“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” In this sense, a school board in Pennsylvania has ceased being conservative — and delivered a blow against progressivism — by reinstating its district’s Indian mascot a mere month after five new members were elected to the board by campaigning on that very issue.
As Fox News reports:
The Southern York County School District (SYCSD) school board voted 7-2 on Thursday to allow Susquehannock High School to bring back its traditional Warriors logo.
“This vote was the Lexington & Concord moment in the effort to defeat cancel culture,” Native American activist and historian Andre Billeaudeuax [sic] told Fox News Digital, after lobbying on behalf of the traditional image that pays homage to the Indigenous Susquehannock people.
All seven votes in favor of the logo came from members who were elected since a previous board voted to remove the logo back in 2021.
“The SYCSD school board stands as a role model and blueprint for other communities fighting for their Native names and imagery,” the North Dakota-based Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) said in a statement, after it presented its case last week at the board meeting.
Five of the newcomers were elected in November after the sudden removal of the popular image in 2021 — and an effort to rewrite the region’s Native American history — spurred community anger and action.
“This movement was about erasing Native American culture and I wasn’t about to stand for it,” Jennifer Henkel, a mother of three children and one of the new school board members, told Fox News Digital.
However, “Former members of the board, including Deborah Kalina, do not seem to appreciate the new direction taken by the board, according to the report,” the Washington Examiner adds.
“‘They came into their new positions with bravado to push their personal agendas and not with humility to learn their jobs,’ Kalina said,” the site continues.
Yet how the new members were elected — while campaigning, at least in part, on the mascot’s reinstatement — if their “agendas” are only “personal” was not explained.
“Personal,” though, does describe much of the anti-mascot reportage. Just consider the York Dispatch, which devoted a large part of an article to one anti-mascot activist, Sicangu Lakota artist Katy Isennock, and her claim that to “put the mascot away is respect.” It’s only when you read well down into the very long piece — i.e., the part many readers will never get to — that you learn of the mascot’s Indian defenders. For instance, York County resident Frank LittleBear “said he doesn’t find the logo offensive,” relates the paper. “Without the iconography, he wrote, people will forget that region’s Indigenous history,” the Dispatch also informed.
Anecdotes aside, a 2016 poll conducted by the left-wing Washington Post found that 90 percent of American Indians did not find the then-Washington Redskins’ mascot offensive. Would they feel much different about the Susquehannock mascot (presented in short video below)?
Ironically, featured in the above news piece agitating against the mascot is the kind of person who too often does: a young, woke, white woman who, as critics often suggest, apparently believes she has to be offended on behalf of minorities “too dumb to know they should be offended themselves.”
As comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher put it in 2019, addressing the white-savior phenomenon, “White liberals have to start listening to me when I tell them, ‘You can’t be more offended than the victim.’” (Video below. Warning: No guarantee of sanity beyond the two-minute mark.)
As for Susquehannock High School, if its appropriation of Indian imagery is so wrong, what about its Indian name? Should that be changed, too?
For that matter, Indian/Indian-origin names are legion in our nation. Chappaqua, Potomac, Okeechobee, Tallahassee, Muscogee, Oneida, Pocatello, Minidoka, Shoshone, and Seattle are just a sampling. And Illinois, Alabama, Connecticut, Alaska, Arizona, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Oklahoma are a mere handful of states with such names. Nix them?
Interestingly, too, woke white leftists never propose to be offended on behalf of Scandinavian-descent Americans over the Minnesota Vikings’ name and mascot (below). Is it that they believe white people are smart enough to be offended for themselves?
An irony here is that leftists, being like rebellious children who revolt against whatever their parents stand for, would also be upset if Indian names and symbols were absent from America. Then they’d say, “Why, these people were here before us and you act as if they don’t even exist!”
But the SYCSD school board shows how it’s done, how you cancel cancel culture. It’s not enough to be “conservative” and, as the late William F. Buckley put it, stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” Sometimes you have to force a “system restore” and get back to your foundations — and stick to your guns until the cultural devolutionaries scream themselves out.
