The Savage Mascot
As the Arkansas River descends from its birthplace in the Rockies to the place in Colorado’s Southeastern corner where it exits the state, it flows through a small agricultural town named Lamar. Despite the ready source of water, the landscape remains arid amid a years-long drought without foreseeable end. Dust often blankets the town’s streets, brought in upon tall storms that roll over the Great Plains with modern echoes of the Dust Bowl—as if some giant invisible broom were reaching down from heaven to sweep up the chaff, obscuring the sun and choking the air. The dust lands on everything, penetrates everything, preserving, embalming. Lamar doesn’t grow and it rarely changes.
Eleven years have passed since I lived there. Many church marquees still bear the same words they had back then. Their writers have become the accidental prophets of a city in decline. The bus plant that fueled Lamar’s years of plenty went under around the time I started high school, and its ghost still haunts the town’s borders. Though the high school itself has added some improvements—new street lights, new benches near the front doors—the towering silhouette of the face of the savage mascot remains the timeless purveyor of the school's immutability.
The stern image of the savage is one that pervades Lamar. Statues of him guard the street that bears his name—the iron sentinels of a century-long tradition. Murals cover school walls and hang in local businesses, erected in public parks, etched into the sides of historic structures. During sports seasons, the savage makes his appearance in storefront windows along Main Street, where his fury is sure to be seen from each visiting team’s bus windows. Athletes sport his name on their jerseys, hoping they might be imbued by the fierce and persistent pride they say comes from savage spirit.
Savage spirit. I had hoped for it once too, during my teenage years. I had tried to summon it from the earth the way a windmill summons water, like a kind of magic I could call forth if need arose.
And when I was much younger than that, I would look at the image of the mascot pictured in headdress and I would see my father’s face. Dad was a high school math teacher and football coach—and for me, the actualization of everything I wanted to be one day. Because of his job, I became familiar with the intricacies of the high school much sooner than most of my peers. I knew my way around the locker rooms before I reached kindergarten. I knew the weight room, the classrooms, the gymnasium with the arrow painted on its floor. I would walk through hallway walls that bore years of painted murals dedicated to the savage, and sometimes I’d linger, standing before them in awe and fear and wonder. These were the shrines dedicated to the most important figure in my pantheon of childhood deities. The savage ruled. And under his great power reigned the demigods, the Savage’s ambassadors—the players who bore his likeness on their jerseys Friday nights during autumn. Though under stadium lights their helmets and shoulder pads seemed to glow from their divinity, it was their humanity that tantalized me with the possibility that perhaps I might share in the magic someday—that I might become, like them, immortal. And I would. My name, like so many names before, would get etched into newspapers and yearbooks before I graduated, preserving me in the annals of time.
Lamar High School’s yearbook is called the Chieftain and I served one year as its editor-in-chief. The very first mention of the savage mascot appeared in its pages, as far was we know, in 1910. Town rumor suggests the mascot was being used as early as 1898, however, less than ten years after Wounded Knee Massacre.
The town of Lamar became incorporated just prior, in 1886. If we were to go back in time to that place, we’d likely be surprised to find a significantly different landscape than the one that exists now. The dusty banks of the Arkansas River were then covered in thick riparian forests. Huge cottonwoods shaded its waters, rumored to be as wide around as redwoods. The Spanish called this area “La Casa de Palo,” or, “The House of Wood,” and under the forest’s protection, many Native American Plains tribes like the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, were known to camp during travel or trade along the Santa Fe Trail. Today, few of those cottonwoods still remain as farming practices and land disputes made water scarce, as the need for lumber grew, and as foreign invasive species of plants, like the tamarisk, began dominating the banks of the Arkansas.
