SKOWHEGAN, Maine — While many people in Maine spent a quiet Monday off in observance of Columbus Day, the Skowhegan area was abuzz over the controversy surrounding the holiday and the dispute over a local school’s use of an Indian mascot.
Skowhegan High School is the last in the state to use “Indians” or related terms for sports teams, something that many members of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac people consider deeply offensive.
Efforts to bring about a name change so far have failed.
Supporters of Skowhegan Area High School’s Indian mascot held a rally Monday for those who want that tradition to continue. The event was held near the town’s famous statue of an American Indian in Langlais Park.
Organizers told CBS 13 that they were simply showing their pride for their mascot while raising funds for the area animal shelter and gathering food for the needy.
When asked why they chose to hold the event on Columbus Day, a holiday offensive to many Native Americans, organizers said they would get complaints no matter when they did it.
“This issue has nothing to do with the Native Americans or anything. If you’re trying to get on that topic, this is about our community,” Skowhegan Pride rally organizer Jennifer Poirier told CBS 13. “That’s been blown out of proportion by the media. It’s a day. It would have been a grievance regardless of what day was chosen.”
Meanwhile, a nearby rally at Lake George was held to celebrate Skowhegan Indigenous Peoples Day.
Organized by the Maine Chapter of Not My Mascot, the pro-Native American event was among a growing number of its kind held around the United States.
Tribal activist Barry Dana, a former chief of the Penobscot Nation, said Monday that the rally celebrating Maine’s indigenous people was planned long before the mascot event.
“They’ll watch this coverage later today and say, ‘Well, we don’t think it’s insensitive,’’ Dana said to CBS 13. “But now they know we do. We’ve survived over 500 years of genocide, broken treaties, the list goes on.”
Columbus Day is a U.S. holiday that commemorates the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World on Oct. 12, 1492. It was unofficially celebrated in a number of cities and states as early as the 18th century but did not become a federal holiday until the 1937, according to History.com.
Indigenous people have been protesting the Columbus Day holiday for decades, Native American activist and educator Sarah Sunshine Manning noted in a column posted Monday on Indian Country Today’s website.
She wrote that “by the end of Columbus’s second voyage back to America, the friendly [Indians he encountered] were enslaved, brutalized, tortured, killed, raped and almost completely annihilated on the island of Hispaniola, all in the name of imperialism.”
Last year, the cities of Seattle, Washington, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, Manning wrote. Making the change since then were Albuquerque, New Mexico; Lawrence, Kansas; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Bexar County, Texas; Anadarko, Oklahoma; Olympia, Washington; and Alpena, Michigan, she said.
South Dakota is the only state to have eliminated Columbus Day, she added.
“Wabanaki: A New Dawn,” a recently released documentary about the experiences of Maine’s tribal people is available at vimeo.com/6928369.