Retire the Manteo Mascots

About Us

We're a team of Dare County community members and Manteo High and Middle School alumni. We aim to have the mascots ‘Redskins’ and ‘Braves’ retired and replaced with non-racialized mascots that do not cause harm as either a racial slur or appropriation of Native identity, and instead celebrate our history and our future.

Here are just a few reasons why we think this is important:

• The National Congress of American Indians, the oldest, largest, and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization, has run a campaign against the use of Native mascots since 1968, as they are dehumanizing and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
• “Redskin” is a dictionary-defined racial slur. Civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights, recognize this as a cause in the fight against discrimination and racial stereotyping and have called for an end to the use of Native American images and team names by non-Native schools.
• Over twenty years of peer-reviewed social science research shows that there are no positive outcomes of Native mascots for Native students or people. They not only harm them psychologically, but show them the limited ways in which non-indigenous people view them and stereotype them. Furthermore, they harm non-native students and community members by limiting their perceptions of both the history and present of Indigenous people and encouraging racial stereotyping.

Resources

• Change the Mascot

  A national campaign originally started to end the use of the racial slur "r*dskins" as the mascot and name of the NFL team in Washington, D.C. Launched by the Oneida Indian Nation.

• No More Native Mascots

  A group of Indigenous advocates in the Southwest who seek to confront the colonization of Indigenous identities.

• National Congress of American Indians

  Information about the NCAI's campaign: Ending the Era of Harmful “Indian” Mascots

Contact

Let us know if you'd like to get involved or have questions.