When the town did form, it formed quickly. Promoters brought in settlers enticed by the promise of free land, and after stealing an entire railway station from a neighboring ranch, the community began its boom. At the outset, town fathers had a few quick decisions to make—the first and perhaps most important being the town’s name. In an attempt to draw attention to the infant community and to gain quick support, they named their settlement after the then-Secretary of the Interior, hoping the man might be flattered enough to make the town the home of the government land office. That man’s name was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar the second, (clearly not a muggle). He served as an official in the Confederate States of America, and then as a member of the House of Representatives who fiercely opposed Reconstruction, did not view African-American men fit to vote, and adamantly promoted, in his words, "the supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” Though all-white, the burgeoning settlement along the banks of the Arkansas River must have fallen beneath his gaze. The town fathers failed to catch Lamar’s attention, but the name stuck, and the town grew anyway. Within two years, they had homes, businesses, and then, a school.
Insofar as I’m able to find right now, we have no formal record detailing what exact ideas were discussed by those who chose the savage mascot to represent the sports teams of Lamar. Town rumor states that a debate ensued between those who favored the Lamar Savages, or those who want to be named the Lamar Snow Geese. Each spring brought flocks of snow geese to the area on their northern migrations, so it seemed like a logical fit. And if this is true, it also seems safe to assume that the name savage found its way onto the table because those present were aware of the significance of Cheyenne and Arapaho history in the area. And that history wasn’t pretty.
These school officials likely knew about the Colorado Wars, which happened twenty years prior, as lands that were promised the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes in the Fort Lamarie Treaty were encroached upon by settlers looking for gold in the Rocky Mountains. They had probably heard of the tribes’ retaliation while trying to defend their lands—the battles, the raids, the scalpings. I can only imagine that as the debate between savage and snow goose raged, it became increasingly clear to them which of the two figures would most intimidate their athletic opponents. Knowing the common attitude at that time that white settlers held for American Indigenous peoples, I doubt they considered the possibility of any future repercussions. People in the highest offices of the land were calling for the removal of all Indigenous people. In a lecture in 1886—the very same year Lamar was incorporated—future president Theodore Roosevelt said in a public speech: “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” He went on to say and confess throughout his presidency his belief that Native Americans would vanish under white pressure. And by the time of the mascot debate in Lamar, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes had been relocated to unfamiliar lands in Oklahoma. As far as the townsfolk of Lamar were concerned, all the savages were gone.
We must also assume, if these early settlers had even the slightest idea of their local history, that they’d also heard of another famous slaughter—one that happened only forty miles north of the town's borders. I can’t help but assume they’d heard of the Sand Creek Massacre, in which the Colorado Militia attacked and destroyed a Cheyenne and Arapaho village, whose chief, a peacemaker named Black Kettle, had been promised sanctuary in exchange for their surrender. He flew an American flag overhead as the militia bent down on the encampment. It was under this flag that the Colorado Militia slaughtered up to 160 people, mostly women and children, and mutilated their bodies, taking their genitals home as war trophies. All that begs an important question first put forth by Kit Carson: “You call such soldiers Christians, do you? And Indians savages?” Perhaps, indeed, the savages still reside in Lamar today.
A homecoming parade float. Picture first used here.
Since then, generations of students have grown up with a definition of the word “savage” that’s altogether different from the meaning it carries across the rest of the country. Countless white children celebrate their heritage each year by wearing headdresses, by performing their best imitations of snake dances, by applying war paint and chanting war cries. For a while in the 80’s, students used a life-size mascot costume of a native warrior with exaggerated features, whom they called, “Chief Ugh Lee."
But for those growing up in Lamar today, so far removed from the atrocities of the past, as well as the ongoing friction of the present moment outside the community’s cultural bubble, it’s difficult to see the savage in any other way than as how I saw it, as a child—as a noble deity, fiercely defending those people and lands it holds dear. The headdress, the tomahawks—all of it belongs as much to the town as anyone else, they believe. Even stolen artifacts may start to feel indigenous after enough generations have passed. Still, the tokenism that began with Lamar’s forefathers endures, and no matter whether we're killing, or enslaving, or tokenizing, we are first required to do one thing: to take what is a living, breathing, soulful human, and reduce that human to a useable object.
It is for this reason, and others that I will now lay out, that I’m calling on my hometown to rethink my beloved home mascot. It’s time to change it.
