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Pride or Prejudice?
Buttoned-down college boys were drawn to mascots who stood for a noble but violent masculinity.
By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY / Wall Street Journal
July 31, 2015 3:28 p.m. ET
‘Defenses of Native American mascotry often rely on personal anecdotes and polling data,” writes Jennifer Guiliano—disapprovingly—in “Indian Spectacle.” She complains that an AP poll about the Indian names and symbols used in college athletics surveyed only “0.000322 percent of the [U.S.] population.” It almost seems as if Ms. Guiliano doesn’t grasp how statistical sampling works.
Fortunately, “Indian Spectacle” is not a book about statistics. It is instead a look back at how schools from the University of North Dakota (“Fighting Sioux”) and Stanford (“Indians”) to Florida State (“Seminoles”) adopted Native Americans as emblems for their teams and drew on Native American imagery and folklore to give themselves a kind of identity. While the use of Indian mascotry may seem racist and insensitive today, its origins, in Ms. Guiliano’s telling, are too complex to be reduced to easy moral categories.
American colleges in the early 20th century, Ms. Guiliano says, were struggling to make “the seemingly esoteric disciplines of the social sciences, as well as professional business degrees, relatable to the citizen public.” There was a need, in short, to sell academic pursuit—to make it appealing “to a public more obsessed with securing employment, feeding their families and enjoying limited leisure time.”
INDIAN SPECTACLE
By Jennifer Guiliano
Rutgers, 175 pages, $27.95
Back then, only a small percentage of the American public went to college—8% in 1920. The paramount question was how to get more people to support the very idea of college. One answer, Ms. Guiliano says, was football. Universities began to draw crowds of tens of thousands to newly built stadiums. But the game itself was not enough. The halftime shows became almost as important, with music commissioned specifically for marching bands. Then came the Indians.
Ms. Guiliano offers a lot of explanations for why Indian mascots became so popular. Indians were “objects of racial repulsion who represented the base instincts of humans and the devolution of humanity” and were thus luridly appealing. They were also symbols of masculinity, she argues, but of a different sort from that of the white players on the field. Whereas the whites were supposed to be “tempered by gentility and moral uprightness,” the Indians were “exhibits of barely restrained violence”—a quality that, in a contest involving a lot of body-smashing, was not entirely unwelcome.
But it wasn’t just the idea of the violent savage that appealed to administrators and students. It was also the idea of its opposite—the “noble savage.” In 1920, the University of Illinois launched its first major capital campaign to raise funds for a football stadium. The donation-soliciting pamphlet featured “a campfire circle of Indian men with a lone Indian figure standing in what appears to be a Sioux headdress, loincloth, and boots,” Ms. Guiliano writes. The Indian holds “a peace pipe, with one hand raised.” With remarkable sweep, the pamphlet states: “No temples have these ancient Indians left us, and no books. But we have a heritage from them, direct through the pioneers who fought them and learned to know them. It is the Great Heart, the fighting spirit, the spirit of individualism, of teaching our children to be free but brave and to have a God—for these are the laws of our tribe.”
It seems, then, that even warrior Indians helped inculcate virtue. Colleges were not the only institutions that admired the Indian heritage and tried to make it their own. The Boy Scouts of America and the YMCA adopted Indian dances and back-to-nature skills as part of their efforts to instill character in boys.
Yes, there was plenty of cultural appropriation and projection going on here, but it was not all invidious. Mascotry could include ideas of tribute and respect—and, when it came to sports per se, an acknowledgment of potential superiority. Americans in the early 20th century were well aware that Indian boarding schools, like the Carlisle school in Pennsylvania, excelled in football. Glenn “Pop” Warner, for whom a national kids’ football league is still named, coached for several years at Carlisle. And legendary athlete Jim Thorpe played for Warner there. By contrast, Ms. Guiliano says, quoting another scholar’s research, black baseball mascots at the time were supposed to be “diminutive, odd-looking, and often bearing some physical deformity.” Blacks were a people not to be emulated for their strength and masculinity but to be seen as “brutes” or objects of ridicule.
Ms. Guiliano makes the case that plenty of what counted as Indian behavior in the context of sporting events—from made-up words like “Oskee Wow-Wow” (a refrain in Illinois’s popular bleacher song) to the costumes and halftime dances—were “faux Indian” and bore little resemblance to what real American Indians did. Similarly, she notes that much of the elevated language used to explain the mascots glosses over the brutal persecution that Indians received at the hands of white settlers. In the end, she feels an understandable antipathy toward the cultural appropriation she documents.
