The Native American Heritage Fund has awarded $484,000 to 10 schools, a college and a university to replace offensive mascots and create more accurate educational curricula about Indigenous communities in Michigan.
When it started in 2016, the fund’s board identified 15 high schools with inaccurate mascots meant to represent Indigenous people.
With 2024’s funding, all of those mascots have been or will soon be replaced, said Dorie Rios, chair of the fund and the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi Tribal Council.
“We believe there are many more out there at the different levels [of schools],” she said. "There are likely elementary and middle schools that still use Indigenous imagery or caricatures as mascots, and the fund intends to address those too, Rios said.
The tribe administers the fund in conjunction with the state government. Funding for the grants comes from casinos, which are required to contribute 2% of their annual revenue to a fund that the Michigan Gaming Control Board disperses to the 12 federally-recognized tribes in the state.
About $500,000 of the money the Nottawaseppi Huron Band receives goes to the fund, according to the control board’s most recent report.
This kind of program requires buy-in from the participating schools, which can be difficult to get, Rios said.
A big obstacle to changing mascots is common misconceptions about Indigenous communities among non-Indigenous people, said Laurel Davis-Delano, a sociologist at Springfield College. She and her colleagues have studied the psychosocial effects that offensive mascots have on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.
“There's not a lot of media representations of contemporary Native people,” she said. She said that can translate to non-Indigenous people relying on stereotypes — including thinking that Native Americans only exist in the past.
That can also include promoting “positive” stereotypes, thinking that using an Indigenous person as a mascot is “honoring” them, Davis-Delano said.
Julie Dye, an activist and elder of the Pokagon band of Pottawatomi Indians, does not see it that way.
“You can't really honor someone when that honor is not all agreed upon,” she said. Dye has been campaigning against Indigenous people being used as mascots since she was a teenager.
“It's the harm that they [mascots] perpetuate and create in the school system as a hostile learning environment for our children,” Dye said.
Davis-Delano and her co-authors found that using Indigenous people as mascots has negative psychological effects on Indigenous students.
“[Indigenous students] experienced more stress, more distress, more depression, more despair and more hostility,” she said. Some of the mascots the fund has targeted are considered so offensive the fund will not print their names, using "R-word" instead.
But mascots aren’t the only thing the fund covers. Some recipients will use the award money to create culturally appropriate history curricula for third graders, support Indigenous students or co-manage a nature center. Providing accurate education about Indigenous people and removing harmful depictions of them go hand in hand, Rios said.
“It's just better educating the school systems [about] our presence, in the past and the present and into the future,” she said. “That's our ultimate goal.” Dye agreed.
“That education piece is very important all the way around, not just about mascots, but about us as a people,” Dye said. Removing misinformation requires providing correct information in its stead, Davis-Delano said.
“This is like a chicken [and] egg situation, right?,” she said. “Get rid of the stereotypes or increase accurate knowledge.” The fund’s goal is to do both, Rios said.
The next application period for the fund opens in June 2025. Public and private schools as well as units of local government can apply. Applicants should have written support from the tribe local to their area, Rios said.
“We look for, ultimately, who's this educating, you know, who's it benefiting?” she said. “And most importantly, did that institution get any sort of buy in from the local tribe in that area?”
Dye, who has been part of the conversation for decades, said she’s seeing some improvement.
“We didn't have much of a voice years ago,” she said. “And that situation is changing.”
