My wife Catherine and I attended Tuesday night’s Kelseyville School board meeting that addressed the question of bringing back “Indians” as the Kelseyville mascot.

As a Lake County resident I was proud of how the meeting was conducted. Speakers for both sides alternated in their presentations, which were both eloquent and heartfelt. It once again reminded me why I enjoy living here.

But (yeah, the other shoe dropping) I am strongly of the opinion that the previous board was right to drop the use of Indians, and that the current board would be way wrong to bring it back.

The reason for my opinion is pretty simple. The Pomo nations of Lake County got a raw deal at the hand of the European settlers and their descendants who live here today are still feeling the results. While the Kelseyville High School community may think the Indians should “get over it,” that’s only likely to happen when the ripples caused by the depredations of Kelsey and Stone and their followers fade in strength and time.

While 150-plus years may seem like a long time to the proponents of the Indian mascot, my conversations with local natives tell me it seems like yesterday to them, many of whom are still engaged in a struggle for survival stemming from how they were treated by the very people who gave Kelseyville its name.

The least the Kelseyville High School community should do is to recognize the pain expressed by the many people who oppose the Indian mascot, and not engage in conduct that can only serve to make the pain worse. Insisting that the Indian mascot be brought back to stoke the fires of school spirit and build attendance at basketball games is in essence the same type of behavior (although no killings or rapes are involved) that Kelsey and Stone engaged in back in the 1850s – trampling on Native American dignity with no regard whatsoever for Indians as human beings.

Along this line, I was most struck by the number of Kelseyville High School students (current and former) who with the utmost sincerity recounted instances of cheers that made them “proud to be Indians.” The fact that most of them are not Indians seemed not to matter. It would appear that the students who are “proud to be Indians” are blind to Indians as a people, a nation, a race.

Perhaps it is because of the culture we all grew up in, which included stereotyped depictions of Indians in movies and comic books that fed into a generalized racism regarding all people of color. But whatever the reason, it appears to me that the people who want the Indians mascot back in action view Indians as part of the public domain, to be used as symbols by anyone for any purpose. Pleas by Indians to be treated as human beings, with dignity and respect, fall on deaf ears.

In the end, Kelseyville High School will go down in history as a progressive institution if the board honors the previous board’s decision – and the local tribes – and rejects the attempt to bring back the Indian mascot. Conversely, the high school and the Kelseyville community will forever be labeled as both mean-spirited and ignorant of the steps that must be taken to help heal the wounds their ancestors inflicted on the peoples who now only seek to end the use of the word Indian as nothing more than a high school plaything.

Steve Elias lives in Lakeport.

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