This is the wackiest notion I’ve come across in quite some time.

In this story posted by the little newspaper/website named the Long Beach Post, a recent candidate for student body president at Long Beach State has called for the school to dump its Prospector Pete mascot and also change the nickname for the school’s sports teams away from “49ers” –  because they are “culturally insensitive.”

Sigh.

Long Beach State is known as the 49ers because of the year the school was founded, 1949, and because of the California Gold Rush associated with that year a century before.

It would appear that the basis of “insensitivity” is American Indians “displaced” by all these U.S. citizens who flooded the state back then.

A couple of points.

1. Native Americans were not living in some idealized state before the Gold Rush of 1848-49. Spain (then Mexico) had been in hat is no the state of California for centuries, and the abuse of indigenous peoples in the state was fairly far advanced before U.S. citizens were on the scene in any numbers.

2. The Gold Rush associated with the 49ers was almost entirely in the north of the state. Whatever issues native Americans had with the prospectors were nowhere near Long Beach.

3. Humans have migrated in waves all over the world for thousands of years. The Germans who overran Rome had, in turn, been pushed towards Rome by other people coming off the steppes of Asia. It happens. People arrive in a location in greater numbers or with better hardware, and the people who were there before get displaced. Happened to the Celts in Britain and France, and … well, we could cite hundreds of examples, and if you start trying to decide who “owned” what tract of land and when, that’s an endless and pointless exercise.

The woman complaining about the 49ers name and the logo Prospector Pete suggests that Long Beach State become the Tongva Rebels, in honor of the Indian tribe that may have lived in the area of Long Beach State at some point in time … and that Prospector Pete be replaced by “Toypurina, a female leader of a Tongva rebellion” against “occupiers” who probably were Spanish or Mexican, and not representatives of the Cal State educational system.

Anyway, this woman must have been really bored when she came up with this. Or looking for attention, and here I am writing about it.

Prospector Pete is a semi-lame mascot, I will grant you, even with a recent makeover.

And if you want to sit around and think this through, and not try to foist the “Tongva Rebels” and their queen “Toypurina” on the school … the 49ers were a largely Northern California concept. The Gold Rush happened in the northern half of California. Not in SoCal.

If the woman wants to get some traction on a potential mascot/nickname change, perhaps she should focus on the NorCal connotations of “49ers.” (See: Montana, Joe.)

That might actually get the attention of a few sensible people.