Native American symbols and stereotypes, like the Land o' Lakes maiden or Aunt Jemima, have always raised alarms. For years Native Americans have worked to get professional sports teams to retire offensive names and mascots. The Washington "Redskins" — a team with not only an offensive mascot but one whose name was actually a racist epithet — still exemplifies the resistance to change from white sports fans.
In 2005 the NCAA abandoned almost all Native American college sports mascots. States have come around, too. Maine, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have all banned them in the last few years. Connecticut doesn't ban indigenous mascots outright but denies funds from the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan [casino] Fund if a school uses them.
A state Commission is now working on a redesign of the Massachusetts flag and seal, the fruits of 34 years of prodding by former state Representative Byron Rushing. Along with this legislation, several other bills to address historical wrongs to Native American people are moving through the Legislature. One of them is a bill to ban Native American mascots and names on school sports teams. It's a bill that has been repeatedly filed but killed on Beacon Hill.
Mascot bans got more personal for Dartmouth residents in 2019 when three residents (I was one of them) asked the School Committee to simply hold a public discussion on the Dartmouth "Indian" mascot. With surprising speed the Committee voted 3-2 to reject the idea. But with George Floyd's murder, a short-lived national moment forced the Committee to confront this and other racial issues, so a "Diversity Subcommittee" was formed — a casket in which all such issues were to be unceremoniously buried.
Subcommittee members, though they tried hard to address the mascot as well as other diversity issues, never really got much support from the greater School Committee. Shannon Jenkins, the only member of the Committee still serving who voted in support of a public hearing in 2019, has drawn particular animus from a group of Tea Party Republicans called "Defend Dartmouth" which also includes some of the Aquinnah leadership and MAGA Republicans permitted to speak for it.
Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Virtually every federally- or state-recognized tribe but one supports banning Native American mascots. These include the Chappaquiddick Wampanoag; Mashpee Wampanoag; Pocasset Wampanoag; Herring Pond Wampanoag; Massachuset-Ponkapog; the Nipmuc Nation. Indigenous rights groups like the National Congress of American Indians; United American Indians of New England; the North American Indian Center of Boston; and hundreds of indigenous rights organizations throughout the country support such bans. You can find tribal statements in favor of a Massachusetts ban on the website of MA Indigenous Legislative Agenda.
But when it comes to mascots, the leadership of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) is at odds with all of them.
In 2021 Chairwoman Cheryl Andrews-Maltais of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) registered formal notice to both the Town of Dartmouth and its School Committee that she was displeased with a "lack of consultation and coordination regarding the name and imagery" used by the school system and that she supported the mascot. The Chairwoman seemed less concerned about how indigenous people were portrayed in district curriculum than with her family's claims on the logo.
The chairwoman's brother, Clyde Andrews, maintains that he designed the current logo in 1974. It would be interesting to see Andrews's 50 year-old sketch, but the Dartmouth "Indian" used today is virtually identical to the one Dartmouth College retired (also in 1974) after finally bowing to Native American demands. Incidentally, the DHS mascot is not the only sports element the High School took from the College. The Dartmouth letter "D," the moniker "Big Green," and the fight song are all still used by Dartmouth College.
George Marcotte, a MAGA Republican who appears regularly on WBSM, created a group called "Defend Dartmouth" to attack the School Committee, academics, liberals, and members of the community he calls "woke" elitists and "outsiders." One of his group's talking points is that "canceling" the mascot (to use his MAGA terminology) will somehow erase Native American history. Another is that no one opposed to the mascot could possibly be from Dartmouth or be a tribal member. At the March 2nd public hearings Marcotte's group threatened Committee members with recall and promised election challenges.
One of these challengers is already on the Town ballot and she is targeting two Committee members who already support the mascot. Lynne Turner, a former Arizona teacher, is running on an anti-masking, anti-VAX, and a thinly-veiled anti- "Critical Race Theory" platform.
"Critical Race Theory" is a post-graduate research methodology that has nothing to do with teaching history in public schools. Nevertheless, it has become a MAGA battle-cry in 35 Red states where constitutionally questionable laws now attempt to limit speech, control student thought, and decree that history happened as red state legislators say it did. Their goal is the Disneyfication of American history: the whitewashing and muting of America's sordid history with indigenous and enslaved people.
Whether Dartmouth residents know it or not, the mascot issue is just the beginning of their troubles with Bristol County Republicans as more candidates like Turner are unleashed on local schools. Nor is the mascot vote likely to disband the “Defend Dartmouth” group as they search for new enemies and new campaigns. But the mascot issue has certainly revealed the depths of their hostility toward racial justice.
Another "defender" of the mascot is Christopher Pereira, Tea Party Republican, former School Committee member, and informal advisor to the Aquinnah, whose name appears on some tribal correspondence. Pereira runs Friends of Dartmouth Memorial Stadium Inc. and the Dartmouth Indians Football Alumni Club, which lobbied for a $2 million football stadium renovation. In 2020 Pereira approached honorary Trump campaign Chair Tom Hodgson to sponsor an event in Dartmouth.
