Indian Mascots Research Articles

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

In Brief

American Indian mascots and legal status, intersectional leadership, and segregation: New research from the journals.

Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present MichaelHilger. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present Michael Hilger. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.It has been frustrating over the past thirty-five years, answering and re-answering the same questions regarding American Indians and the American Indian experience from students ranging in age from six to forty-five. Do Indians live in tipis? Why are Indians so mystical? What is in that 'peacepipe' they smoke? What's so bad about the 'Redskins' and other Indian mascots? And so on, ad nauseam. The age group really does not matter; I get the same litany of questions. Mindful of my promise to myself and to my American Indian friends to remain patient and to avoid overly sarcastic responses, I answer the mind-numbing questions with measured language delivered in sincerity-dipped tones. When I have asked non-Indian students what they think of American Indians, the sixyear-olds respond, They are mean! and the older students say, They love nature. So, through all we have been through as pluralistic and multicultural nation, it is not stretch to conclude that with regard to American Indians and their American experience, non-Indians remain, as group, pretty clueless. To what can we attribute this condition? We can blame school curricula that omit and distort the American Indian experience, and we can blame schoolteachers, prekindergartenthrough graduate school levels, who seldom speak of American Indians in the present tense. We can blame museum curators and scientists whose fascination with American Indian bones (just the bones) seems boundless. We can blame governmental policymakers who patronize in repetitive cycles, deciding whether to American Indians or to allow American Indians to help themselves. To the extent that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal governments are run by American Indians, we can blame American Indians themselves. Throughout my academic career, I have focused my attention on television and movie portrayals of American Indians for their complicit roles. As father, I grew frustrated during my kids' most impressionable years with having to explain Disney's (and other cartoonists') racist portrayals of American Indians. And I am not alone in this frustration with Hollywood. Over the years, researchers have detailed how films, television shows, and images in popular culture propagate and perpetuate this collective ignorance. From Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.'s seminal 1978 The White Man's Indian to Michael Ray FitzGerald's 2014 on Network TV, steady stream of studies analyzes this phenomenon from multiple angles-photographic images, images in popular culture (TV, film, advertisements, etc.), and school textbook treatment of the American Indian experience.To this flood of evidence, we can now add Michael Hilger's in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present. Hilger divides this very enlightening and useful study into two parts-a ninety-one-page critical examination of film portrayals of American Indians/First peoples and 337page encyclopedic listing, arranged alphabetically, a new canon of most sound films [and television films] and solid representation of silent films (and the rare animated short) in which and First characters play significant role (93). This listing is subdivided further in three appendices -Films by Nation (seventy-one different Nations/ Tribes listed), Image Portrayals of Americans (e.g., attack on fort, homosexuality, Native American activist, romance between mixed-blood American man and white woman, vengeance, etc.), and television films.The essence of Hilger's critical examination of cinematic portrayals of is reiteration of the well-documented dichotomous depiction of American Indians in films as either the Savage Savages or the Noble Savages. As Hilger succinctly states, With only minor variations. …

Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America by Jennifer Guiliano

