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I hope this raises awareness about the damage made by Native Mascots
This is an issue at my school, the University of Illinois
This article from NYTimes.com
The Squabbling Illini: Rallying Cries Lead to Rift
December 16, 2003
By MIKE WISE
URBANA, Ill. - The history books say the last Indian tribe
in Illinois was forcibly relocated to Kansas and then
Oklahoma early in the 19th century.
But there is one Indian left, according to members of the
Honor the Chief Society: Chief Illiniwek.
Of course, the chief is not a typical Indian, and he is not
even a real one. He is a student dressed in Hollywood-style
regalia, created 77 years ago by an assistant band director
at the University of Illinois. He dances at halftime of
football and basketball games.
A debate over whether mascots with Indian themes are
offensive or harmless has played out on college campuses
and at professional stadiums for more than two decades. But
there is something singular here, a fierce loyalty to a
student in war paint that makes the hair stand on grown
men's forearms. The passions aroused by the chief also make
the great-great-granddaughter of Sitting Bull, a junior at
Illinois, fear for her safety.
The catalyst for the debate was a proposal last month by
Dr. Frances Carroll, a new member of the university's board
of trustees, to have Chief Illiniwek "honorably retired."
She set aside her proposal after her support on the board
eroded unexpectedly, but she intends to raise it again in
March.
The proposal has divided the board and the university along
political and, at times, racial lines. A symbol of pride to
many students and alumni, Chief Illiniwek can at the same
time be a hurtful reminder to American Indians of their
mistreatment, of the misappropriation of their culture.
The chief's presence at football and basketball games flies
in the face of a national trend. In 1970, more than 3,000
American athletic programs referred to American Indians in
nicknames, logos or mascots, according to the Morning Star
Institute, a Native American organization. Today, there are
fewer than 1,100. At a time when American Indians are
reclaiming their heritage, the use of Indian mascots and
nicknames has ceased at all but a handful of major
universities.
At Illinois, though, the forces of change have met strong
resistance. Roger Huddleston, a local home builder and the
president of the Honor the Chief Society, calls Carroll's
proposal the "November ambush at the O.K. Corral."
"Chief Illiniwek is part of my geographic heritage," he
said. "For anyone to dismiss that because I'm Caucasian,
that's racist."
Whose Symbol Is It?
John Gadaut, a lawyer in Champaign, said he had spent more
than $5,000 on keep-the-chief billboards and buttons.
"I'm a Native American," said Gadaut, who is white. "I was
born and bred in Illinois. The chief means something to me,
too. People keep saying we have a mascot. No, we have a
symbol."
But those who think it is time to do away with the chief
note that the symbol for the past three years, and for
almost all of the past eight decades, has been portrayed by
a white college student.
More than 800 faculty members have signed petitions,
contending that the mascot interferes with fulfilling an
academic mission, diversity. Nancy Cantor, the chancellor
of the university's Champaign-Urbana campus, supports doing
away with the mascot.
Carroll said: "It's time for it to be put to bed. It's
tough, but we have to do it."
Their success is still very much in doubt, with
well-financed boosters and alumni determined to keep the
chief.
"It's got all the subtexts," Lawrence C. Eppley, the
chairman of the board of trustees, said. On one side, he
said, are "the people who see themselves as the do-goodie
white person."
"On the other, you got the old, bad white people from the
Midwest who can't change with the times," he said. "This is
about the chief, of course, but it's partly about the tail
end of the p.c. backlash of the 90's. When you start
throwing the word racist around, the other side becomes
firmly entrenched."
Genevieve Tenoso, an anthropology major who is a
seventh-generation descendant of Sitting Bull, the
legendary Hunkpapa leader, experienced a dose of the
roiling emotions when she ran into a group of students
demonstrating on behalf of the chief under the banner "The
Illini Nation."
"I think I said, `Look, now they've got their own tribe,' "
she said. "And a guy told me if I didn't shut up he was
going to pop me in the lip."
"Who knew," she said, "that this would be the issue on
campus to get people to resort to a threat of violence?"
