Indian Mascots

* Re “Tribes Win in Mascots’ Last Stand,” Sept. 8, and “Van Nuys School No Longer Home of the Braves,” Sept. 9.

Perhaps some of our school board members and their . . . fellow racists need a history lesson. Not the American history they learned in school, but the true American history.

Lenard E. McDonald, a 1941 graduate of University High, says in part, “My whole committee is up in arms.” What kind of arms are you talking about? A Gatling gun, maybe? That’s one of the weapons our government used to slaughter thousands of indigenous people. Some people call them Indians.

McDonald goes on to say, in part, “To everybody I have spoken to so far, this is a small group with a chip on their shoulder.” They are a small group because our government consigned them to oblivion. We, a government of the people, murdered men, women and children just because they were Indians. We broke treaties as soon as we wrote them. And we are still doing it today.

At Birmingham High, after losing their mascot, a student wipes her tear away, saying she no longer wants to be a brave or study American history: “I don’t want to know these awful people now.”

Are these the same awful people who were confined to concentration camps? Oops. We call them reservations. The same awful people living on a reservation on a cold winter night were given blankets by our humanitarian government that were infected with smallpox. Shall I go on?

ARTHUR LOWY

Van Nuys

* If the LAUSD wants to completely re-educate all of our children by wiping out their mascots’ images, then the next step would be to pull George Orwell’s “1984” from the school library’s shelves.

JOSH PEASLEE

Tarzana