Reviewed by: Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America by Jennifer Guiliano Joe Schiller Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America. By Jennifer Guiliano. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. ix + 165 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 cloth. At a glance, Jennifer Guiliano’s subtitle seems ambitious for such a concise book. Her impressive contextualization of the rise of Indian imagery in college athletic mascots and halftime shows, though, fulfills it well. Relying on archival sources from five universities formerly or currently using American Indian mascots, Guiliano argues that the creation of American Indian mascots and halftime spectacles was bound to the larger project of higher education. From the late nineteenth century to the early Cold War, the mascots’ establishment reinforced the modern university’s mission to develop white male middle-class athletic bodies in the service of community and country. The mascots sanitized narratives of colonial expansion in the face of anxieties about industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and wartime fitness for service. The work is organized chronologically in six chapters, each having a thematic emphasis. The first chapter chronicles the rapid rise in profitability of college football, showing how university identity became tied to the sport and its spectacle. The remaining chapters pan the scope of complicity in the Indian mascot’s invention and spread. The University of Illinois was historical ground zero, but the university’s influences were in the Great Plains. Progressive Era reformers like those with the Boy Scouts of America, often with connections to Dakota and Lakota people, trained early (white) Indian mascots in dance and costuming. The headdressed Plains Indian became the preferred image for mascots as far away as Stanford. Administrators, students, athletes, newspaper sportswriters, and band directors, among many others, embraced and disseminated ideas about community identities created through Indian mascotry. With variation between universities, the narratives were consistent: Indians could be present in the modern university when called forth by university mythology, or cued to perform by the band’s “sounds of ethnicity” (51), but must nobly cede university space to whites and remain in the past. Guiliano’s samples are well chosen for institutional diversity. However, she mischaracterizes the University of North Dakota as a “frontier agricultural school” (8) when, in fact, part of that university’s mission in creating an Indian identity was to distance itself from North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University), in addition [End Page 333] to assuaging fears about its proximity to the frontier and finding a suitable opponent to the agricultural college’s bison. This is a very minor oversight, but placing und’s founding in its liberal arts tradition might actually have helped her already cogent argument for und’s effort to appear more civilized to eastern audiences. Begun as Guiliano’s dissertation, Indian Spectacle is tightly argued and well researched, theoretically rigorous and clearly written. It makes no effort to engage contemporary debates about Indian mascots or their effects on contemporary American Indians, yet illustrates why, amid never-ending battles over their use, we should understand the historical circumstances that bore them. Joe Schiller Department of History University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

American Indian Permission for Mascots: Resistance or Complicity within Rhetorical Colonialism?

Abstract In 2005 the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned the use of American Indian symbols such as mascots, nicknames, and imagery in postseason sporting events. However, several universities successfully appealed this decision by demonstrating permission from eponymous American Indian nations. The focus of this essay is on the rhetorical implications of this permission argument within American Indian rhetoric about American Indian mascots, nicknames, and imagery. Drawing from the lens of rhetorical colonialism and an examination of the University of Utah Utes, I reveal how American Indian permission for mascots can be seen as upholding rather than challenging the system of colonialism through a form of self-colonization.

Indian-Styled Mascots, Masculinity, and the Manipulated Indian Body: Chief Illiniwek and the Embodiment of Tradition

In the creation and use of ethnicized sports team mascots such as those based on notions of the constructed idealized Indianness of Native Americans, white male identity is coupled to their use and presentation. From historical to contemporary contexts of such use, the body of the Indianized other as mascot becomes the contested site for these cultural appropriations. The manipulated body of the Indian mascot is presented for the public gaze in stark contrast to the reality of Native American lives and realities. The consumptive aspects of these public displays reinforce stereotypes grounded in historical experiences based on power and hierarchy by white males through popular culture media and texts. As a product of colonialized interactions, Indian mascots are presented as the preferred type of Indian allowed for public display rather than the reality of indigenous peoples such as Native Americans.

Race in American sports: essays

These essays examine the issue of race in college and professional sports, beginning with the affects of stereotypes on black female college athletes, and the self-handicapping of black male college athletes. Essayists discuss the use of American Indian mascots, the need to hire more NFL coaches of color, and ideals of black male masculinity in boxing--

Race, Place, and Biography at Play

Critical to the Indian mascot debate is the question of whether American Indians support their use. My research describes the diverse viewpoints of Northeast (NE) Ohio Natives, who live in a region with a prominent Indian mascot. I also explore a biographical pattern that maps onto respondents’ perspectives. Natives who lived in the urban setting exclusively ( urban only) are less likely to resist romantic portrayals of Indianness, such as those conveyed by Indian mascots. Natives who lived on or near a reservation prior to moving to NE Ohio ( reservation & city), however, are more likely to participate in protest against the region’s Indian imagery. I suggest that Natives with experiences in both environmental spheres have a heightened sensitivity to the harmful consequences of all Indian stereotypes.

