The Flimsy Research Behind Native American Mascot Bans

In mid-June, the Trump administration reignited the debate over Native American mascots when it announced an investigation into New York State’s mascot ban. Since a 2023 decision by the state’s Board of Regents, New York public schools have had to remove any references to Natives, including the use of names like “Chiefs” or “Thunderhawks,” and even a friendship belt logo.

New York’s ban rests on the theory that the presence of such symbols, regardless of intent, creates a harmful learning environment for Native students. The Trump administration, meantime, says that the Empire State is engaging in discrimination by forcing schools to remove only Native symbols while allowing names and symbols associated with other racial or ethnic groups, like the Dutchmen and Huguenots, to stay. (State officials say that they would gladly expand the ban to all mascots referencing race or ethnicity to meet the administration’s criticism.)

Mascot bans are costly. Districts spend anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to many millions in replacing mascots and creating new ones. Is it worth it? It doesn’t appear to be—our review of the evidence suggests that while Native mascots might offend some, they don’t have any effect on educational outcomes.

Social science research has built a case for mascot bans, particularly with a 2020 meta-analysis of 19 papers. These studies, in tandem with laws concerning hostile school environments, have been influential enough to withstand court challenges to mascot bans and convince states to enact blanket prohibitions.

The quality of the research, however, is flimsy at best. The meta-analysis covers research papers that study not the educational impact of bans but their “psychosocial” effects. The analysis misleadingly draws a strong connection between Native mascots and poor educational and social results, implying that the negative feelings produced by the mascots cause such outcomes. But none of the studies reviewed examine academic achievement, graduation, health, or employment directly. The review offers no evidence to suggest that Native mascots affect academic attainment or create a harmful learning environment for students—the relevant consideration for legal purposes.

Moreover, many of the outcomes reviewed are the results of implicit-bias tests (called Implicit Attitudes Tests). IAT results hold little scientific validity. Other measured outcomes, like self-esteem, are measured shortly after study participants are primed to make certain statements after seeing Native imagery. We can’t know the long-term impacts of exposure to these images—and post-2010 research replication efforts have shown that priming-effects studies rarely hold up in the real world. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman once warned priming researchers, “your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.”

The review’s authors stress the importance of examining experimental evidence that can best assess causal effects rather than just looking at correlations. Yet more than half of the papers they assess don’t fit this model—and only two papers overall examined psychological effects on Native Americans themselves.

In one of the experimental papers, the conclusions are perplexing. Among Native youth, at least 80 percent oof associations with Native mascots and imagery were positive, and exposure produced a statistically significant but practically insignificant difference in self-esteem: a half-point drop, at most, on a scale of one to five. Nonetheless, the paper concluded that Native mascots, “regardless of whether they are perceived positively by Native youth, are harmful to the psychological well-being of these youth.”

In the second paper, a small sample of Native and non-Native University of North Dakota students were shown the school’s Fighting Sioux nickname and logo. Self-reported measures on distress scales were found to be higher for Native students. But the authors themselves admit that the study cannot be generalized to other individuals—not even to other students at the school. That’s because students were not randomly selected to participate; they were recruited from psychology classes and the university’s American Indian center. The Native students were also older than the non-Native students, and age correlated with higher distress scores.

If the evidence behind mascot bans is weak, the associated financial costs are much clearer. School districts in Amityville, Fulton City, and Oneida City, for example, all had Native mascots and all serve economically disadvantaged populations. The New York State Comptroller’s office lists these districts as facing fiscal stress. Amityville, which had already spent $1 million to remove Native American imagery in 2018, challenged the 2023 ban, which meant removing its Warriors logo. But the district backed out of the legal challenge in fall 2024, spending an additional $200,000 to comply.

According to the 2020 meta-analysis, nearly one in every 12 high schools (8.2 percent) had nicknames associated with Native Americans in 2014. As Amityville’s experience shows, the cost of changing for some of these districts could be enormous.

Some may argue that regardless of research, imagery offensive to certain people should be removed. But while some Natives view mascots as what the Left condemns as “cultural appropriation,” others see them as cultural appreciation. In fact, some tribal members have been fighting to keep Native names. Frank Black Cloud, a member of the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota, backed a Long Island school that didn’t want to rebrand. Cloud pointed to two polls finding that nine out of ten Native Americans don’t take offense to sports nicknames like “Redskins.”

Such polls raise the question: Whose voices are being considered in the mascot debate? Progressive advocacy groups and academics often don’t reflect the views of the minority communities they claim to represent or study. To complicate matters further, banned terms like Thunderhawks may not even refer to Native Americans.

State governments cannot adjudicate these nuances effectively. Given divergent opinions on what’s offensive, rebranding decisions should be left to local communities.

Time will tell if the Trump administration can make New York abandon its mascot mandate. Lawmakers in other states should think carefully about whether such efforts are a justifiable expense of taxpayer dollars.

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