A Comanche-Kiowa scholar and former high school principal and coach offers a brief overview to frame his argument against Indian mascots
Because school mascots are marks of local identity, it's often difficult to see them as elements of larger historical and cultural patterns. Here, a Comanche-Kiowa scholar and former high school principal and coach offers a brief overview to frame his argument against Indian mascots.
Sports writers of the early 1900s had a field day covering the "Indians" of the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pa. Led by legendary coach "Pop" Warner, the underdog squad defeated many of the era's college football powerhouses. Stories laden with frontier and Native imagery vaulted the Carlisle Indians into the national arena. The Boston Globe reported one Carlisle-Harvard game under the headline "Custer's Last Stand on the Little Big Horn."
Unlike Carlisle, most schools with "Indian" mascots today have few if any indigenous students. The portrayal of American Indians in sports takes many forms. Some teams use generic Indian names, such as Indians, Braves or Chiefs, while others adopt specific tribal names like Seminoles, Cherokees or Apaches. Indian mascots exhibit either idealized or comical facial features and "native" dress ranging from body-length feathered (usually turkey) headdresses to more subtle fake buckskin attire to skimpy loincloths. Some teams and supporters display counterfeit Indian paraphernalia, including tomahawks, feathers, facial paints, drums and pipes, as well as mock-Indian behaviors, such as the "tomahawk chop," dances, chants, drum-beating, war-whooping and "scalping."
So-called Indian mascots reduce hundreds of indigenous tribes to generic cartoons. These "Wild West" figments of the White imagination distort both Indian and non-Indian children's attitudes toward an oppressed -- and diverse -- minority. Schools should be places where students come to unlearn the stereotypes such mascots represent. Most children in America do not have the faintest idea that "Indians" are real people.
You can help eliminate racist imagery of Indians from school sports. Administrators and school boards can convene focus groups to study their local situations in comparison with those of other communities. (Dallas Public Schools, for example, convened a special task force last year that recommended -- and amicably coordinated -- the replacement of virtually all Indian mascots in the system.) Park commissions can restrict use of public facilities by teams displaying racist mascots. Newspapers and broadcast media can adopt policies stating they will not use racist mascot names and demeaning terms such as "scalp" and "warpath" in their reporting.
Perhaps most importantly, teachers, parents and student leaders can advocate for all of the above. Inaction in the face of racism is racism. Enslaved minds cannot teach liberation.
Cornel Pewewardy is an assistant professor of education at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.