FREEPORT, Texas — This week the NFL saw historic changes that may soon trickle down to the few remaining Texas schools that have resisted similar movements in the past.
The Washington Redskins owners and managers decided to change the football team’s name after mounting public pressure.
The derogatory term has a racist history but has been used by public school athletics departments as a name for mascots and teams for decades.
Most of the Native American imagery and names have been replaced by schools over the years, however, several schools have resisted the change.
The small refinery town of Freeport, Texas is home to a little more than 12,000 people. The United States Census Bureau reports 3.1 percent of the city’s residents identify their ethnicity as Native American.
Prior to its colonization, Native American tribes including the Karankawa occupied the lands of the Texas Gulf Coast, fishing in the same waters stretching from Galveston Island to Corpus Christi.
There is only one place where images of the American Indians are found in Freeport today: Freeport Intermediate School’s long-time mascot is the “Rowdy Redskin."
The mascot is on the school’s sign, in the gym, the website and all the school merchandise for kids to wear to expressing their school pride.
Native Americans say the image and the word are both derogatory and racist.
“The ‘R’ word is insulting to us,” said Chance Landry, founder of Houston’s Southern Apache Museum. “It’s like an ‘N-word’.”
She said the term as a hateful and violent past.
“They have no idea what that word means to us,” Landry said. “You know, they used to take our scalps and they used to get money for them. And when you lift up a scalp, after you cut it off, you know, you see red.”
Landry was part of the effort seven years ago that resulted in the removal of three HISD mascots considered offensive to Native Americans.
That same year, Brazosport ISD made the decision to keep its mascot.
KHOU 11 has made multiple attempts to obtain a comment from Brazosport ISD’s public relations office, however, calls were not answered or returned after the subject of this story was shared in an initial conversation.
“Rowdy? The ‘R’ word is already bad enough, but to put rowdy on there? Come on,” Landry said.
The few remaining Texas schools that still cling to their Native American mascots face a re-energized push to remove them.
“I don’t want to see the school invest any more energy into the offensive imagery I’ve seen,” said Cherokee Nation principal Chuck Hoskin, Jr.
The Cherokee Nation withdrew its formal support of Port Neches-Groves ISD’s use of the tribe’s name and imagery.
The last time there was discussion of change, the school district’s superintendent said letting the purple-feathered PN-G Indian go would amount to surrendering to left-wing extremists.
“They’re tearing down our statues but let’s keep some of the things,” said one Port Neches resident.
An “Indian” is also used as the mascot for Santa Fe High School.