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It’s no secret how President Donald Trump feels about sports teams turning away from Native American mascots. He’s repeatedly called for the return of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, claiming their recent rebrands were part of a “woke” agenda designed to erase history.

But one surprising team has really gotten the president’s attention: the Massapequa Chiefs.

The Long Island school district has refused to change its logo and name under a mandate from New York state banning schools from using team mascots appropriating Indigenous culture. Schools were given two years to rebrand, but Massapequa is the lone holdout, having missed the June 30 deadline to debut a new logo.

The district lost an initial lawsuit it filed against the state but now has the federal government on its side. In May, Trump’s Department of Education intervened on the district’s behalf, claiming the state’s mascot ban is itself discriminatory.

Massapequa’s Chiefs logo — an American Indian wearing a yellow feathered headdress — is expected to still be prominently displayed when the fall sports season kicks off soon, putting the quiet Long Island hamlet at the center of a political firestorm.

The district is now a key “battleground,” said Oliver Roberts, a Massapequa alum and the lawyer representing the school board in its fresh lawsuit against New York claiming that the ban is unconstitutional and discriminatory.

The Trump administration claims New York’s mascot ban violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from engaging in discriminatory behavior based on race, color or national origin — teeing up a potentially precedent-setting fight.

The intervention on behalf of Massapequa follows a pattern for a White House that has aggressively applied civil rights protections to police “reverse discrimination” and coerced schools and universities into policy concessions by withholding federal funds.

“Our goal is to assist nationally,” Roberts said. “It’s us putting forward our time and effort to try and assist with this national movement and push back against the woke bureaucrats trying to cancel our country’s history and tradition.”

Trump reignites Redskins debate

When the NFL team in Washington, DC, retired its Redskins name amid social pressure at the height of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, other sports teams with similar names followed suit. Cleveland’s professional baseball team, the Indians, became the Guardians in 2021, and the ripple effect reached amateur teams, too.

Joining New York, 10 other states now have legislation restricting Native mascots in schools.

Nearly 30 schools abandoned Native-themed mascots in 2020, according to the National Congress of American Indians, which has opposed the monikers for years. Still, more than 1,500 schools nationwide continue to use names affiliated with Indigenous culture.

The debate was reignited last month, when Trump posted on Truth Social that Washington’s NFL team, now the “Commanders,” should revert to the Redskins — a dictionary-defined slur — and threatened to hold up the franchise’s new stadium deal on federal land in DC.

For now, plans for the Commanders to play at the old RFK Stadium site appear to be moving forwad after the DC Council approved the deal earlier this month. A second vote in September is expected to similarly green-light the project, making it unlikely Trump could unilaterally derail it.

The Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, DC, is seen on December 22, 2024. Tom Brenner/Getty Images/File

But the fight is ongoing in Long Island, home to several of New York’s Algonquin tribes. Massapequa first got the president’s attention in the spring, when the school district board publicly appealed to Trump for help saving the Chiefs mascot. It worked.

“I agree with the people in Massapequa, Long Island, who are fighting furiously to keep the Massapequa Chiefs logo on their Teams and School,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in April, adding that he asked Secretary of Education Linda McMahon “to fight for the people of Massapequa on this very important issue.”

He posted a photo of himself holding up a “Massapequa Chiefs” sweatshirt with the logo printed largely on the front.

McMahon visited Massapequa a month later to announce the Department of Education’s investigation found that the New York Department of Education had violated Title VI with its Native American mascot ban. McMahon compared Indigenous mascots to team names like the Vikings, Fighting Irish and the Cowboys, arguing that New York’s ban unfairly singled out Native Americans.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon holds a jersey during a news conference at Massapequa High School on May 30. Johnny Milano/The New York Times/Redux

The case was then referred to the Department of Justice in June.

But JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York Education Department, said in a statement that there’s been no further action since then, adding that it has been clear from the outset that “this ‘investigation’ was nothing but political theater.”

The US Department of Education did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

O’Hare said the New York Education Department “intends to use all of the tools available to ensure the implementation of this regulation,” adding that the district could lose state funding or see board members removed for noncompliance.

‘Hurtful and stereotypical’

The vast majority of the roughly 22,000 people in Massapequa are White, according to census records, and the county it’s located, Nassau, went for Trump in 2024. The Baldwin brothers and Jerry Seinfeld are among the famous alums of the high school. Long Island’s two Indian reservations — the Shinnecock and Poospatuck territories — are within an hour’s drive.

The tribes have publicly supported New York’s ban on mascots with Native culture in the past. Asked whether Massapequa’s board of education communicated with leaders from those local tribes, Roberts, the lawyer representing the school district, said, “We have engaged Native American groups of many different tribes and backgrounds.” He declined to specify whether that included those from the surrounding Long Island area.

Germain Smith, a former Shinnecock tribal leader who served on an advisory council of Indigenous leaders for the New York Education Department said he personally communicated with state tribes before recommending the mascot ban.

“There was a consensus that it was hurtful and stereotypical,” he said.

A mural of a chief on the wall of a parking lot next to Massapequa High School on April 22. Heather Khalifa/The New York Times/Redux

In Massapequa, the Chiefs logo with the profile of an American Indian in a headdress is an inaccurate depiction of the actual culture and appearance of the Long Island tribes, according to John Kane, a member of the Mohawk tribe who also served on the advisory council of Indigenous leaders.

The host of a radio show in Western New York, Kane has challenged those who say the mascots are intended to honor Indigenous people by asking how they would hypothetically apply the same concept to the Black community.

