on the Oxford community. Crowder knew that if he didn’t vote the way that he did, then the issue would have come up again. Crowder was the third vote out of five to vote in favor of changing the mascot from the Braves, used as a noun, to the Talawanda Brave, an adjective, and removing the Native American head from all Talawanda merchandise that had not yet been made.

The Talawanda School Board and many professional sports teams such as the former Arkansas State University Indians, who changed their mascot to the Red Wolves in 2008, have opened their eyes to the way that these mascots are affecting Native Americans. According to the American Psychological Association, American Indian mascots have a negative effect on all students. They are especially impactful for students who have had little or no experiences and contact with Indigenous peoples. These mascots “[establish] an unwelcome and often times hostile learning environment for American Indian students that affirms negative images/stereotypes that are promoted in mainstream society.”

The decision made by the Talawanda School Board was a catalyst of change for local districts nearby and was an educational experience for the members of the community that welcomed the change and listened to the concerns of others. As of August of 2020, there are 79 Ohio school districts that use Native American names and mascots, and only 13 of those districts are considering changing them. Those in favor of the mascot change hope that the Talawanda Brave have set the example and plan to continue to use their strength as a community to bring justice to issues facing Oxford.

“The very least we can do, as people who profit from the settler-colonial state which continues to oppress Native people,” Cope says, “Is to acknowledge our true history and give their cultures utmost respect.”