The Battle Begins
The movement to abolish American Indian
nicknames began in the 1960's in Indian communities and on
several college campuses. Oklahoma's "Little Red" was the
first nickname to be retired, in 1970. Stanford and
Dartmouth soon followed, dropping Indians from their team
names.
The movement to do away with the nicknames and mascots
appeared to have won a key battle in 1999, when a panel in
the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that
Redskins was a disparaging moniker and violated federal
law. Six trademarks involving the Washington Redskins were
revoked.
Last month, federal District Court Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly overturned that ruling. Suzan Harjo, one of
six plaintiffs in the case, said they had appealed.
At Illinois, Charlene Teters, a member of the Spokane
Nation, took her children to a football game in the late
1980's and decided to do something about Chief Illiniwek.
Soon after, Teters, a graduate student at the time, started
holding up a handmade placard outside the stadium that read
"American Indians are people, not mascots." News accounts
of her protest spurred the movement.
"When you see a community erode your child's self-esteem,
you act," said Teters, now an artist and professor at the
Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, N.M. When she
arrived at Illinois, a campus sorority was still holding a
Miss Illini Squaw contest.
"I felt then we needed to kill the fake Indian," Teters
said. "They say, `We're doing it to honor Native Americans
and the history of the state.' But it just seems like
misplaced atonement, especially when they want to dictate
the boundaries of that atonement."
Ever since, the chief's three-minute halftime performance
has divided the university, sometimes along political
lines.
Carroll, the trustee seeking to retire the mascot, is an
African-American former schoolteacher with Democratic
leanings who grew up and still lives on the South Side of
Chicago. Carroll insisted that her motivation had nothing
to do with being an African-American woman and everything
to do with "being a human being."
Marge Sodemann, one of two voting trustees on the
university's 10-member board who adamantly defend the
chief, is a staunch Republican from the prairie. The
license plate on her sedan reads "GOP Lady."
"The chief stands for the values, trust and honor of
everything that went on in the past," Sodemann said. "It's
not a racist mascot. Everything he's done is honorable. The
people here really dote on him."
More than 200 students, including dozens of members of the
marching band, held an all-night vigil in support of the
mascot before the board meeting Nov. 13. The day of the
meeting, other students demonstrated in favor of retiring
the chief. And during the public board meeting, some white
students sang Indian songs and performed tomahawk chops.
Proposal Must Wait
Carroll needs 6 of the board's 10
votes to retire the chief. At the 11th hour, she said, at
least two trustees waffled in their support, so she shelved
the proposal until March.
Anti-chief factions contend that wealthy alumni have long
pressured Illinois governors to maintain the mascot, and
they say that governors, through channels, have pressured
their appointees on the university's board. Governor Rod R.
Blagojevich has said that the decision is a university
matter.
While her fellow trustees were aware of Carroll's passion
for the issue, they did not know the ancestry of the woman
for whom she is named. Frances Graves, Carroll's
grandmother, was a Creek Indian from York, Ala. Carroll
brought a photo of Graves, a light-skinned woman with
straight hair who was wearing a cloth hat and a collared,
white powdery sweater, to an interview at the university's
Chicago campus.
"I haven't really told anyone about that, just didn't see
the need," Carroll said. "They always said she was
full-blooded, but I'm not really sure.
"Anyhow, I never thought about it, being a black woman
sticking up for the American Indian or doing this for my
grandmother. I just thought about doing what's right."
Chief Illiniwek was created in 1926 by the university's
assistant band director, Lester Luetwiler.
The chief's first appearance came during a game against
Penn; he offered a peace pipe to a mascot of William Penn.
Red Grange was the Illini star then, and many alumni
associated the Galloping Ghost with the advent of the chief
era. An icon was born.
Matt Veronie, a white graduate student with spiked, gelled
hair and neatly ironed khaki pants, is the current chief.
(An assistant chief sometimes fills in for him.) At games,
Veronie's cheeks are painted Illini orange and blue. He
wears a matching feathered war bonnet and Lakota-made
buckskin; at halftime, he dances and leaps with a solemn
countenance. He wonders about all the fuss.
"I think what I'm doing is a good thing," he said.
