Skokie To Redesign Village Seal, Remove Image Of Native American Man

SKOKIE, IL — Skokie should scrap its seal and design a new one that does not have a Native American man on it, a village committee recently recommended.

According to village staff, the seal was first adopted in the late 1940s following the change of the town's name from Niles Center to Skokie, which comes from the Potawatomi word for “marsh."

The seal features the profile of a man in a headdress in front of an arrowhead and above the year of the village's founding and the motto, "Village of Vision."

Last year, the village board's Human Relations Commission formed a committee to review the appropriateness of the seal, collect feedback about it and provide a recommendation.

The committee was chaired by Maria Monastero Bueno, who also chairs the Human Relations Commission, according to a statement from village staff.

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Monastero Bueno partnered with Mitchell Museum of the American Indian Executive Director Kim Vigue and Jasmine Gurneau, a Skokie resident and the director of Native American & Indigenous Affairs at Northwestern University.

According to commission minutes, Monastero Bueno said several meetings with members of the Native community made it clear that the seal needed to be "addressed and studied."

The seal review committee invited representatives of 17 Native community groups in the Chicago area to a listening session in December. Following that meeting, attendees drafted a report and submitted it to Village Manager John Lockerby.

"The idea was to use Native American artists to draft a new seal that incorporated specific themes," according to the minutes from the commission's February meeting. "It was agreed the seal not be a human image, that it represented nature specific to Skokie and the seal incorporates the theme of our community in the past, present and future."

A copy of the report is available online. The committee did not publish minutes of its meetings, but staff said its members unanimously recommended that village officials draw up a new seal.

According to the staff statement, the committee made the following determinations:

"Peer-reviewed research shows that Native mascots and imagery can have a harmful effect on Native communities and the greater population," "The Native imagery used in the seal is not a culturally or historically accurate representation of the Native people who inhabited the area that is now Skokie," and "Some members of the Native community and the greater community find the seal image and its depiction of a Native person to be inappropriate."

According to village staff, the committee to develop a new seal will be led by Monastero Bueno, Gurneau and Village Trustee Khem Khoeun, the board liaison to the commission.

Native American imagery is also featured on the Skokie Police Department's logo, although in a different fashion than its badges in years past. Niles West High School dropped its "Indians" mascot in 2001. And a Skokie local little league team changed its name from the "Indians" in 2021.

Related: Parents Petition Skokie Indians Little League Team To Change Name