Levels of Disagreement Over Contested Practices

This article unravels the tangled threads of argumentation that can be found in public debate over institutional practices. An analysis of letters to the editor (n=1551) written about two contested practices (American Indian mascots and the exclusive teaching of evolutionary theory) uncovers three analytically distinct levels of disagreement in the discourse. In the first level, partisans debate the effects of keeping or eliminating the contested practice. This disagreement over consequences leads to a second disagreement over how the social criteria for adjudicating controversies apply to the situation. This application level sits atop a third foundational level of the discourse where partisans debate the nature of social reality and the definition of the rules.

Unsettling America: the uses of Indianness in the 21st century

How Indianness Matters Now: An Introduction I. Old Battles 1. George Bush May Not Like Black People, But No One Gives a Damn About Indigenous Peoples: Visibility and Indianness after the Hurricanes 2. Embattled Images in the Marketplace: Commodity Racism, Media Literacy, and Struggles over Indianness II. Ongoing Wars 3. On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender, and American Indian Imagery in Sport 4. Defending Civilization from the Hostiles: Notes on the Ward Churchill Affair 5. Always Enemy Combatants? The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Native American Struggle for Humanity III. New Fronts 6. Borrowing Power: Racial Metaphors and the Struggle Against American Indian Mascots 7. Alter/native Heroes: Native American Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition 8. De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United States Reclaiming Indianness: Notes Toward a Conclusions

Book Review: American Indians and the Mass Media, edited by Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez

American Indians and the Mass Media. Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez, eds. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. 284 pp. $24.95 pbk.The first and only issue of the first English-language newspaper in America, Boston's Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, included several telling articles about American Indians. Some Indians were friendly (they were Christianized); others were threatening (they were miserable savages). In one form or another, these contrasting categories have been ingrained in popular culture from the colonial era the present, resulting in a misleading and harmful set of ideas and images about American Indians that this text sets out describe, deconstruct, and correct.Meta G. Carstarphen of the University of Oklahoma and John P. Sanchez of the University of Pennsylvania have put together a comprehensive overview of how American Indians have been portrayed in the mass media. The book is organized into four parts: Historical Analyses, Contemporary Viewpoints, Mediated Images and Social Expectations, and Interior Views and Authentic Voices. Each section includes articles by scholars, journalists, and activists, many of whom write-refreshingly-from American Indian perspectives. They offer research and commentaries on topics ranging from labels (Are they tribes? nations? Indians? Americans?) legal issues, such as tribal sovereignty and the continuing reliance on eighteenthand nineteenth-century stereotypes in news, advertising, and the movies.The purpose of the collection, co-editor Carstarphen writes, is to chart some of the seminal issues concerning American Indians and the media, from past portrayals contemporary icons, in a manner that explicates the new and the nuanced. In this, the book is largely successful, though the quality and significance of the articles varies and the collection would benefit from a more powerful and coherent theoretical foundation. That said, the best of these essays tackle important questions about race and representation in American culture and describe ongoing efforts carve out a place for Native American in contemporary media. Even in the twentieth-first century, as contributor Victoria E. Sanchez notes, American Indian voices and selfrepresentations are overshadowed by the pervasive and monolithic images perpetuated and reinforced by the institutions of the American mass media.One of the most interesting chapters is Lynn Klyde-Silverstein's analysis of the 2002 controversy surrounding the Fighting Whites, the deliberately provocative name of an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado. The team, which offered a clean-cut, smiling white man as its mascot, generated huge media coverage and allowed American Indians raise pointed questions about Indian mascots. Nevertheless, Klyde-Silverstein found that American Indians did not have the power frame the issue themselves and could not stop some readers and reporters from trivializing the topic. Through trivialization, she concludes, [Colorado] newspapers created a picture of American Indians as unimportant mainstream American life. …

Chasing Objectivity? Critical Reflections on History, Identity, and the Public Performance of Indian Mascots

Chasing Objectivity? Critical Reflections on History, Identity, and the Public Performance of Indian Mascots examines the role of the objectivity within the discipline of history via explorations of research into Native American sports mascots. I argue that Whiteness and other aspects of privilege are intimately, and publicly, entwined with the practice of “doing” history and that through explorations of historical narratives of race, we can reveal the limitations of the subjective-objective divide and the weight of our own privilege as academics and members of the broader American culture.

