University kills Prospector Pete mascot because of supposed genocide during the Gold Rush

California State University, Long Beach, is abandoning its longtime Prospector Pete mascot amid recent claims that the Gold Rush represents a time of racism and repression for indigenous people.

The university announced it will no longer use its original mascot and will allow students to vote for a replacement in May, or ditch the idea of a mascot altogether, according to a report by Fox News.

“It is time that we evolve our traditions to reflect what our campus is today and what it will be in the future,” the university said on its webpage for the Prospector Pete mascot.

Prospector Pete became the mascot for the university when it opened in 1949 because founding President Pete Peterson said he had “struck the gold of education” in creating the university.

But now the university has disowned its heritage, claiming the Gold Rush was “a time in history when the indigenous peoples of California endured subjugation, violence and threats of genocide.”
“We have evolved from Prospector Pete. We are more than one mascot. We are the Beach. A model of diversity, success and relevance,” the university added.

Therefore, the university will officially retire the Prospector Pete mascot.

The move is part of a more recent trend at the university, according to Fox News. In 2014, the university’s athletics department began moving away from its forty-niner and Prospector Pete nicknames in favor of the more generic and inoffensive “Beach.”

University President Jane Close Conoley will have the final say in determining the mascot replacement, which will be revealed in late spring 2019, according to the university’s website.

In September 2018, the university removed its Prospector Pete statue from its prominent place on campus, where it had stood for over half a century. The statue was unveiled in 1967, showing a bearded man sitting on a rock, without any identifiable mining or panning tools.

A student-run nonprofit association organized under the university umbrella, Associated Students Inc., instigated the removal of the statue, passing a resolution in March 2018 claiming that before the Gold Rush “the people of the Tongva Tribe were enslaved by settlers to build missions in the greater Los Angeles area.”

It also asserted that more than 80% “of the Indigenous American population were killed in the twenty years following the gold rush era due to malnutrition, enslavement, murder.”

The resolution indicated that the campus itself is located on an ancient village named Puvungna, on sacred land formerly belonging to the indigenous Tongva people, and argued in favor of a plaque as a replacement for the statue, to serve as “a recognition of our shameful previous association with prospectors.”

In a wake of the decision to do away with Prospector Pete, the university is asking students to vote on a new mascot. Choices include Pelicans, Sharks, Stingrays, Giraffes, and even a no-mascot option simply called, “the Beach.”

The options came from hundreds of submissions provided by students, Genesis Jara, president of Associated Students, told the Mercury News of San Jose.

This isn’t the first time a college campus has decided a long-cherished university mascot was suddenly offensive. In March, students at George Washington University narrowly voted to call on the school’s administration to remove the Colonials moniker from its athletics team.

An online petition signed by several hundred George Washington students described the Colonials mascot as “extremely offensive,” even though the university has carried the athletic nickname since 1926 and the mascot since 1948.

Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.

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