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12/22/2019 11:00 PMAt Valley Regional High School, the former Warriors’ logo of a Native American profile has been replaced with a letter “V”-based logo. Still, a call to remove the Warriors name, as well as the prominent vestiges of the former logo, are being met with a call by some to return the discontinued logo to the schools’ football helmets.
Dueling petitions about the matter can be found on change.org—”Valley Regional High School’s Racist Mascot” and “Get The Warrior head back on Valley football helmets.”
Several other school districts, as well as high schools and professional sports teams throughout the country, are grappling with similar issues.
The change.org petition requesting the removal of the warriors mascot, started by VRHS alum Melina Roise and Gabriel Leger, states, “Valley Regional High School’s mascot and athletics logo reductively stereotypes diverse Native American society as a piece of disrespectfully homogenizing imagery. The ‘warrior head’ icon and the team name ‘Warriors’ are both harmful representations of indigenous peoples and local heritage.”
According to Love Richards, a tribal council member of the Nipmuch Nation in Massachusetts, “mascotting” an ethnic group has a negative connotation.
In a 2016 memo about the issue, he wrote, “There is a reason no other ethnic group is mascotted in the degree Native Americans are. Mascotting another group of people with out their permission isn’t about love, respect, and honor, it’s about privilege and power.”
He added, “The misrepresentation of Native Americans has been an issue that the United States has struggled with for some time. The impact of stereotypes of any social identity of a group has been proven to cause mental health effects such as low self-esteem among Native Americans and negative attitudes toward Native Americans among non-Native Americans.”
The former Valley logo, which still greets visitors in places as prominent as the front entry and the gymnasium floor, is a backward-facing duplicate of the widely protested Washington NFL team logo.
The removal petition calls on Region 4 to “halt Valley Regional High School’s racism. Students and alumni, such as myself, seek a more adequate education about and celebration of indigenous heritage especially on an immediately local level. It is time to heed the words of the activists who have spoken out against the usage of this imagery across our nation, as both members and allies of the populations it affects.”
The petition to keep the warrior mascot, which was started by a user with the handle “valley students,” states: “The Valley Warriors have played football in Deep River for 52 years. The support of the warrior head has been on tens of thousands dedicated football players and fans. The Warrior head is not only a logo for Valley football, but it demonstrates the thousands of hours of hard work that our coaches and athletes have put into Valley football’s program. It is extremely offensive to a vast majority of our current athletes, coaches, along with alumni. The warrior head symbolizes strength, integrity, and perseverance, rather than a racist or disrespectful [sic].”
Roise and Leger are proposing that in lieu of the warriors mascot, instead, they would like a logo designed by the student body that shows specific relevance, in some way, to the Connecticut River valley towns of Chester, Deep River, and Essex.
“We are hoping that maybe the VRHS could have some kind of an art contest, within the school, to come up with a more appropriate, positive mascot,” said Roise, who graduated VRHS in 2017.
“If nothing else, we would like to have a mascot that is original, not one that is an exact replica of another logo,” said Leger, who graduated VRHS in 2018. “The students can come up with a replacement themselves and choose for themselves how they want to be represented. That’s how it should be.”
He added, “The current mascot reflects poorly on Native Americans and the remaining tribes in the United States in which some of the worst poverty in the U.S. exists. To continue to use this logo is disrespectful to Native Americans and the imagery is inappropriate.”
Leger and Roise hope bringing this issue to the forefront will create a conversation in the community and bring awareness to the issue. In addition, they hope to insight some sort of change in the very near future.
“The sooner this mascot is changed the better,” said Leger.
“We want it replaced with a quality mascot and logo that everyone can agree on,” added Roise.
While the district was already moving toward elimination of the Native American imagery accompanying the Warriors, district officials said the petitions will be addressed.
“The Regional District 4 Board of Education is committed to developing a process that will engage all stakeholders in the communities we serve to participate in a dialogue about this subject,” said Superintendent of Schools Brian White. “The central office administration will collaborate with the Regional District 4 Board of Education on how to best facilitate this process at an upcoming board of education meeting.”
“This is a complicated community issue,” said Region 4 Board of Education Chairman Kate Sandmann. “It is an opportunity to open up the dialogue about this subject.”