Guilty.
Not, if it please the court, for intentionally disparaging Native Americans by playing on high school teams nicknamed “Indians.” (Or working on the school newspaper called “The Pow Wow.”) I plead youth. I was 15—and white—and didn’t give a second thought to how that mascot landed with Indigenous People.
Sixty years on, the knuckleheads who are moaning about Cleveland’s baseball team announcing it will ditch the “Indians” moniker—and Washington’s footballers no longer branding themselves with an out-and-out slur—have no such excuse. We all have had plenty of time, and exposure to protests regarding racial awareness, to acquire an education in the matter.
Still, Atlanta clings to the name “Braves,” Kansas City to “Chiefs,” Chicago to “Blackhawks.” A recent fivethirtyeight.com analysis of MascotDB by Hope Alchin found that, while the numbers are decreasing, 1,232 high school teams continue to use Native American names, including 411 Indians, 107 Chiefs or Chieftains and 45 holding onto Washington’s recently discarded name.
“Why are teams so reluctant to let go of their Native mascots?” Alchin wanted to know. “Research has repeatedly shown the mental harm that these icons inflict on Indigenous people, and tribal leaders continue to speak out against teams’ disrespect and appropriation. Finally, in 2020, it seems that broader public opinion might be catching up. Football fandom, perhaps, has not.”
Four states—California, Maine, Oregon and Wisconsin—have laws or department of education policies prohibiting Native American mascots in public schools. Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and Nebraska have proposed embargos and, in 2005, the NCAA implemented a de facto ban focused on colleges whose mascots were deemed “hostile or abusive.”
That year, Ronald Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, declared that the “use of American Indian mascots as symbols in schools and university athletic programs is particularly troubling because schools are places of learning. These mascots are teaching stereotypical, misleading and too often insulting images of American Indians. These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students; they are sending the wrong message to all students.”
I finally had begun to learn a few things way back in 1972, when I was assigned by Newsday to report on Dartmouth College’s decision, in the face of building Native American complaints, to change its athletic nickname from “Indians” to the school color, Big Green.
Dartmouth’s founder in 1770, Eleazar Wheelock, had claimed his school was for “the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land…and also of English Young and any others.” By 1972, though, Dartmouth was struggling to recruit Native American students—aiming for an increase of just 15 for each class of 800 students—while confronted with its few Indigenous students’ anger over the school mascot, who wore war paint and did sideline dances for first downs.
A Dartmouth professor at the time, Jeffrey Hart, claimed he was mystified by the fuss, since “I never regarded the Indian symbol as a racial slur, and I only marvel at those who do so, or at least say they do.”
Among non-Native Americans, a tone-deaf pretzel logic persists that such mascots, rather than an insult, are an “honor” to Indigenous People. As historian Jennifer Guiliano, author of the 2015 book “Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America,” put it, “It’s really hard for Native communities to look past that this…is a celebration of the dying of their ancestors….It is celebrating extermination and colonization.”
My freshman-year teams, when I was an “Indian,” were at Alemany High, opened five years earlier in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. (My family moved the next year and I became a far less-offensive “Eagle.”)
Why the administrative muck-and-mucks came up with that mascot is beyond me. The school was named for a Spanish-born missionary who became Bishop of California a century earlier; nothing to do with Native American history in the area, unless one considers the unpleasant narrative detailed by the Native American Heritage Commission:
“Despite romantic portraits of California missions, they were essentially coercive religious labor camps organized primarily to benefit the colonizers….to first militarily intimidate the local Indians with armed Spanish soldiers who always accompanied the Franciscans in their missionary efforts.”
It turns out that, at some point over the past half-century, Alemany changed its school colors and its mascot. From garnet and grey to cardinal and gold (questionable upgrade, but OK) and from Indians to….Warriors?! That really is just another term to caricature Native Americans as crazed, wild aggressors.
And doesn’t sound so innocent.