There is a lot more at:
https://webmail.uiuc.edu/redirect?ht...f5b8a657830e5c
This article from NYTimes.com
The Squabbling Illini: Rallying Cries Lead to Rift
December 16, 2003
By MIKE WISE
URBANA, Ill. - The history books say the last Indian tribe
in Illinois was forcibly relocated to Kansas and then
Oklahoma early in the 19th century.
But there is one Indian left, according to members of the
Honor the Chief Society: Chief Illiniwek.
Of course, the chief is not a typical Indian, and he is not
even a real one. He is a student dressed in Hollywood-style
regalia, created 77 years ago by an assistant band director
at the University of Illinois. He dances at halftime of
football and basketball games.
A debate over whether mascots with Indian themes are
offensive or harmless has played out on college campuses
and at professional stadiums for more than two decades. But
there is something singular here, a fierce loyalty to a
student in war paint that makes the hair stand on grown
men's forearms. The passions aroused by the chief also make
the great-great-granddaughter of Sitting Bull, a junior at
Illinois, fear for her safety.
The catalyst for the debate was a proposal last month by
Dr. Frances Carroll, a new member of the university's board
of trustees, to have Chief Illiniwek "honorably retired."
She set aside her proposal after her support on the board
eroded unexpectedly, but she intends to raise it again in
March.
The proposal has divided the board and the university along
political and, at times, racial lines. A symbol of pride to
many students and alumni, Chief Illiniwek can at the same
time be a hurtful reminder to American Indians of their
mistreatment, of the misappropriation of their culture.
The chief's presence at football and basketball games flies
in the face of a national trend. In 1970, more than 3,000
American athletic programs referred to American Indians in
nicknames, logos or mascots, according to the Morning Star
Institute, a Native American organization. Today, there are
fewer than 1,100. At a time when American Indians are
reclaiming their heritage, the use of Indian mascots and
nicknames has ceased at all but a handful of major
universities.
At Illinois, though, the forces of change have met strong
resistance. Roger Huddleston, a local home builder and the
president of the Honor the Chief Society, calls Carroll's
proposal the "November ambush at the O.K. Corral."
"Chief Illiniwek is part of my geographic heritage," he
said. "For anyone to dismiss that because I'm Caucasian,
that's racist."
Whose Symbol Is It?
John Gadaut, a lawyer in Champaign, said he had spent more
than $5,000 on keep-the-chief billboards and buttons.
"I'm a Native American," said Gadaut, who is white. "I was
born and bred in Illinois. The chief means something to me,
too. People keep saying we have a mascot. No, we have a
symbol."
But those who think it is time to do away with the chief
note that the symbol for the past three years, and for
almost all of the past eight decades, has been portrayed by
a white college student.
More than 800 faculty members have signed petitions,
contending that the mascot interferes with fulfilling an
academic mission, diversity. Nancy Cantor, the chancellor
of the university's Champaign-Urbana campus, supports doing
away with the mascot.
Carroll said: "It's time for it to be put to bed. It's
tough, but we have to do it."
Their success is still very much in doubt, with
well-financed boosters and alumni determined to keep the
chief.
"It's got all the subtexts," Lawrence C. Eppley, the
chairman of the board of trustees, said. On one side, he
said, are "the people who see themselves as the do-goodie
white person."
"On the other, you got the old, bad white people from the
Midwest who can't change with the times," he said. "This is
about the chief, of course, but it's partly about the tail
end of the p.c. backlash of the 90's. When you start
throwing the word racist around, the other side becomes
firmly entrenched."
Genevieve Tenoso, an anthropology major who is a
seventh-generation descendant of Sitting Bull, the
legendary Hunkpapa leader, experienced a dose of the
roiling emotions when she ran into a group of students
demonstrating on behalf of the chief under the banner "The
Illini Nation."
"I think I said, `Look, now they've got their own tribe,' "
she said. "And a guy told me if I didn't shut up he was
going to pop me in the lip."
"Who knew," she said, "that this would be the issue on
campus to get people to resort to a threat of violence?"
The Battle Begins
The movement to abolish American Indian
nicknames began in the 1960's in Indian communities and on
several college campuses. Oklahoma's "Little Red" was the
first nickname to be retired, in 1970. Stanford and
Dartmouth soon followed, dropping Indians from their team
names.
