A Pennsylvania school district voted in favor of reinstating a Native American logo that was retired in 2021.
The Southern York Couty School District school board voted 7-2 on Thursday to reinstate an indigenous “Warrior Head” logo of a Native American man wearing a feathered headpiece, according to WJLA News. A tomahawk and a pipe can also be seen in the image of the Native American warrior.
“This school was built on Susquehanna land,” a community member said during the school board’s meeting. “Those people lived here. You cannot rewrite history. You can’t cancel the past.”
In 2021, the Southern York County School District voted in favor of keeping the mascot name, the “Warriors” but retired the logo of a Native American warrior, according to The York Dispatch.
The decision to retire the logo came after calls for the school district to change the logo. While a petition to remove the Native American logo gained 850 signatures, a rival one to keep the logo gained roughly 3,800 signatures.
A study conducted by the 2020 board’s diversity committee found “there are no longer members of the Susquehannock tribe living in the district,” the Associated Press reported.
After retiring the logo, a new design featuring a black arrow going through a red “W” was created in an effort to “show movement and a forward, upward direction,” Wade Bowers, a graphic communications teacher, said in a statement.
“Students created the arrow from the letter W to represent the Warrior name,” Bowers explained. “They designed the arrow to show movement and a forward, upward direction symbolizing the district’s direction in academics, athletics and as a community.”
“What you’re doing, in my belief, is the right thing,” a representative with the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) said during Thursday’s meeting. “And, I totally agree. Why do you want to take away and hurt a culture that’s such a minority in this country right now?”
While some members of the community supported the decision to reinstate the logo, parents such as Katy Isennock, a Native American alumna of the school district and parent to children who attend schools in the district, told WGAL that the community had taken a “step back.”
“The issue is important to me, to show my kids that we have a voice and we need to use it,” Isennock told the outlet. “Moving forward is a little hard when we just took a step back but the focus will be on our kids and their mental health.”