None of these efforts would be successful were it not for the collaboration of several equally Trumpian members of the Aquinnah. These include: Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais' sister Naomi Carney, a New Bedford City Councilwoman who works for far-right Sheriff Tom Hodgson; her nephew Sean Carney, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran for City Council himself; and twice unsuccessful Republican candidate for Bristol and Norfolk Senate, Jacob Ventura, who ran on an anti-immigration platform.
This group of MAGA Republicans inside and outside the Aquinnah leadership portray themselves as the only legitimate voices on the mascot. Marcotte and Pereira attack liberals and academics as "outsiders" (channeling the phrase "outside agitator" used throughout the South during the Sixties). Several of the Aquinnah leadership insist upon their exclusive voice as designers of the mascot and as members of a federally-recognized tribe. At a March 22nd School Committee meeting, even after listening to tribal members contradict him two weeks earlier, Ventura still maintained that no other tribal groups oppose the mascot.
In a letter of October 28, 2019 to the School Committee, Ventura formally introduced himself as a member of "the federally recognized Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) base[d] on Martha's Vineyard, but representing Wampanoag Nation across the SouthCoast, Cape and Islands for hundreds of years." This was a bold statement: that the Aquinnah represent the entire Wampanoag Nation.
But the Wampanoag Nation is not the only indigenous nation in Massachusetts and it includes numerous tribes, not just the Aquinnah. Even voices within the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah are anything but monolithic. Kisha James, a member of the Aquinnah who supports statewide legislation to ban mascots, told the Boston Globe last Fall that the word "mascot is just another word for pet." She added, "It solidifies this idea that we're not people. We're costumes, we're characters forever stuck in the past." Brad Lopes, program director of the Aquinnah Cultural Center, created a change.org petition disputing Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais' efforts to promote the Dartmouth mascot "as the official position of our Nation."
Nevertheless, majorities in the School Committee and Select Board have chosen to hear what they want to hear — and who they want to hear it from.
At a January 24th School Committee meeting this year member Chris Oliver asked fellow members to "reaffirm" the Indian and to begin discussions with [only] the Aquinnah. Fellow Committee member John Nunes went a step further, demanding that the whole issue be "put to bed" with an immediate vote, right then, right there.
A Town preference for hearing from, and dealing only with, the Aquinnah was echoed in a November 1st, 2021 School Committee meeting at which Superintendent Bonnie Gifford discussed a "reset" with the tribe in a private conversation with the Chairwoman and invited her to create a "framework on how to proceed." At the same Committee meeting then-Chair Kathleen Amaral discussed her private conversations with Jacob Ventura which avoided public scrutiny: "where his views weren't aligned with what he had been quoted, you know, so it sort of, like, you know, it creates this unnecessary drama and, you know, the streamlined communication and what we have is very open."
At a February 7th Dartmouth Select Board meeting Selectman and MAGA Republican John Haran, who told reporters he had been approached by "a tribal member," proposed a resolution to hold a non-binding referendum on the mascot. In calling the vote Chair Shawn McDonald acknowledged that the symbol was based on a generic Eastern Woodland Indian and not any particular tribe. But without hesitation the Board agreed to put a matter of civil rights and human dignity on the April 5th town ballot for a white majority to decide. And while doing so most of the Selectmen sang the praises of inking an agreement with only the Aquinnah.
Both Haran and Ventura boast that the mascot referendum was their handiwork. On March 7th Ventura and twenty other Aquinnah alumnae of Dartmouth High wrote to the School Committee demanding that "the issues related to the Indians name and symbol are local, special and unique to Dartmouth. These issues should ultimately be resolved by Dartmouth's residents and alumni."
Although “Indian” representation is clearly an issue of concern to other tribes and nations, the Aquinnah members' letter trivialized the harms of cultural appropriation, handing off the issue to a white Republican Selectman as a "local matter" to be decided by voters who are 91% white.
The mascot issue will soon come to an untimely halt after having been swept under the rug for the last three years. On March 8th the Dartmouth School Committee got its first and possibly last chance to hear from members of the Mashpee, Pocasset, and Aquinnah who oppose the Dartmouth mascot. On March 22nd the Committee heard from members of the public. And on April 5th town voters will be asked to vote in a non-binding referendum on a complex issue with barely any time to think about it.
On March 26th many of these strange bedfellows appeared together in a photo-op designed to paint a picture of the Town's close relationship to the Aquinnah. Present at a COVID/PPE distribution event not announced to the public were: John Haran, John Nunes, and Chris Oliver; several "Defend Dartmouth" members including George Marcotte, Shelly Zhang, and Chris Pereira; and from the Aquinnah Clyde Andrews and Katie Marden.
For now the MassGOP and MARA (Massachusetts Republican Assembly aka Tea Party) seem to have smothered a local attempt to right a long-festering racial wrong. Although "Defend Dartmouth" is a well-oiled campaign with MassGOP fingerprints all over it, there is plenty of blame to go around — including the more than 80% of us who routinely skip town elections, fail to look deeper into issues, or never bother to ask hard questions of Town candidates.