Citation:

DeLoria, Philip J. "Mascots and Other Public Appropriations of Indians and Indian Culture by Whites." Encyclopedia of North American Indians. 1996 ed. History Study Center. ProQuest Information and Learning. Waunakee High School LMTC. 17 Oct. 2006 .

Mascots and Other Public Appropriations of Indians and Indian Culture by Whites

Philip J. Deloria (Lakota ancestry), University of Colorado at Boulder

When the Florida State Seminoles football team rushes onto the field, it follows the university's mascot--a stereotyped Indian warrior with colored turkey feathers and a flaming spear, which is planted in the end zone with a whoop. Florida State's fans, many in Indian costume themselves, then proceed to chant a faux-Indian melody, swinging their arms in a synchronized "tomahawk chop." The Florida State experience is a common one. "Indians"--in a variety of flavors ranging from warriors, red men, braves, and chiefs to "Fighting Sioux" and "Apaches" have been the most consistently popular mascot in American athletic history.

The University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse first named its teams Indians in 1909. In 1912, the Boston Braves baseball team followed suit, and three years later, Cleveland's baseball club also became the Indians. During the 1920s, many college and professional teams-- including teams at Stanford, Dartmouth, and the University of Illinois, as well as the Chicago Black Hawks hockey club--adopted Indian names. The practice filtered down to thousands of high schools and junior high schools seeking institutional identities. Today, professional sports boasts five major clubs that use "the Indian" as a name and mascot. In addition to Chicago and Cleveland, Atlanta has the Braves, Kansas City has the Chiefs, and Washington, D.C., has the Redskins. While some colleges and universities--including Stanford and Dartmouth--have dropped their Indian logos and mascots, many more continue to insist that their use of Indian stereotypes is harmless fun.

Americans' embrace of Indian mascots was only part of a broad, early-twentieth-century primitivist nostalgia that stamped Indian imagery on a nickel, positioned baskets and pottery in the "Indian corners" of arts-and-crafts revival homes, and permeated the rituals of Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls. At the turn of the century, many Americans perceived that the story they had been telling themselves about their origins and character--one of frontier struggle between bold adventurers and savage Indians--had lost much of its cultural power as historians and critics declared the frontier "closed." On the contemporary side of this closed frontier, Americans saw the modern world--a place of cities, immigrants, technology, lost innocence, and limited opportunity. Many Americans used a ritualized set of symbols--cowboys, Indians, scouts, and pioneers--to evoke the bygone "American" qualities of the frontier era: "authenticity," nature, community, and frontier hardiness. Through summer camp and wilderness outings in "nature," touristic contact with the "authenticity" of Indian primitivism in the southwestern deserts, and an increased emphasis on rugged, character-building athletic competition, they sought to reimagine "modern" compensatory experiences that might take the place of the now-lost "frontier struggle."

Bringing Indians--potent symbols both of a nostalgic, innocent past and of the frontier struggle itself--into the athletic stadium helped evoke the mythic narrative being metaphorically replayed on the field. It was no accident that many other mascots-- mustangs, pioneers, and so on--were also prominent characters in the athletic rendering of the national story. Indian chiefs and braves represented the aggressiveness and fighting spirit that was supposed to characterize good athletic teams. This racial stereotyping justified an American history in which peaceable cowboys and settlers simply defended themselves against innately aggressive Indians in a defensive conquest of the continent. As mascots celebrated "Indian" ferocity and martial (read also athletic) skill, they were at the same time trophies of Euro-American colonial superiority: "Indians were tough opponents, but 'we' prevailed. Now we 'honor' them (and in doing so, celebrate ourselves)."

The performative aspects of mascot ritual bring this American narrative to life, and demonstrate to participants that their myths, enacted both on the athletic field and in the stands, remain valid. The virulent response to Indian protests against Indian mascots demonstrates the deep emotional investment many Americans have made both in their imagining of Indian people as ahistorical symbols and in their sports affiliations. In mass society, athletic spectacles have become a deeply ingrained tradition to which many Americans turn for personal and social identities. The Florida State Seminole, then, signifies not only the frontieresque American character sought by early-twentieth-century fans, but also a more contemporary longing for the relative purity, simplicity, and tradition of the early twentieth century itself.

Indian people have reacted to the use of Indian mascots differently. While many native people expressed dismay, others saw athletic rituals as truly honoring Indians. American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Dennis Banks, for example, has claimed that, until the late 1950s, Stanford and other schools promoted "positive, respectful images" of Indians. According to Banks, during the 1960s fans became more involved in a disrespectful, racist spectacle, and clubs expanded their mascot activities. In Atlanta, for example, "Chief Noca-homa" came out of a tipi and danced wildly each time the Braves hit a home run. So while some Indians have always found the very idea of mascots offensive, others do not find it so even today, and still others join Banks in being most concerned about the positive or negative quality of the stereotyping.

