Nearly three weeks ago, Obies joined a protest of the Cleveland Indians’ first game of the season based on the racist connotations of the team’s name. About a month earlier, Oberlin High School came under fire for its own use of “Indians” as a team name.

The high school’s mascot, said Associate Dean of the Conservatory and President of the School Board Marci Alegant, was first challenged about ten years ago.

“Every decade,” she said, “someone has brought [the issue] to the board.”

The current debate began when a parent whose husband is Native American expressed reluctance to send her child to a school whose mascot represents an allegedly derogatory epithet.

Oberlin High School graduates College junior Casey Ashenhurst and Jeff Schubert, conceded that while the mascot may have racist implications, the name did not bear a great deal of meaning to them during their high school years.

“The pride in our school was expressed through affinity with the town rather than with the mascot,” Ashenhurst said.

For Schubert, “The Oberlin soccer team was known as the ‘Oberlin soccer team,’ not as ‘the Indians.’”

But Oberlin High School’s mascot is part of a larger picture. The state of Ohio has the highest percentage of sports teams claiming the mascot of the Indian as its own, with almost one in ten teams boasting the symbol. Many people embrace the Indian as a mark of tradition and pride. Oberlin High School’s mascot has endured for nearly a century, spanning multiple generations of athletes.

“Some people say that Native Americans are honored [by the mascot],” said College senior Elana Riffle, who recently participated in the protest against the Cleveland Indians at Jacobs Field. “So to take that out of the public eye it’ll be forgotten.”

However, Riffle and other College students have shown a passionate drive to change the status quo. One activist vehicle on campus is the Experimental College course titled “The History of the American Indian Movement,” taught by Robert Roche of the Cleveland American Indian Movement.

This month, when students travelled to Cleveland for the protest, they faced hecklers, with one person yelling at the protesters, “Go back to Iraq,” according to College first-year Enrico Nassi, who participated in the event.

Even Oberlin College itself is torn on the issue. Former member of the Board of Trustees Larry Dolan is the owner of the Cleveland Indians.

Many students, including Nassi, believe that these tensions are part of a larger problem.

“This is systemized cultural racism, and not enough people are educated on the matter...to get a change to happen,” he said.

Meanwhile, tensions persist in school board meetings as those for and against changing the team name make their arguments, and a resolution has yet to be reached. In light of the divisiveness of the issue, Alegant would like to see community members educated about the pros and cons so that some consensus can be reached.

At that point, she said, the school board could take action one way or another.