A Question of Honor: Chief Wahoo and American Indian Stereotype Activation Among a University Based Sample

ABSTRACT For over 30 years, a debate has raged regarding the appropriateness of high school, university, and professional sports teams using American Indian mascots. Proponents of such mascots state that these images are traditions and honor Indigenous People. Opponents of these images argue that the symbols foster stereotypes (Pewewardy, 1999) and negatively affect American Indians (Fryberg, Markus, Oyserman, & Stone, 2008). The purpose of this investigation was to examine if exposure to an American Indian mascot activated American Indian stereotypes in a predominately European American sample. In addition, we explored the role of personal motivation, prejudice level, and experience on stereotype activation. We found that the Chief Wahoo image (i.e., Cleveland Indian's logo) compared to other images activated negative, but not positive, American Indian stereotypes. Participants' motivation to control prejudice, prejudice level, and experience did not predict negative stereotype activation. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Do American Indian mascots = American Indian people? Examining implicit bias towards American Indian people and American Indian mascots

Empirical examinations of American Indian (AI) mascots have only recently entered into the discourse of mainstream psychology. The present studies examined implicit attitudes of non-AI people towards AI mascots and the extent to which they are related to attitudes towards AI people. Significant concordance was observed between negative bias toward AI mascots and AI people. Negative AI mascot bias also predicted stereotype-consistent expectations of an AI person. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots

Four studies examined the consequences of American Indian mascots and other prevalent representations of American Indians on aspects of the self-concept for American Indian students. When exposed to Chief Wahoo, Chief Illinwek, Pocahontas, or other common American Indian images, American Indian students generated positive associations (Study 1, high school) but reported depressed state self-esteem (Study 2, high school), and community worth (Study 3, high school), and fewer achievement-related possible selves (Study 4, college). We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.

The Elimination of Indigenous Mascots, Logos, and Nicknames: Organizing on College Campuses

The American Indian Quarterly 29.1&2 (2005) 156-177 [Access article in PDF] The Elimination of Indigenous Mascots, Logos, and Nicknames Organizing on College Campuses Sudie Hofmann In this article a brief history of activism on the American Indian mascot issue in Minnesota will be discussed with a specific focus on college campuses. The approaches taken at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) to create awareness on this issue and the successes and failures of actions taken to push for meaningful changes at the policy level at scsu and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) will also be discussed. Possible responses to arguments made by opponents of these changes as well as tactics for organizing on campuses that play schools with American Indian mascots and nicknames will be considered. Minnesota History The first documented evidence of activism on this issue in Minnesota was in 1967 when Mankato State University began a ten-year debate to change its logo and nickname from the Indians to the Mavericks.1 A new president and the efforts of university activists ended the debate in 1977 when the Indians became the Mavericks on July 1, 1977.2 Thus, the long history of activism on issues of American Indian mascots and nicknames in Minnesota seems to have found its roots on the Mankato campus, not far from the location of the largest federal execution in U.S. history when thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in 1862.3 The origins of activism on this issue in Minnesota sprang from the same geographic area that silenced the voices and extinguished the lives of American Indians a century earlier. There is little documentation of activism in Minnesota regarding American Indian mascots from 1977 until the summer of 1986 when [End Page 156] three students in the Department of Human Relations and Multicultural Education at scsu wrote letters to the Sauk Rapids Rice School District superintendent asking that the school board address the racist use of the school's nickname, "The Indians."4 The students asked that this issue be placed on the school board's next agenda, and a St. Cloud Times reporter at that meeting wrote a story about the controversy that was picked up by the Associated Press. Subsequently, the executive director of the Minnesota office of the American Civil Liberties Union decided to pursue some type of action to require that all Minnesota schools using American Indian mascots and nicknames cease this practice.5 In June of 1987, Phil St. John, a parent at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, challenged the school regarding its Indian nickname and logo. He formed Concerned American Indian Parents (caip) and successfully lobbied the school district to change the school nickname to Lakers in June of 1987.6 In 1988 the Minnesota Board of Education, with courageous leadership from Will Antell, White Earth Anishinaabe and State Director of Equal Educational Opportunities in the State Department of Education, worked collectively with the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, caip, and the Minnesota Dakotas Region of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, to draft a policy that required all school districts in Minnesota with American Indian nicknames to cease using them.7 Minnesota, specifically Minneapolis, is also the birthplace and national headquarters of the American Indian Movement (aim).8 In October of 1991, members of aim along with caip and American Indian dignitaries founded the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media.9 This coalition planned and coordinated protests in Minneapolis in October 1991 during the World Series and again in January of 1992 during the Super Bowl.10 Although the hundreds of demonstrators were derided and heckled by fans, the protests received national attention and helped sharpen the issues for many social justice activists in p–12 settings as well as on college campuses.11 Scholarly journal articles and commentaries in newspapers forced schools and universities to examine their level of commitment to issues of diversity and to creating more welcoming environments for students, staff, and teachers.12 A setback occurred in May of 1992 when the Minnesota Board...