Alas, Ms. Guiliano is not content to settle for a mix of insights and observations. She wants to describe, in painfully theory-driven prose, an “anxiety” that is supposedly at the heart of American culture. Referring to the male college students of an earlier era, she says that “mascotry and athletic identity were an integral way of mapping the meaning-making for these upper-middle-class men. . . . This type of mapping challenges bifurcated elucidation of culture into highbrow versus lowbrow endeavors.” Elsewhere she observes that “the hypersexualized image of the Indian brave further rendered the gendered nature of the image even more prominent,” though “the image was softened by the warrior’s flowing windblown hair.” She goes to great lengths to show that “Indian bodies” were tools used by (presumably anxious) white men to prove themselves to be white, masculine and heterosexual.
Whether the continued use of Indian mascots can be justified based on this mixed history remains a subject of fierce debate. In recent years we’ve seen a series of campaigns demanding that colleges let go of their Indian identities. The “Fighting Sioux” of North Dakota lost their nickname after a vote in the state legislature. As Ms. Guiliano reveals, the Indian moniker had been adopted in 1930 after a debate in which it was argued that “Sioux” footballers would have a better chance of winning against the school’s archrivals, the “Bison” of North Dakota State. (Once again, the Indian name suggested prowess.) The Stanford “Indians” are now the “Cardinal.” Chief Illiniwek, the mascot of the University of Illinois, was forced into retirement in 2007. Florida State has managed to hang on to its “Seminoles” identity—indeed, its Indian mascot, Osceola, rides on horseback to the middle of the football field and, ahead of each home game, defiantly throws down a feathered spear. Florida State is allowed this atavistic display thanks to the approval of the Seminole nation.
Two years ago—when the NFL’s Washington Redskins were being attacked by seemingly everyone for their retrograde name—the National Congress of American Indians issued a report claiming that “the self-esteem of Native youth is harmfully impacted, their self confidence erodes, and their sense of identity is severely damaged” when they are exposed to “Indian-based names, mascots, and logos in sports.” Perhaps so, but the problems of Native Americans are so dire that it is almost insulting to suggest that mere mascotry might be a significant cause. The NCAI even linked names and mascots to high Native American suicide rates.
American Indians have the highest rate of poverty, the highest rate of gang involvement and the highest rate of alcohol-use disorders of any ethnic group in the country. If this is your experience, is the image of a Native American on a football-team jersey going to crush your life chances and alter your sense of yourself? To borrow Ms. Guiliano’s rhetoric, such is the “narrative” that we are now being asked to accept. It’s enough to arouse the fighting spirit in all of us.
—Ms. Riley is writing a book on Native American culture.
Buttoned-down college boys were drawn to mascots who stood for a noble but violent masculinity.
By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY / Wall Street Journal
July 31, 2015 3:28 p.m. ET
‘Defenses of Native American mascotry often rely on personal anecdotes and polling data,” writes Jennifer Guiliano—disapprovingly—in “Indian Spectacle.” She complains that an AP poll about the Indian names and symbols used in college athletics surveyed only “0.000322 percent of the [U.S.] population.” It almost seems as if Ms. Guiliano doesn’t grasp how statistical sampling works.
Fortunately, “Indian Spectacle” is not a book about statistics. It is instead a look back at how schools from the University of North Dakota (“Fighting Sioux”) and Stanford (“Indians”) to Florida State (“Seminoles”) adopted Native Americans as emblems for their teams and drew on Native American imagery and folklore to give themselves a kind of identity. While the use of Indian mascotry may seem racist and insensitive today, its origins, in Ms. Guiliano’s telling, are too complex to be reduced to easy moral categories.
American colleges in the early 20th century, Ms. Guiliano says, were struggling to make “the seemingly esoteric disciplines of the social sciences, as well as professional business degrees, relatable to the citizen public.” There was a need, in short, to sell academic pursuit—to make it appealing “to a public more obsessed with securing employment, feeding their families and enjoying limited leisure time.”
INDIAN SPECTACLE
By Jennifer Guiliano
Rutgers, 175 pages, $27.95
Back then, only a small percentage of the American public went to college—8% in 1920. The paramount question was how to get more people to support the very idea of college. One answer, Ms. Guiliano says, was football. Universities began to draw crowds of tens of thousands to newly built stadiums. But the game itself was not enough. The halftime shows became almost as important, with music commissioned specifically for marching bands. Then came the Indians.
Ms. Guiliano offers a lot of explanations for why Indian mascots became so popular. Indians were “objects of racial repulsion who represented the base instincts of humans and the devolution of humanity” and were thus luridly appealing. They were also symbols of masculinity, she argues, but of a different sort from that of the white players on the field. Whereas the whites were supposed to be “tempered by gentility and moral uprightness,” the Indians were “exhibits of barely restrained violence”—a quality that, in a contest involving a lot of body-smashing, was not entirely unwelcome.