The movement to do away with the nicknames and mascots
appeared to have won a key battle in 1999, when a panel in
the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that
Redskins was a disparaging moniker and violated federal
law. Six trademarks involving the Washington Redskins were
revoked.
Last month, federal District Court Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly overturned that ruling. Suzan Harjo, one of
six plaintiffs in the case, said they had appealed.
At Illinois, Charlene Teters, a member of the Spokane
Nation, took her children to a football game in the late
1980's and decided to do something about Chief Illiniwek.
Soon after, Teters, a graduate student at the time, started
holding up a handmade placard outside the stadium that read
"American Indians are people, not mascots." News accounts
of her protest spurred the movement.
"When you see a community erode your child's self-esteem,
you act," said Teters, now an artist and professor at the
Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, N.M. When she
arrived at Illinois, a campus sorority was still holding a
Miss Illini Squaw contest.
"I felt then we needed to kill the fake Indian," Teters
said. "They say, `We're doing it to honor Native Americans
and the history of the state.' But it just seems like
misplaced atonement, especially when they want to dictate
the boundaries of that atonement."
Ever since, the chief's three-minute halftime performance
has divided the university, sometimes along political
lines.
Carroll, the trustee seeking to retire the mascot, is an
African-American former schoolteacher with Democratic
leanings who grew up and still lives on the South Side of
Chicago. Carroll insisted that her motivation had nothing
to do with being an African-American woman and everything
to do with "being a human being."
Marge Sodemann, one of two voting trustees on the
university's 10-member board who adamantly defend the
chief, is a staunch Republican from the prairie. The
license plate on her sedan reads "GOP Lady."
"The chief stands for the values, trust and honor of
everything that went on in the past," Sodemann said. "It's
not a racist mascot. Everything he's done is honorable. The
people here really dote on him."
More than 200 students, including dozens of members of the
marching band, held an all-night vigil in support of the
mascot before the board meeting Nov. 13. The day of the
meeting, other students demonstrated in favor of retiring
the chief. And during the public board meeting, some white
students sang Indian songs and performed tomahawk chops.
Proposal Must Wait
Carroll needs 6 of the board's 10
votes to retire the chief. At the 11th hour, she said, at
least two trustees waffled in their support, so she shelved
the proposal until March.
Anti-chief factions contend that wealthy alumni have long
pressured Illinois governors to maintain the mascot, and
they say that governors, through channels, have pressured
their appointees on the university's board. Governor Rod R.
Blagojevich has said that the decision is a university
matter.
While her fellow trustees were aware of Carroll's passion
for the issue, they did not know the ancestry of the woman
for whom she is named. Frances Graves, Carroll's
grandmother, was a Creek Indian from York, Ala. Carroll
brought a photo of Graves, a light-skinned woman with
straight hair who was wearing a cloth hat and a collared,
white powdery sweater, to an interview at the university's
Chicago campus.
"I haven't really told anyone about that, just didn't see
the need," Carroll said. "They always said she was
full-blooded, but I'm not really sure.
"Anyhow, I never thought about it, being a black woman
sticking up for the American Indian or doing this for my
grandmother. I just thought about doing what's right."
Chief Illiniwek was created in 1926 by the university's
assistant band director, Lester Luetwiler.
The chief's first appearance came during a game against
Penn; he offered a peace pipe to a mascot of William Penn.
Red Grange was the Illini star then, and many alumni
associated the Galloping Ghost with the advent of the chief
era. An icon was born.
Matt Veronie, a white graduate student with spiked, gelled
hair and neatly ironed khaki pants, is the current chief.
(An assistant chief sometimes fills in for him.) At games,
Veronie's cheeks are painted Illini orange and blue. He
wears a matching feathered war bonnet and Lakota-made
buckskin; at halftime, he dances and leaps with a solemn
countenance. He wonders about all the fuss.
"I think what I'm doing is a good thing," he said.
There is a lot more at:
https://webmail.uiuc.edu/redirect?ht...f5b8a657830e5c
!!! 
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