Schools should be places where students come to unlearn the stereotypes such mascots represent. The Indigenous portrait of the moment may be bellicose or ludicrous or romantic, but almost never is the portrait we see of Indian mascots a real person. Children's self images are very pliable and susceptible to external forces, especially if they are steeped in violent and negative images. Unfortunately, for Indigenous Peoples many false images of ethnicity still dominate the consciousness of the American psyche. I have found that many ethnic images have been manufactured and created in the image of other racial groups.
Many ethnic images distort reality while creating new and seductive realities of their own.
Students in schools cannot understand the realities of modern American life and the prospect for the next generations without understanding the popular images of the past and the present. Today, the perceptions and negative image of Indigenous Peoples by the American mascroculture that is a part of the history of the motion picture industry evolved from stereotypes created by the earliest settlers and chroniclers of this country. The contradictory views of Indigenous Peoples, sometimes gentle and good and sometimes terrifying and evil, stem from the Euro-American's ambivalence toward a race of people they attempted to destroy. The treatment of Indigenous Peoples in the movies is the final expression of white America's attempt to cope with its uneasiness in the face of a sense of cultural guilt. Therefore, Indian began as a white man's mistake, and became a white man's fantasy, because of white guilt, white fear, white insecurity.