SKOWHEGAN, Maine - Members of Maine's four Native American tribes say it's time for public schools in Skowhegan to stop using the term "Indians" as the nickname and mascot for their sports teams. At a special school board meeting Monday night, representatives from the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac tribes spent more than an hour explaining why the term is inappropriate and hurtful to their people.
Skowhegan's schools are now the only ones in the state that still use a Native American nickname. Many students and parents, though, say the name "Indians" is part of the town's and schools' heritage and is not meant to be offensive or racist.
On Monday night, 40 minutes before members of Maine's tribes began their presentation, 17-year-old Zachary Queenan stood outside Skowhegan Area Middle School, holding a homemade sign with "Skowhegan Indians Our Heritage" written neatly across the front in bright orange magic marker.
"We are giving the community a voice because we were not allowed to speak in the meeting," he said.
Queenan, a senior who runs track for Skowhegan Area High School, stood in a group of several dozen students and parents who came out to protest any potential move by the school board to ditch the nickname and mascot they've grown up with.
Angel Brewer, who has a child at the middle school, says the name "Indians" is meant, in part, to be a celebration of the Native American heritage in the area. "What's the motivation behind it? Is the motivation of the community to be in some way derogatory, or racial in any way? Absolutely not."
But members of Maine's four tribes say it's not that simple. It can be really hard, Barry Dana later told school board members, for non-Native people to understand how it feels to hear "Indians" used as a nickname, or as the name of a sports team's mascot. Dana is former chief of the Penobscot Nation.
"We're simply asking to be able to sit down and watch a basketball game or a track meet or football game and not have to engage in a conversation with our children: 'Why do they call themselves Indians? They're not Indians!' " Dana said.
Barry Dana and others on the panel talked of having to have these kinds of conversations over and over through the years. Matt Dana, who represents the Passamaquoddy tribe in the Maine Legislature, remembers taking his eight-year-old son to a wrestling match last year in the gym at Skowhegan High. He says the boy became upset when he saw the image of an Indian on the wall of the gym.
"So I had to explain to him that we, as a people, still need to convince and ask for that respect - that it's offensive to use," Dana said. "He still had a hard time. He couldn't understand why native people were used as imagery."
Disagreement over the use of the term "Indians" first surfaced in Skowhegan as early as 1999, when the American Indian Movement sent a letter of protest to the local school district. The school board formally rejected a push to drop the name two years later. In February of this year, the Bangor chapter of the NAACP contacted officials in RSU 54, demanding, again, that the district come up with a different nickname and mascot.
"This panel of native people do not look at Skowhegan as being racist," said Barry Dana. The bigger question, says Dana, is what happens once people understand what the use of these nicknames does to the psyche of Native Americans. "The issue itself becomes racist if it's continued, once you know the difference."
The tribes, Dana admitted, can't legally force RSU 54 to abandon "Indians" as a nickname and mascot. Skowhegan Area High School is now the only high school in the state, though, that continues to use a nickname that Maine's Native American tribes find offensive.
The school board will continue to debate whether to keep the name or drop it in the coming months.