(RNS) — It’s Aug. 11, 1978, and President Jimmy Carter has just signed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act into law. This law provides a path for Indigenous peoples to participate in our sacred religious practices, on our sacred lands, without the interference of the federal government.
While our religious rights are still being opposed today, as when high school and college students are punished for wearing regalia on their graduation robes, the 1978 law was a huge step forward in acknowledging that Native peoples in the United States deserve to make their own decisions for how they would practice their spirituality.
In July 2025, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he wants the Washington Commanders’ football team to change its name back to the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians to become the Indians again.
“Indians are being treated very unfairly. MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!” he wrote, and later threatened a new stadium deal for the Commanders if they stick with the name. Other restrictions could be applied to the teams, he said, if they don’t revert to racist monikers the president claimed “honor” Indigenous peoples.
A study conducted in 2020 by a Harvard anthropologist, a University of Michigan psychologist and Springfield College sociologist found that Native mascots are detrimental to Native American students and that they encourage racist stereotypes of Native people.
In 2005, the American Psychological Association issued a resolution calling for the retirement of all use of Native American symbols, mascots and images. Its then-President Ronald F. Levant said, “These mascots are teaching stereotypical, misleading and too often, insulting images of American Indians. These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students; they are sending the wrong message to all students.”
I think of the scene of the red Indians in the old Peter Pan cartoon: The white children, with war paint on their faces, show up to a series of teepees with a group of Natives wearing fringe and buckskin, asking them what makes them red. The Native woman even calls herself s*uaw, a racial slur for Indigenous women, as they all sing, “What Makes the Red Man Red.”
I grew up with this image and the narrative of the warring, buffoon-ish, ignorant Native. It distorted the way I viewed myself as an Indigenous person — instead of learning to take our stories seriously, I struggled to match these images with the Native spiritual landscape I knew. I was conscious even as a child that they altered how the world views us as well. If we are nothing but the “red” people, we fall quickly, quietly into all the racist caricatures created against us by the America we know.
If we are still stuck in the Peter Pan “red man” tropes in 2025, we are harming future generations of Native kids who should grow up in an America where their cultures and spiritual practices are valued. If Trump’s wish comes true, it would take power from our communities, forcing us once again to be viewed from the lens of a colonized society.
We’re a nation still coming to terms with who we are. It is not uncommon in many of our families (mine included) for elders to be silent about who they were. Some struggled with celebrating our cultural ways, and many still held pride in our cultures in subversive ways. They did this in the face of restrictions on our spiritual practices and languages, the stealing of our sacred lands and the ongoing battle against colonial-trauma caused by Indian boarding schools.
We are continuing to heal from this intergenerational trauma, finding ways to openly honor and celebrate our cultures and ways of life, and we deserve to do that without the interference of President Trump, who shows no respect for Native communities.
Carter, a president who was still a flawed human being, attempted to find a way to give us rights as Indigenous peoples — rights to follow our own spiritual, cultural traditions in a nation that does not value them and sees them as anti-Christian and pagan, among other things.
What Trump has continued to do is target our cultures, our ways of life and, yes, our spirituality, as complex as it is. He is attempting to steal our power under the guise of colonialism, just as his hero President Andrew Jackson did.
But as Indigenous people, we should have the power to choose who we are, just like we should choose what we believe, and that means having a voice in the fight over Native mascots that perpetuate the warring savage caricature over all of us.
We deserve more for ourselves and future generations, and we will continue to fight for that in an America that deserves to know and value us for who we have always been.
Kaitlin Curtice. (Courtesy photo)
(To learn more about the Not Your Mascot campaign, visit this website.)
(Kaitlin Curtice, a Potawatomi award-winning author, poet-storyteller and public speaker, writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She is the author of eight books; her newest, “Everything Is a Story,” releases October 2025.)