Privilege at Play

Using legal scholar Felix Cohen’s philosophy of Indian rights, this article provides a broad interpretive analysis of the American Indian sport imagery issue. The article begins with an introduction to Cohen’s work and then elaborates on howWhite privilege operates within the culture. An analysis of various aspects of American Indian sport imagery follows, using a concept Cohen called “transcendental nonsense.” Finally, the article concludes with recommendations for how teachers, corporate executives, and government leaders canmove beyond the transcendental nonsense that American Indian mascots and team names represent to a better and more meaningful understanding for both American Indians and non–American Indians.

The Fancy Dance of Racializing Discourse

In the United States, the Euro-American practice of using stereotypical Native American imagery and dancing in association with athletic mascots continues despite vigorous protest. This suggests that American Indians occupy a different semiotic space than other U.S. minorities who are no longer subject to such explicit racializing representations. This article asks how and why non–Native Americans endow Indian mascots with significance. Analysis of the discursive formations associated with one such local practice—the dancing Indianmascot at the University of Illinois known as Chief Illiniwek—suggests that the dominant “race-making” population, who are themascot’s ardent supporters, create and passionately defend a “White public space” in which any contemporaryNativeAmerican presence is positioned as disorderly. This article seeks to advance the understanding of how racializing discourses create the cultural logic that stigmatizes and stereotypes (in this case) American Indian people.

Native Images in Schools and the Racially Hostile Environment

Many American Indian students attend schools that also have Indians as their mascots. They and their parents often find the stereotyped images that these schools use offensive and are searching for a legal challenge to the use of negative images of Indians by public schools. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any federally funded program. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has interpreted Title VI to prohibit schools from creating, encouraging, or tolerating a “racially hostile environment.” This essay addresses the legal standards for the application of the racially hostile environment regulations to schools that have American Indian mascots.

Putting the Moccasin on the Other Foot: A Media History of the “Fighting Whities”

The use of American Indian mascots or symbols for professional and collegiate sports teams has stirred considerable controversy in recent years because Native Americans in North America maintain that such symbols and mascots are stereotypical and dehumanizing. In 2002, an intramural basketball team in Colorado decided to change its name to the “Fighting Whites” as a parody of the name “Fighting Reds,” used by a nearby high school. This article analyzes the rhetorical nature of the “Fighting Whites” (or, as they also were known, “Fighting Whities”) short but meteoric journey in both print and electronic media.