Pawtuckets, Mascots, and the Red and Black

Girls' Cross Country race, 2021

In the summer of 2020 the Winchester (MA) School Committee voted to retire the “Sachem” as Winchester High School’s mascot. Sachems were one of several Algonquian terms for a group or tribal leader, with a Sachem typically serving as the paramount leader of several groups. Controlling current-day Winchester and the surrounding region, the Pawtuckets were one of several groups (tribes) who lived in eastern Massachusetts prior to seventeenth-century epidemics and European settlement. While Native Americans never left Massachusetts and New England, settler actions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries severely diminished and hid their presence by the nineteenth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both the rise of team sports and the success of the Carlisle (PA) Indian Industrial School football team led professional and amateur teams to use Indians and Indian terms as mascots. Following local examples such as the Boston (Atlanta) Braves (from 1912) and Boston (Washington) Redskins (from 1933) and the town’s own Native American history, Winchester teams started to use Indian-related names, alongside others. Over the 1950s, the “Sachem” became cemented as Winchester High School’s mascot, developing into one of the town’s traditions in subsequent decades.

While some educational institutions began to move away from Indian mascots as early as the 1970s, local mascots were harder to dislodge, with the School Committee voting to retain its usage in 2000. With the 2020 removal of the “Sachem,” as people should not be a team’s mascot, Winchester High School instituted in 2021 the former mascot’s colors - the Red and Black - as its new mascot.

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