My grandfather is about as true a cowboy as they come. Most ranchers in Southeast Colorado know this, because they likely know him by name. He’s run cattle on the land acquired by his father after the Land Rush since that man’s passing, when Grandpa was twelve. He broke wild stallions for money as a teenager. I once witnessed him revive a suffocated cow by jumping on its chest and blowing in its mouth. Once, when we were surprised by a tornado while fixing fence, we raced the storm not back to the house, but to save a mama cow that had been temporarily paralyzed from hip-lock while giving birth. He possesses a kind of kinship with the earth and with his animals that honestly seems supernatural at times. He’s the quintessence of the Western cowboy prototype, and as such, upholds an unspoken tradition in our family: Grandpa alone gets to wear an actual cowboy hat. No one else does. His progeny know that the trappings of a cowboy are things that must be earned by being a cowboy, and Grandpa not only earned them, but set the bar pretty high for the rest of us. He and Dad still sometimes talk about the Urban Cowboy trend that swept the country during the 1980’s—when city folk began to dress in Western attire without ever having seen a real-life cow or dug a real-life post hole in their lives. He hated it. He, like so many people who I grew up with, felt betrayed by the commercialization of their lifestyle. They’d grumble during Cowboy/Cowgirl dress-up day during homecoming week. I can only imagine them visiting Nashville and walking down Broadway, gawking at the tourists’ newly-purchased cowboy hats that were made to look worn-in, as if they had in fact suffered the frontier’s hardships.
“It’s like waving around a diploma without any of the education,” Grandpa might say. And he’s right. All that frustration is legitimate. The city folk sporting the worn-down boots, the spurs, the leathers, the hat—most of them never actually earned the right to wear any of it, nor are they aware of the usefulness or the traditions of such things.
What those city folks are doing—taking pieces of Western ranching culture without earning it—has a name: cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation happens any time members of a dominant culture adopt elements of a minority culture, re-contextualizing them for their own symbolic use or value. Those of us in Lamar can often see this happening plainly with the appropriation of our culture, but it may be hard to face that the people of Lamar have also been demonstrating the cultural appropriation of many elements of Cheyenne and Arapaho culture for the last century. We’ve taken symbols that weren’t ours, that we didn’t earn, and re-contextualized them to use for our own purposes. But unlike Western culture, we crafted the savage persona from people we also dehumanized, slaughtered, and stole land from. We attempted to destroy Native American culture and substitute our own in its place while choosing those pieces we felt inclined to use. As such, this becomes not simply a matter of cultural appropriation—though it’s no less than that. Our use of the savage mascot carries with it echoes of racial genocide, white supremacy, and colonialism.
As is the case with any attempt to create racial equity within the United States, this issue isn’t going to be an easy fix. I’m advocating to change the savage mascot, yes—but a deeper and perhaps more naive hope I have is for a change in the way we consider and prioritize the needs and struggles of those we’ve labeled “other.” I’ve heard proud Lamar residents claim that rather than appropriate Native American culture, our use of the savage mascot actually honors and supports said culture, claiming that the mascot has given the Lamar people a special concern for Native American peoples. First, this claim fails to recognize that “Native American culture” doesn’t actually exist. It’s not a monolith. Several very different people groups inhabited the North American continent at the time of European colonization, each with its own unique cultural practices. My first question to those claiming the savage “honors Native American culture” is: which Native American culture does it honor, and would those people agree with your assessment?
But also, if Lamar’s intention is to honor and support what it’s calling Native American culture, why aren’t its citizens flocking to Standing Rock to aid the Native communities there? Why aren’t we engaged in their continued struggles for equity, especially for voting rights and against discriminatory policing? Why aren’t all those who claim Native American ancestry actually active members of their tribes, promoting communication about the mascot? How many Lamar residents who called themselves savages growing up know which tribes inhabited the lands that would come to be called Southeast Colorado, and can accurately recount their history, and ours? Why isn’t there more education in schools toward this end? Throughout my time in Lamar, I’ve often heard claims that the mascot honors Native American peoples, but I’ve witnessed little to no action that actually backs those claims up. I’m not arguing that you should back those claims up, but rather, that those claims themselves are baseless. If we truly wish to honor the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who once took shade under the forests we felled to build our community, we can start by choosing a mascot that doesn’t carry racial animus toward the very people we claim to be honoring.
