I still waiver back and fourth on this issue because when I was in high school we had many issues with our mascot; the Indians. We loved our mascot and we had a sense of pride when wearing those uniforms or cheering on our teams during games. One year there was a massive uproar about our mascot and how it's disrespectful to many Native Americans. I never saw the disrespect and neither did my classmates. Throughout the year we had many public meetings, school wide informational talks, and public forums on why or why not the Indians should be our mascot. Being a athlete, I never thought our mascot name was disrespecting anyone. I always thought we wore it with pride and never saw it as harmful. Our school decided to keep the mascot the Indians that year and it's still our mascot today but many things in our athletic department had to change because of it. We had to get rid of uniforms (including football helmets) that had a tomahawk or Indian head dress, the school symbol of an Indian head was changed, and gym walls were painted over. Today I still am glad that my high schools mascot is the Indians because it's what I'm used to; but there are also people that feel disrespect because of this and I don't like that at all.