We recently discussed the decision by the New York State Board of Regents to ban the use of school sports team names and mascots employing indigenous words and images. This impacts hundreds of schools around the state with teams called “Chiefs” or “Redskins.” Far more controversial was the decision to include the name “warriors.” But the rule included an exception for schools that receive written permission to use a name from a federally recognized tribal nation. This has complicated the situation for the Salamanca School District and its sports team, the Warriors.  The school and the entire city sit on land that is leased from the Seneca Indian Nation. The current President of the Seneca Nation has endorsed the ban, but many of his people do not. (Associated Press)

The profile of a Native American man, a braid trailing down and feather jutting up, is tiled into a high school hallway, dyed into the weight room carpet and laid into the turf of the football field at Salamanca city schools.

School leaders say the omnipresent logo and “Warrior” name for the school athletic teams are sources of pride here, in the only U.S. city built on land leased from a Native American reservation.

But as New York joins states moving to ban schools’ use of Indigenous nicknames and mascots because they diminish Native cultures, the tribe may have the last say over whether the logo stays.

So the Seneca Nation is being asked to decide if the team name is acceptable. Even if the leader is saying no, the name is very popular among the students, nearly 40% of whom are themselves Native Americans and citizens of the Seneca Nation. The school’s logo (depicting a Native American man with a long braid of black hair) was designed by a Seneca artist. Informal polling around the district has shown that most (though not all) students and parents support keeping the name. So why force the change?

On top of that, none of this makes any sense because “warrior” is not even a word in any indigenous language. It comes from the Old North French term “werreier” (Old French guerroieor) meaning “a warrior, soldier, combatant, one who wages war.” The Seneca word is “Hökwe” (literally “man”). Their neighbors in the Mohawk Tribe have a word “Rotisken’rakéhte” which has been translated to mean “warrior society,” but, again, that’s a modern adaptation.

If we were feeling less charitable, we could accuse the Seneca Nation of “cultural appropriation” because they stole the word warrior from the English and French settlers who arrived here from Europe. I can certainly understand how some indigenous people would be offended by the name “redskins,” or perhaps even “Chiefs.” (Of course, that’s a gray area also.) But not “warriors.”

Some of the New York teams using the word warrior don’t even employ any Native American imagery or have mascots dressed in that fashion. At least one of them uses a mascot that looks like a Roman or Spartan warrior. How is anyone finding that to be offensive to indigenous people?

This all seems like yet another case of political correctness run amok. And it’s also yet another distraction from the serious challenges facing New York and the rest of the country. We’re dealing with out-of-control crime rates, an invasion on our southern border, rising inflation and prices, and the looming threat of a world war breaking out. Is the name of a high school football team really what we need to be focusing on?