Having grown up in Lamar, and having been so invested in its community, I feel like I understand its people. The High Plains aren’t gracious. The land can be volatile. It has, in its own way, shaped us into a strong-hearted and resilient people—perhaps not unlike how it shaped those who called the land home centuries before we did. The truth is, we do share a great deal in common with the people whose image we’ve caricaturized, because the Great Plains have a way of shaping its inhabitants in like manner. Could it be possible that this reality may be a jumping off point that we might use to become radically empathetic and proactive? I understand that when government officials swoop in and attempt to tell us how to run things and what things need to change, we won’t listen. I’m not telling you to listen. I’m not telling you to be reactionary to the whims of government officials. I’m not asking you to cave in to becoming politically correct for its own sake. I’m asking you to be active agents of positive change, to initiate a movement, to begin a trajectory toward doing the right thing. I confess that we are a people slow to change, but we are not a people without compassion. We are a people who value rich tradition, but let us not forget that while tradition forms us, we also form it—indeed without humans, tradition wouldn’t exist at all. Let us do right by Cheyenne and Arapaho people, not because someone told us to do it, but because it’s what’s right. We are a people of strong conviction, a people of integrity. Let us also be a people who recognize our faults. We have taken Native American cultural artifacts to use for our own purposes. It’s time we returned them to their rightful owners.
Let’s Discuss
In my discussions with Lamar folks about the savage, I hear a few common arguments about why the town should keep the mascot. I’ll address those here. If there’s something I didn’t cover that you’d like to add, please do so in the comments section.
1. We don’t mean anything negative/derogatory by the savage mascot.
I know, and I believe you. Having grown up in Lamar myself, and having worn the colors on my jersey every week, I believe that the image of the Savage is held in highest esteem, and that it is no one’s intention that the mascot be a source of pain for anyone else. But lest we forget what the road to Hell was paved with, we might do well to pause and listen to the perspectives of those who say they’re hurting.
Anyone who’s spent time in a significant relationship might have learned the difference between intent and impact. A husband may not intend to wound his wife when he makes a thoughtless comment, but the impact of that comment still may wound her, and his good intentions don’t negate the reality of her pain. When a child bites another child, we usually don’t accept “I didn’t mean to!” as a helpful excuse because we’ve still got another child crying from the marks on their skin. My grandpa had a good colloquialism for this reality too: “You may not have meant to shit your pants, but that don’t change the fact your pants are still full of shit.”
As pertains to the Savage mascot, each townsperson’s intentions surrounding the mascot's use remain largely irrelevant in the conversation about whether or not the mascot carries racial animus toward others. It’s surely better that we intend not to hurt anyone than it would be if we used the savage mascot with the intention to wound, but once wounds have been dealt, intentions matter very little. And to be sure, our mascot does wound others. Elicia Goodsoldier, enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and the Spirit Lake Datoka tribe, details new scientific research about epigenetics and the role that repeated trauma suffered throughout generations plays in humans’ actual DNA. Repeated exposure to culturally appropriated symbols like the savage mascot can preserve the lasting impression of trauma in Native American communities. Continuing to use the savage mascot and all its cultural trappings in the manner we’ve been doing is tantamount to refusing to acknowledge the history of injustice suffered by Native American people. In the face of such pain, we should spend less time trying to convince others of our intentions (which won’t change the pain), and instead listen long enough to consider the traumatic and cultural impacts that the savage has on Native American communities.
2. The mascot represents a Lamar tradition. It represents our pride, our fierceness, our willingness to never give up, etc.