“I don’t know what image you would use to represent your honoring of Blacks as a mascot,” Kane said, adding that coming up with an inoffensive name would also be a hurdle.

“But even if you could get over those two things,” Kane continued, “how do you think Black people would feel about White people claiming their identity just because it’s their school mascot? … I mean, can you imagine a stadium full of people in blackface because they decided that was their mascot?”

Native and Indigenous groups

But Roberts pointed to another organization that has been vocal for years in wanting to keep Native mascots — the Native American Guardians Association, or NAGA. Several of its members joined McMahon in Massapequa during her visit in May.

The group’s sole issue has been lobbying for the preservation of Native mascots with an “educate, not eradicate” motto. Washington’s past Redskins logo, for example, “was meant to honor. It represents the warrior spirit, the strength, and the pride of our people,” NAGA said in a statement.

Members of the organization’s board declined to be interviewed outside of providing a statement.

In recent years, prominent Native groups and activists, including Indigenous leaders in New York, have questioned NAGA’s legitimacy as the organization’s representatives appeared in places like Massapequa to protest Indigenous mascot bans. The group is often cited by sympathetic local non-Natives as the example of American Indian support for the monikers.

NAGA first rose to prominence as a fierce backer of the Washington Redskins under previous owner Daniel Snyder, a businessman who for years resisted any name change.

NAGA, which received federal nonprofit status in May 2017, is funded through private donations, which has fueled speculation among other Native American activists that the group was accepting money from Snyder. NAGA’s website says it “received ZERO funding from Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins franchise or any of its charitable divisions or foundations.”

The organization claimed to represent “everyday American Indian families who feel pride seeing our names and faces honored” with more than 84,000 members — a number NAGA said represents those who request membership from the organization’s website and follow their social media pages.

NAGA has repeatedly pointed to a 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey and 2016 Washington Post poll, both of which said roughly 90% of American Indians supported the Redskins name.

But a more recent 2020 study from academics at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, had different results after surveying more than 1,000 Native Americans representing all 50 states and nearly 150 tribes.

Roughly half of the participants said they were offended by the Redskins’ name. Moreover, of those polled for the study, 57% who strongly identify with being Native American were found to be deeply insulted by caricatures of Native American culture.

From Redskins to Skyhawks

About five hours north of Massapequa, the Oriskany school district in Central New York unveiled the logo for its new mascot, the Skyhawks, at a ceremony in February.

Like in other New York school districts, the decision to do away with a beloved decades-old mascot — in this case, the Redskins — was controversial. But unlike Massapequa, Oriskany ultimately complied with New York’s mandate. Options for the new moniker were put to a vote, and Skyhawks — for the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk fighter jet that was on the USS Oriskany aircraft carrier — was the winner.

The unveiling of the new Oriskany moniker at Bernie Block Field on June 10. John Clifford/Sentinel Media Company

“It was kind of forced upon the district,” said Oriskany Superintendent Gregory Cuthbertson. “I just made sure that our community was part of the process, and I wanted to make sure that I heard everybody’s voice and the different perspectives.”

“But you have some people who would still say that they’re a Redskin and they’ll always be a Redskin,” he added.

Cuthbertson said the rebrand cost Oriskany about $50,000. New York didn’t provide the schools that had Native mascots additional funds to replace them, and Cuthbertson said the money went toward new uniforms and alterations to the gymnasium, athletic fields, scoreboards and even official letterheads.

Other districts have said changing mascots will be significantly costlier. Roberts said Massapequa estimated a mascot rebrand would cost about $1 million, and a neighboring district in Long Island, Connetquot, calculated its switch from “Thunderbirds” would cost up to $23 million, according to The New York Post.

But Connetquot then struck a compromise with the state Board of Regents in late June that would allow the district to shorten its name to “T-Birds” in exchange for dropping ongoing legal action against the state logo ban, according to The Post.

Four other districts received an extension to rebrand because they were found to be “acting in good faith to eliminate the use of prohibited mascots,” said O’Hare, the New York Education Department spokesperson. Massapequa’s request for more time was denied because “it has made no efforts to implement the regulation and has, at times, suggested that it has no intention of complying,” O’Hare added.

The coming legal fight

The federal Department of Education announced last month that it had also opened a civil rights probe into Connetquot school district “for reportedly working to erase its Native American mascot and imagery, the Thunderbirds,” though the school was under pressure from the state to comply with its mandate.

The department hasn’t yet opened investigations into the other districts, such as Oriskany, that changed mascots under instruction from the state.

Deborah Hellman, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the case for overturning the New York ban based on a Title VI civil rights violation is “extraordinarily weak.”

The statute forbids discrimination against individuals on the basis of race, color or national origin. Because a ban on Native American mascots does not involve treating any person differently from another, the only way for Massapequa and the federal government to state a claim would be to show that removing Native American mascots creates an environment “that is severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” to Native American students.

But because so many in the Indigenous community have said they consider keeping the mascots to be the real offense, meeting the court’s “objectively offensive” standard is likely to be “an insurmountable hurdle,” Hellman said.

Just 10 years ago, the Department of Education under the Obama administration opened a similar Title VI investigation after a school near Buffalo was accused of violating students’ civil rights by not taking down its Redskins mascot. Then, the federal government’s interference resulted in the district removing the logo.

The statute is now being applied in a completely different way, Hellman said.

“The Department of Education is using Title VI quite aggressively,” she said, adding that “the alleged victims of discrimination, like the conception of what is an instance of discrimination, has shifted.”