1:15pm | Elizabeth Gamboa, a recent candidate for ASI president at CSU Long Beach, was running on a platform with a plank calling for the university’s “49ers” nickname, represented by mascot “Prospector Pete,” to be dropped, on the grounds that it’s a holdover from our racist past.

This sort of call is not new. But in almost all cases the mascots in question are Native American, the objection being that the portrayals are, at best, insensitive — at worst, caricatures or downright slurs.

The objection to Prospector Pete is that the 49ers (named after the 1849 beginning of the California Gold Rush) contributed to the near-extirpation of indigenous Californians — including the Tongva Tribe, which is said to have occupied the land where the university itself now sits.

“Many find this to be offense and insensitive considering how the Indians lost their land and lives to ’49ers,'” Gamboa wrote in a press release.

Besides, Gamboa says, “Our current name depicts us a basic cookie cutter CSU campus, not a major university with big[-]time state, national, and global impact. Unfortunately[,] perception is reality. Consequently[,] with a name change, we can begin to attract even better students to the university.”

Gamboa’s suggestion is for the 49ers to become the Tongva Rebels, with Prospector Pete losing his job to Toypurina, a female leader of a Tongva rebellion against the occupiers. Gamboa would go so far as to make new diplomas available to past graduates, retroactively reflecting the name change.

The total cost for the switch? No one seems to know for sure, but Gamboa’s guess is $200,000 — a sum she believes can be raised without using university funds. “Private gift[s] from friends who encourage and support the name change would pay for capital expenses associated with signage, marketing expenses and other one-time costs related to the name change,” she wrote. “We would use consumable items such as stationary, business cards, brochures and any other publication with the old name until they ran out before reprinting with the new name.”

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Many schools and universities have effected similar switches — again, almost always away from Native Americans. But professional sports teams have proven far less reactive to such concerns. The only name change in the major sports undertaken for reasons unrelated to relocation took place in 1997, when the Washington Bullets were rechristened the Washington Wizards. When it comes to Native Americans, some teams have changed their iconography — the NBA’s Golden State Warriors no longer use indigenous imagery; the Atlanta Braves realized a patch on their original 1960s uniforms was such a monstrous caricature that they replaced it on their current “throwback” jerseys — but none have dumped their names.

What might seem the most shocking example is the NFL’s Washington Redskins. “Indian” may be a misnomer, but it was never meant as a slur; “Brave” and “Warrior” can be said to be well-intended; but “Redskin” is nothing but a slur (even if the team’s logo is less caricature than simply a bland, generic rendering of a Native American).

If there is an argument for keeping — or at least not needing to replace — the “Redskin” name, it is probably that in present-day practice “Redskins” means only the professional football team — a usage that may have drained the slur out of the slur. In my own experience, despite the artwork on the sides of the Redskins’ helmets, as a child never once did I think of the name as anything but the team. Joe Theismann, John Riggins, and Darrell Green were Redskins; no Native Americans were Redskins, since none were on the roster.

The counter-argument is obvious: Whatever the current practice, its epithetical origin is more than enough reason to dump it.

The logic for replacing “Prospector Pete” is also etymological, but from another angle: 49ers were largely responsible for visiting ruin upon the local indigenous population, and so it is unseemly to be represented by such an icon.

“CSULB was founded on the sacred place of these Tongva people,” Gamboa says. “49ers altered the environment in a way that negatively effected the indigenous populous. […] I think it’s disrespectful to have a symbol of destruction of the Tongva.”

Of course, not everyone agrees that a change of mascot is a worthwhile use of money or energy. “Toypurina you’ve got to be kidding,” wrote “Tom” on Gamboa’s Website. “Prospector Pete is not offensive to anyone on the face of the earth. CSULB or Long Beach State, who cares. Everybody calls it Long Beach State anyway. No increase of donations will occur. Bring back the football team, but don’t kill poor Prospector Pete.”

Obviously Tom overstates the lack of concern over making such a change — many people are offended, and more would be were they aware of the irony involved — but the question of whether there is enough offense to justify the resources involved in making such a change is a pragmatic one.

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Gamboa’s call to consider a name change at CSULB is not the first. In early 2009 the Daily 49er, CSULB’s student newspaper, ran an unsigned editorial on the subject:

Here on campus, a symbol of California’s horridly racist past dances around in costume. To many people of color, the Prospector Pete mascot and the ominous miner statue on the upper campus, combined with the “49er” school spirit iconography — emblazoned on everything from coffee mugs to our beloved sports teams — represent a violent history.

During the Gold Rush, Anglo forty-niners wiped out 80 percent of the American Indian population. From 1849 to 1861, the genocides reduced California Indian populations from approximately 150,000 to less than 30,000. The mining camps used to advertise “Indian hunts” in local newspapers and store windows. […] Many miners created cottage industries of Indian slavery. Women and children were kidnapped from their villages and sold into domestic servitude or to mining camp brothels.
The editorial goes on to quote Georgiana Sanchez, “a CSULB American Indian Studies professor […] and elder of the Chumash Nation,” as saying that “there have been repeated attempts by the American Indian community to shed the 49er/Prospector Pete imagery”; and that “CSULB officials once offered to change the school symbol [….] ‘This [Prospector Pete statue] is a very offensive symbol to us. It causes deep pain because the 49ers wiped out our ancestors, cultures and languages with the genocides. We personally have long wished it would be torn down.'”

Is this a topic worthy of further discussion? Based on my experience putting together this piece, it might be supposed that the university says “no,” as neither Sanchez nor several other CSULB officials contacted replied to the Long Beach Post‘s numerous requests for comment.