(I’m mainly responding here to the arguments found in this The Denver Post article about the mascot)
Lamar isn’t unique for taking a derogatory racial slur as the name of its mascot and forming a culturally isolated tradition around it. There are several examples of this across the history of our country, including a school in Pekin, Illinois, whose mascot were the “chinks” from the 1930’s until 1980. Like Lamar, the people of Pekin took a great amount of pride in this mascot, claiming that when they dressed in Chinese silks and struck a gong upon their team scoring, they were engaging in traditions that actually honored Chinese culture, and that these traditions meant no harm. They used this degrading term for so long that at last it evolved, becoming something untouchably pure—a figure that represented their pride and history. But no matter how pure a conceptualization they held, the fact doesn’t change that for the rest of the world, the mascot is still derogatory and harmful. Just as Pekin’s intentions about their mascot bear little relevance to the pain it brought Chinese-Americans (see question 1), Pekin’s invested traditions in their mascot does also. Lamar is no different.
But to leave the conversation there would be to miss something unique about the savage that I believe is important to explore.
Why does the savage mascot represent pride and fierceness for Lamar? Let’s imagine a reality in which the school founders had chosen the snow goose over the savage. In that reality, would we say with the same conviction that the goose could represent the same pride and fierceness? That seems doubtful. It’s likely that the character traits we assign to the savage come from our perceived caricatures of Native American peoples—that we absorb fierceness from the savage because the Cheyenne and Arapaho who fought to protect their lands were fierce, and that we absorb pride from the savage because those who struggled to preserve their ways of life were proud. At first glance, this might seem like we’re paying homage or honoring the Cheyenne and Arapaho people through our use of the mascot, but the truth is quite the opposite.
Let’s take the above example of the cultural appropriation of the ranching way of life. That wealthy city dude you’ve seen wearing a cowboy hat—the one who’s never done a day of hard manual labor in his life—comes up to you. When you ask him what the hat’s about, he says, “This cowboy hat represents my great work ethic. Country folk work hard,” he says, and when he wears the hat, he feels like he’s a hard worker too. Now, let’s imagine this city man is in politics, and has spent his political career passing legislation making it more difficult for farmers and ranchers to survive. This man knows nothing about what ranchers and farmers go through on a daily basis, and yet has spent his adult life using his wealth and his power to try and destroy ranchers’ reality—and then has the gall to wear a cowboy hat to tell everyone how hard he’s working at eliminating ranchers? Does this example hit a little close to home?
Whether it does or doesn’t, the truth is, we did decimate Native American peoples from the land upon which we now live, and still use pieces of its culture to represent how fierce and defiant we are. Native American peoples faced genocide in this country—both genocide of their physical bodies and the wiping out of their culture. In the face of that genocide, they were indeed fierce in many ways, fighting to protect their way of life and their lands. And yet, like the man in the cowboy hat, we’ve commandeered the remarkable traits they earned by their pain and suffering, which we caused. Those traits aren’t ours to embody. We didn’t earn them and they don’t belong to us.
3. The actual name of our mascot is the noble savage.
Because of pressures from government officials over the last couple decades, locals who wished to communicate that they held the mascot in high regard formulated what they thought was a compromise: to change the name from savage to noble savage. The name unfortunately stuck. This, quite ironically, is a profound misstep, as anyone who’s familiar with the term’s literary origins may already know. It might reveal much more about the truth of the mascot than Lamar townsfolk are comfortable with.
The noble savage is a type of supporting stock character that emerged in Romantic Literature not long after the European colonization of the North American continent. The Native American character would often be contrasted with his or her own tribe—the sub-human savages—while the character bore more “exceptional” or “civilized” qualities that made him or her an asset to the white protagonist’s plot line. The noble savage, a not-so-distant-cousin of the Magical Negro, existed within the story usually to impart some exotic wisdom or advice to the protagonist, and often to sacrifice his- or herself to save the white protagonist. The Noble Savage is a racist trope that dehumanizes Native American people as barbaric and inhumane while leaving room for one or two exceptions to serve as examples that, since it’s possible for certain Native Americans to assimilate into white culture and become “civilized,” the Native American people therefore had no excuse for remaining in what was deemed a sub-human state.
