As schools face calls to drop Native American mascots, some could lose state money

It was at a high school baseball game in 2019 that Becky Gaither's quiet resentment was transformed into action. The mother of three, who grew up in the Seattle area and traces her ancestry to the Cowichan tribe of the Pacific Northwest, was there to see her son on the field for South Point High in Belmont, N.C., "Home of the Red Raiders."

As the game got heated, so did the taunts from fans for the rival school, Stuart W. Cramer. It wasn't long before all of the most cliched Native American caricatures and stereotypes came out, she says: the hand-over-mouth war whoop, the "tomahawk chop" and "twirling around in a circle like a war dance."

Of course Gaither, who had been living in North Carolina for some three decades, was aware of the and calling for the Red Raider mascot to be retired.