‘I’m not a proud Red Raider.’ Rally calls on NC school district to retire mascot
Calls to retire the Red Raider mascot at South Point High School prompted a rally prior to a Gaston County school board meeting Monday afternoon.
Members of the Retire the Red Raider group and the Metrolina Native American Association held a demonstration outside Gaston County Schools offices in Gastonia an hour before the meeting. Some South Point students, alumni, parents, community members and citizens of Native American tribes attended.
“We have asked Gaston County to compromise,” association chair Rebecca LaClaire said at the rally. “Keep the Red Raider, remove the Indian head. What’s the problem with that? ... Why don’t they take a silhouette of themselves and paint it red? They’re not going to do that.”
During the meeting, several speakers explained their frustrations with the Belmont school’s mascot.
“Keep our children sacred, keep our women sacred, elevate our voices and listen to us because silence is violence,” Hayley Brezeale, who graduated from a Gaston County school, told board members.
School board chair Jeff Ramsey thanked the speakers for their comments and said the board “does not typically respond” to them. The board did not take action on the mascot.
At the rally, Jason “Crazy Bear” Keck of the Louisiana Choctaw nation said a school should not “propagate an unreal thing.”
“We understand that the only raiders on this continent was the European settler and colonizer,” Keck said. “We made peace with that part of the history, but we don’t make peace with ... having some kind of savage with feathers on his head being the mascot of a sports team, relegating my ancestors and my people to some red color.”
A Change.org petition to remove the logo began circulating in summer 2020 and has garnered over 11,000 signatures. Members of the Lumbee Tribal Council spoke out against the mascot during a school board meeting in June, calling it “offensive and demeaning,” the Observer previously reported. No action was taken by the board.
Some students led two protests at home football games last spring.
“I have personally seen the adverse effects of the mascot within our own student body,” South Point senior Ryan Simms said in the release. “I ... feel uncomfortable representing my own school, and feel a strong disconnect between my school and the racist mascot it presents. I am a proud South Point student; I am not a proud Red Raider.”
The South Point football team is headed to the third round of the North Carolina state playoffs.
“I wish the South Point community would demonstrate similar courage, grit, and teamwork in considering how our logo and practices affect our Indigenous neighbors long after the playoffs are over,” former Belmont Mayor Richard Boyce, a parent of four South Point graduates, said in a news release.
November is Native American Heritage Month, which also prompted the rally and discussion over the mascot, according to a news release from the Retire the Red Raider group.
“Two thousand organizations who use Native mascots have retired them,” Brezeale said in the news release. “Research clearly demonstrates that mascots harm not only Indigenous youth but all youth. We represent a fight that has been fought for over five decades, and we will not stop until the Red Raider and all offensive Native American mascots in North Carolina are retired.”
This story was originally published November 15, 2021 at 12:43 PM.