One example of this trope can be seen in Disney’s Pocahontas, which I’m confident Lamar folks are familiar with, as the Super Savage Sound System still plays one of its songs during games: savages, savages, barely even human . . . The real-life Pocahontas was married off as a teenager to an old white man who could have been her dad’s age. She was then paraded as an example of a Native American who could assimilate to white ways of living before she grew sick and died. The character our kids watch today (much like the savage mascot) helps to reinforce our historical amnesia of the horrors white colonizers caused on the North American continent.
Additionally, this noble savage trope, when used as a name for a culturally appropriated mascot, takes on a potent and all-too-fitting materialization of white supremacy—the very embodiment of a Native American figure sapped of his humanity and used as a tool for the advancement of white protagonists. Changing the name to noble savage from savage is, ironically, much truer than it had been before, but not at all more humane.
An argument that may naturally follow from this is that maybe we should try some other name, i.e. proud savage, honorable savage, etc. This is no realistic compromise and there’s very little difference. We aren’t simply a debating the semantics of word usage. Because of our historical context, any seemingly positive qualifier a white person adds to the beginning of savage will still mean white savage. It’s the word savage that’s the problem.
4. I’m part Native American and I don’t have a problem with it.
This is perhaps the most common retort I hear from folks in Lamar. Aside from the fact that it’s very common for people in the United States to claim Native American ancestry (especially Cherokee) when they in fact have no blood ties (check out this Slate article), I will generally give whoever it is I’m talking to the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re telling the truth and do indeed have Native American blood ties. After that, I like to inquire about what the person’s relationship is with the community or tribe they claim heritage with. If you fall under this category, here are some important questions to consider:
Are you an enrolled member of the community you share blood ties with?
Are you active in that community?
Would that community be comfortable with you speaking on their behalf about the mascot?
Do you feel comfortable accurately representing their opinions and beliefs on the matter?
If you were in the presence of the members of your community, would you still feel comfortable speaking on their behalf in such a way?
I’ve yet to meet anyone who has confidently answered yes to all these questions and still believes the mascot should remain. It might be helpful, therefore, to think about what claims of Native American heritage mean and why Lamar residents feel compelled to make them in this discussion.
First, why do folks claim to speak on behalf of a community whose members they have little to no contact with, and haven’t been appointed to speak on behalf of? I believe that this behavior and attitude make sense when we take into consideration the way Lamar people use the mascot itself. If we’re already accustomed to using Native American cultural relics to serve our own ends, it follows that we would feel very little cognitive dissonance in reducing Native American heritage to a tool we can use to serve our own ends in this discussion as well. It’s rather like this white man who, after taking a DNA test that showed 4% sub-Sarahan Africa ancestry, sued to gain entrance into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program as a black man on the grounds that he was legally black. In this case, as with claiming First Nations ancestry in an argument about the mascot, members of the majority class attempt to claim a minority status only inasmuch as it advantages them.
Second, I believe claiming Native American heritage is a tool used by Lamar folks to attempt to assuage their guilt and abdicate their responsibility in preserving a symbol of racism, which is accomplished by attempting to erase the pain felt by Native Americans. When I hear, “I’m Native American, and I don’t feel offended by the mascot,” generally it seems that the implied second half of that statement is, “therefore other Native Americans shouldn’t feel offended by it either.” If that’s true, it’s exposing a belief that if only Native American people could see how we view the mascot, they would then have no cause to be hurt or offended. This argument hinges on a self-centric posture that ironically refuses to see the issue from a different person’s perspective while demanding those in a marginalized group to instead view things from the majority perspective.
5. The town’s already struggling. The funds and effort required to change the mascot would be better spent elsewhere.
I hear you. I want you to know that, like you, I worry about the future of Lamar. I find myself dreaming some days about a town like the one I grew up in, in which I rode my bike with my neighborhood friends up and down ditch bank roads until the street lights came on, when main street bustled and local businesses weren’t under constant threat of folding. It was important for me to grow up in Lamar, going to community events like pep rallies and participating in town-wide celebrations that made me feel cared for by a village in ways I truly don’t think that folks in larger cities understand in the same way. You raised me with so many qualities I’m not sure I would have developed anywhere else, and then sent me out, the way good parents must always do. If parents are the bows, we children are the arrows. Sometimes we fly short and stay close to home, and sometimes we fly far away, to return one day or to make a life elsewhere. On behalf of those who do leave, I must say something, and for those who’ve spent the majority of their lives in Lamar, this may be hard to hear:
By clinging to the savage mascot, we’re not only causing harm to any Indigenous person outside of our community looking in. We’re also causing harm to all of our own children who will one day go out.
