Aniak basketball still plays as the Halfbreeds

Aniak's boys basketball team still takes the court as the Halfbreeds, a name students chose nearly five decades ago to describe the community's mixed Alaska Native and white ancestry.

The nickname appears on the team's current schedule and roster. Its continued use is not the result of a newly documented vote or controversy. It is a local tradition that remains visible in contemporary school athletics.

The word is widely understood as derogatory elsewhere. In Aniak, published histories describe a different local meaning. Students adopted the shared nickname in the late 1970s, replacing Apostles for boys teams and Angels for girls teams. A 2005 account described a school symbol pairing an Alaska Native man carrying a spear with a white man carrying a rifle.

More recent reporting on Alaska school mascots likewise traces the name to Aniak's history of intermarriage and the student decision that brought the boys' and girls' teams under one identity.

That history does not determine how every resident understands the word today. It does explain why a name that can sound startling outside Aniak has endured there: it began as a student-chosen statement about the people who made up the community, and it remains on the basketball schedule decades later.