In 1972, Banks and other media-conscious Indian activists forcibly brought the mascot issue into public discussion. AIM's Russell Means threatened the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves baseball clubs with lawsuits, and delegations from AIM, Americans for Indian Opportunity, and the National Congress of American Indians met with Washington Redskins owner William Bennett to ask him to change the team's name. Aside from cosmetic changes to mascot rituals and team songs, however, these efforts proved unsuccessful. Although Indians continued to protest, the effort to eliminate Indian mascots lost momentum for almost twenty years. Then, in October 1991, the Atlanta Braves played the Minnesota Twins in baseball's World Series. Just a few months later, in January 1992, the Washington Redskins competed in football's Super Bowl. Both events took place in Minneapolis, a city with a high concentration of Indian people in a state that had been attempting to eliminate Indian mascots at the college and high school levels. This convergence of place, people, and issue launched a series of protests and an often rancorous national dialogue about the appropriateness of Indian mascots in American sports.

The practice of appropriating Indians as mascots, good-luck charms, or standard-bearers for nostalgia and national anxiety has not been confined to the ballpark of football field. In the late 1960s, countercultural rebels used a primitivist, antimodern version of "the Indian" to criticize American society for its perceived lack of community, spiritual values, and ecological sensibility. Environmental activists, for example, appropriated the famous "Chief Seattle speech" ("This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth"). Many Americans took these words, despite their non-Indian origins in a Southern Baptist-sponsored film script, as a representative "Indian" statement about natural balance and harmony. A well-known 1972 antipollution campaign featuring a teary-eyed Iron Eyes Cody contemplating roadside litter worked in a similar way: as American's "first environmentalists," Indians made admirable mascots for the modern environmental movement.

Like environmentalists, communitarians also borrowed the trappings of native cultures-- tipis, clothing, newly constituted "family" kinship groupings, arts and crafts, and so on-- to construct and evoke closely knit communal ties. For many, taking on "Indianized" names like Moonflower and Dancing Bear seemed to be a good way to acquire premodern communal identities. Spiritual and psychedelic seekers sought out their own version of enlightened Indianness. Many followed Sun Bear, Rolling Thunder, and other shamanistic leaders who promised to teach "authentic" Indian practices. A 1972 paperback edition of Black Elk Speaks, for example, aimed specifically at this market, promised an account of a "personal vision that makes an LSD trip pale by comparison." Political radicals opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam appropriated nineteenth- century Indian leaders as ancestral rebels against American colonialism. On many walls, one could find a popular series of posters featuring Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud--representational mascots who signified the same type of rebellion political activists themselves sought to foment. Just as Indian athletic mascots contain multiple, overlapping meanings, all of these different forms of countercultural activity blended together as people imagined and appropriated new meanings for "Indians."

None of these ideas about Indians originated or were contained in a historical vacuum. The use of "Indians" as mascots for a nostalgic antimodernism has a long history in American culture. One can trace the 1960s counterculture back through the 1950s primitivism of beat intellectuals to the early-twentieth-century anti-modern criticism of New Mexico figures such as John Collier, D. H. Lawrence, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Likewise, the same set of ideas about Indian people resurfaced later, in the 1980s and 1990s, under the auspices of the New Age and men's movements. The continual use of Indianness as an important American symbol has raised serious questions and dilemmas for native people. Some Indians, for example, have left their communities and performed for white Americans a series of "positive" anti-modern roles- -spiritual "teacher," eco-guru, community sage--in order to acquire political and economic power. While such performances indeed generate valuable cultural capital, they also force Indian people to define themselves around non-Indian criteria. For other native people, it has become increasingly apparent that, in an age of mass communication, Indians need to exert some control over--or, at the very least, constantly challenge--any and all ways they are represented in public discourse. As a result, many Indian people--in contrast to many non-Indians--have found struggles against the use of Indian mascots and against the activities of non-Indian countercultural and New Age spokespersons to be critical and significant in terms of social, cultural, and political survival.

Selected Bibliography

Journal of Sport and Social Issues Dennis Banks Laurel R. Davis Synthia Syndnor Slowikowski Lawrence A. Wenner "Tribal Names and Mascots in Sports Issue," 17 (April 1993): 1-33

What's in a Nickname? Exploring the Jungle of College Athletic Mascots Ray Franks (Amarillo, Tex.: Ray Franks Publishing, 1982)