The word savage carries derogatory, incendiary, and yes, racist connotations in virtually every other community in this country. When we send our children to college or trade school or down a career path that takes them outside of the cultural borders of Southeastern Colorado, we send them out as arrows without feathers—as young adults whose social tools are confused. We’ve erected road blocks in the way of their engagement with our country’s history and their present part in that history. If their experiences are anything like mine, they will wear their savage apparel to class and wonder why people stare, why their professors single them out, why they’re somehow lacking the language and stamina to hold conversations around race and American history because their paradigm is different than everyone else’s. They will either be shamed into silence or forced to shift their paradigm as they realize the reality they learned in Lamar is different from that of the wider country, upon which time, they might, like me, feel a profound sense of betrayal. It’s sometimes easier for us folks in Lamar to claim that everyone else sees it wrongly—that over 300 million Americans don’t truly understand the savage, and the 8 thousand in Lamar do—but maybe, for the sake of our future generations, we could choose to have an active role in the betterment of our community before we face legislation that forces us down that path.
There’s no denying that changing the mascot will be costly. Change never costs nothing. What we must ask is whether the change is worth the cost, and I believe it is.
Preserving the mascot won’t save the town. The invisible cultural walls we’re trying to erect around our small ranching community won’t save us—in fact, I believe they’re hurting us.
So many of our arrows, like me, have spent enough time away from Lamar to see the savage from the outside as well as the inside, and as a result gain a unique perspective on the community. After developing new paradigms around the subjects of race and American history that have interplay with the savage mascot, the thought of moving back to Lamar, for many of us, feels like moving back underneath the paradigms we now see weren’t healthy for us. After conducting interviews and polling with classmates at my 10-year reunion in 2017 and communicating with other Lamar alumni over the last year who now live in other cities and states, I found that a majority who said they’d never consider moving back to Lamar actually cited the savage as being a contributing reason. This might be overstated, but I think there’s some truth to it: the savage is one of the reasons why people don’t return to Lamar after moving away. It could be possible that changing the savage could actually aid in the rejuvenation of a dying town.
6. But seriously, what about the cost?
Many other communities across the country have successfully changed their mascots, and for a period of time in 2015, Adidas offered to facilitate schools looking to transition to non-Native American mascots. Though it won’t be easy, there are avenues through which to fund such change.
Judging by what it’s cost other communities of similar size who’ve had their mascots for around the same length of time as Lamar, we can estimate the approximate cost to change Lamar’s mascot to be somewhere around $100,000 - $120,000.
The Stakes
If finding the resources to change the mascot simply because it’s the right thing to do isn’t a good enough reason, I hope that town leaders will realize what stakes we do have in this. Though Lamar has done much to remain frozen in time, history still carries it along at the same rate it does all communities. Sooner or later, we will either change it, or it will be changed for us. Could it be that instead of using our resources to preserve things as they are, we might use them to give our future generations the tools they need to be exceptional and contributing members of this country? Could it be possible that we could transform from a community known for its controversially derogatory mascot caricatured from a Native American warrior to a community that becomes controversially dynamic about how we educate our children to become accomplices for Indigenous people—a community that shows solidarity at places like Standing Rock, that fights to create equity for Indigenous communities, and that demonstrates the process of being introspective, self-critical, compassionate, and humble when it comes to subjects of race? Others may eventually change the mascot for us, but no one will do this work for us. We must be active in the betterment of our community. We must do it ourselves—not because government officials force us to, or because we’re trying to conform to political correctness, but because it’s the right thing to do, and we all have so much to gain from it.