But it wasn’t just the idea of the violent savage that appealed to administrators and students. It was also the idea of its opposite—the “noble savage.” In 1920, the University of Illinois launched its first major capital campaign to raise funds for a football stadium. The donation-soliciting pamphlet featured “a campfire circle of Indian men with a lone Indian figure standing in what appears to be a Sioux headdress, loincloth, and boots,” Ms. Guiliano writes. The Indian holds “a peace pipe, with one hand raised.” With remarkable sweep, the pamphlet states: “No temples have these ancient Indians left us, and no books. But we have a heritage from them, direct through the pioneers who fought them and learned to know them. It is the Great Heart, the fighting spirit, the spirit of individualism, of teaching our children to be free but brave and to have a God—for these are the laws of our tribe.”
It seems, then, that even warrior Indians helped inculcate virtue. Colleges were not the only institutions that admired the Indian heritage and tried to make it their own. The Boy Scouts of America and the YMCA adopted Indian dances and back-to-nature skills as part of their efforts to instill character in boys.
Yes, there was plenty of cultural appropriation and projection going on here, but it was not all invidious. Mascotry could include ideas of tribute and respect—and, when it came to sports per se, an acknowledgment of potential superiority. Americans in the early 20th century were well aware that Indian boarding schools, like the Carlisle school in Pennsylvania, excelled in football. Glenn “Pop” Warner, for whom a national kids’ football league is still named, coached for several years at Carlisle. And legendary athlete Jim Thorpe played for Warner there. By contrast, Ms. Guiliano says, quoting another scholar’s research, black baseball mascots at the time were supposed to be “diminutive, odd-looking, and often bearing some physical deformity.” Blacks were a people not to be emulated for their strength and masculinity but to be seen as “brutes” or objects of ridicule.
Ms. Guiliano makes the case that plenty of what counted as Indian behavior in the context of sporting events—from made-up words like “Oskee Wow-Wow” (a refrain in Illinois’s popular bleacher song) to the costumes and halftime dances—were “faux Indian” and bore little resemblance to what real American Indians did. Similarly, she notes that much of the elevated language used to explain the mascots glosses over the brutal persecution that Indians received at the hands of white settlers. In the end, she feels an understandable antipathy toward the cultural appropriation she documents.
Alas, Ms. Guiliano is not content to settle for a mix of insights and observations. She wants to describe, in painfully theory-driven prose, an “anxiety” that is supposedly at the heart of American culture. Referring to the male college students of an earlier era, she says that “mascotry and athletic identity were an integral way of mapping the meaning-making for these upper-middle-class men. . . . This type of mapping challenges bifurcated elucidation of culture into highbrow versus lowbrow endeavors.” Elsewhere she observes that “the hypersexualized image of the Indian brave further rendered the gendered nature of the image even more prominent,” though “the image was softened by the warrior’s flowing windblown hair.” She goes to great lengths to show that “Indian bodies” were tools used by (presumably anxious) white men to prove themselves to be white, masculine and heterosexual.
Whether the continued use of Indian mascots can be justified based on this mixed history remains a subject of fierce debate. In recent years we’ve seen a series of campaigns demanding that colleges let go of their Indian identities. The “Fighting Sioux” of North Dakota lost their nickname after a vote in the state legislature. As Ms. Guiliano reveals, the Indian moniker had been adopted in 1930 after a debate in which it was argued that “Sioux” footballers would have a better chance of winning against the school’s archrivals, the “Bison” of North Dakota State. (Once again, the Indian name suggested prowess.) The Stanford “Indians” are now the “Cardinal.” Chief Illiniwek, the mascot of the University of Illinois, was forced into retirement in 2007. Florida State has managed to hang on to its “Seminoles” identity—indeed, its Indian mascot, Osceola, rides on horseback to the middle of the football field and, ahead of each home game, defiantly throws down a feathered spear. Florida State is allowed this atavistic display thanks to the approval of the Seminole nation.
Two years ago—when the NFL’s Washington Redskins were being attacked by seemingly everyone for their retrograde name—the National Congress of American Indians issued a report claiming that “the self-esteem of Native youth is harmfully impacted, their self confidence erodes, and their sense of identity is severely damaged” when they are exposed to “Indian-based names, mascots, and logos in sports.” Perhaps so, but the problems of Native Americans are so dire that it is almost insulting to suggest that mere mascotry might be a significant cause. The NCAI even linked names and mascots to high Native American suicide rates.
American Indians have the highest rate of poverty, the highest rate of gang involvement and the highest rate of alcohol-use disorders of any ethnic group in the country. If this is your experience, is the image of a Native American on a football-team jersey going to crush your life chances and alter your sense of yourself? To borrow Ms. Guiliano’s rhetoric, such is the “narrative” that we are now being asked to accept. It’s enough to arouse the fighting spirit in all of us.
—Ms. Riley is writing a book on Native American culture.