Should a Native American in a loincloth be on NYC’s seal?

It features a Native American in a loincloth and an early American settler holding a long rope with a loop on its end, and for more than a century, it has served as the official seal of New York City — but perhaps not for much longer.

Like the rest of the country, New York is engaged in a heated discussion about race and societal bias, a discourse that has spilled onto the streets in the form of protests, graffiti and, for a while, an encampment next to City Hall.

This month, Mayor Bill de Blasio helped paint “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. He has appointed a commission that will reconsider some of the city’s statues. And last week, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her connections to the eugenics movement.

Now the mayor said he would favor re-examining New York City’s seal.

“It’s the kind of thing a commission should look at carefully and decide if it still makes sense for the 21st century,” de Blasio said Monday.

New York City’s seal dates to a 1914 city commission charged with choosing a seal and flag for the newly unified five boroughs.

The beavers on the seal represent the fur trade, and the barrels of flour nod at the city’s “early, short-lived monopoly on milling in the 17th century,” according to the New-York Historical Society. Windmills were a common sight in early New York City.

The official New York City website describes the long rope with the loop at its end as a “plummet,” or a tool used to measure the depth of water. In some depictions of the seal, the loop looks more like a stone. It bears little resemblance to the former seal of the village of Whitesboro, which featured a depiction of a white man throttling a Native American.

The mayor addressed the seal on Monday in response to a question from a radio station WCBS reporter who had been waiting for de Blasio’s daily news conference to begin and noticed the city seal.

“This is a little bit out of left field here,” the reporter, Rich Lamb, said, as he described the seal. “It’s a man in pantaloons holding a rope with a loop at the end of it, presumably a trap or something, and then on the other side of the windmill and a couple of barrels, you have a Native American who’s holding a bow.

“I’m just wondering whether you or your commission or somebody is taking a look at that seal and wondering how relevant it is these days.”

“From time to time, I’ve looked at it. It’s a good question,” de Blasio responded. “It’s something of an unclear image, what it’s saying to us.”

Robert Snyder, the Manhattan borough historian and professor emeritus of American studies at Rutgers University, said it was important for New Yorkers to critically examine historical artifacts, so they could “gauge the distance between the past and the present.”

But he was skeptical of the need to alter the city seal.

“I don’t think we always need to change every inherited symbol from the past to learn something about ourselves,” Snyder said. “By erasing the old seal, we lose the ability to understand the similarities and the differences between the past and the present.”