April 28, 2021 3:50 a.m.
The Roseburg School Board is scheduled to vote on whether to “retire” the Roseburg High mascot – the Indian, on Wednesday night.
Whether to make the change has been debated in the community and beyond for years. In 2012, the Oregon Board of Education voted to ban the use of native mascots in the state’s schools. In 2014, the Oregon State Legislature passed a compromise bill, authored by then State Senator Jeff Kruse, that allowed school districts to enter into an agreement with a federally recognized Native American Tribe to use a mascot that was significant to that tribe. In 2017, the Oregon State Board of Education approved an agreement between the Roseburg School District and the Cow Creek Umpqua Tribe. That agreement allowed RHS to retain the mascot under certain conditions.
Teams at RHS have been called the Indians for years, though exactly when that started is somewhat unclear. Staffer Nathan Miller of the News Review spotted an ad in the 1919 RHS yearbook from Bastian Bros. Company in Rochester, New York. The company had created special Indian Head class pins and rings. Miller found the 1919 and 1921 year book covers which have separate logo designs depicting an Indian as well.
Longtime board member Charles Lee told News Radio 1240 KQEN that he hasn’t been able to find record of a school board action or other action adopting the name. However, Lee did find a clipping from the February 12,1931 New Review, that talked about the girls basketball team, calling them, “the Indians”.
Board member Micki Hall told KQEN she has checked yearbooks going back many years and noted more imagery and the use of the mascot in the late 1950s continuing into the 1960s.
Miller found a picture of the first physical mascot, presented to students in 1955.
In the late 1980s, a costumed Indian was still often scene at sporting events, doing a “war dance” and strutting around. Slowly the use of the imagery faded to eventually being the only the name and the use of a feather in a logo and on some uniforms.
After some professional sports teams starting dropping the use of Native American names and related themes, the question of what to do began to surface more frequently. In the past several months the Roseburg School Board has heard from numerous people, both in person and in writing, who asked for the mascot to be dropped.
The board will make a decision when they meet at 6:00 p.m. in the Rose Theatre at RHS. The meeting can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvFXg7fJ5cQ