Aftermath of a Racist Mascot

For the last twenty years, the University of Illinois’ athletic symbol, Chief Illiniwek, has been under siege. A week and a half ago, the siege finally broke with an official announcement from the Board of Trustees that the Chief would be retired. And, predictably, all hell has broken loose.

The Chief had been the mascot of our "Fighting Illini" for the U of I for eighty years. He was as invention of the assistant director of bands, who thought it would be a good idea to have an Indian figure do a "war dance" at half-time -- the "war dance" itself as filtered through the Boy Scout tradition, danced by a former Eagle Scout in face-paint.

In the 1970s, as Americans became more aware of Native American history -- spurred in part Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history written by Dee Brown, a research librarian at Chief Illiniwek's own campus -- the University became increasingly uncomfortable with its mascot. The University faced a choice: abandon the Indian mascot, as Stanford and Dartmouth did, or else split the difference -- that is, sanitize the Chief, transforming him from a Hollywood Injun to a "reverent tribute to the Native American spirit" (or some similar formula).

So the Chief was revised; he was no longer to be called a "mascot" but a "symbol." The distinction is a fine one: he was no longer to appear at away games, grocery store openings, Presidential inaugurations -- such as Eisenhower's second, at which the Chief performed with the University's marching band. But he still burst out for his halftime dance for every home football and basketball game. And as part of the sanitation process, it was repeatedly stressed by the University that the Chief was a reverent figure honoring Native Americans, not a parody Injun. Although there historically was no Chief Illiniwek, the University advised us that the figure was authentic to Native American traditions; authentic dance, authentic costume, authentic eagle feathers in the headdress.

This turned out to be quite an exaggeration. Parts of the costume were authentic Native American, but it was Sioux, not Illini, and the beadwork was all done by various previous Chiefs. The dance was an amalgamation of bits of Native American "fancy dance" and dance gymnastics like mid-air splits. And, since the eagles in question were a protected species, the actual feathers were off in storage somewhere, replaced by dyed turkey feathers.

In 1989, a graduate student named Charlene Teters began a simple protest: she stood at the stadium gate with a sign saying "We are human beings and not mascots." The reception wasn't terrific: she got pelted with empty cans and lit cigarette butts. But she kept at it, making contacts with major organizations. Pretty soon the National Congress of American Indians had condemned the Chief; so had the NAACP. Native American groups on campus also joined in the debate.

And a furious debate it was.

On one side, you had students and alums who couldn't quite see what all the fuss was about; the Chief, they argued, wasn't a travesty, but represented the noble spirit of the Native American. The Chief -- at least the sanitized Chief -- wasn't intended to be an insult, and they were understandably miffed at being accused of supporting a "racist mascot" when they couldn't see what was racist about him. (Throw in, naturally, a certain amount of Rush Limbaugh pastiche about "self-proclaimed victim classes" and "political correctness.") The Chief was educational, they said, because it taught students about Native American culture. Who were those anti-Chief Grinches, they said, who wanted to take away a symbol of Illini pride?

On the other side, though, you had many organizations with one simple response: "The Chief may not mean to be insulting, but it's insulting all the same." And you had folks like me who, once they discovered how little was truly "authentic" about the Chief, recognized that he was at root a stereotype -- and being a stereotype is not something you can sanitize away.

The battle loomed big, long, and incendiary. A professor of English her students write an essay about the Chief to find out whether or not he truly was "educational," and learned that the Chief taught next to nothing; it led to her publishing a study of Indian mascots: Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots, by Carol Spindel. Campus groups drew lines; there was a Save The Chief group, a Retire The Chief group, various alumni organizations weighing in, all at the highest decibel level imaginable. The Student Senate voted to retire the Chief; a local politician got the Illinois congress to pass a resolution calling the Chief an "honored symbol," the Board of Trustees got hit with petition after petition, and stalled, and stalled.

Then the hammer came down, in the form of a 2005 letter from the NCAA, which had decided once and for all to deal with Indian mascots, calling them part of a "hostile and abusive" environment. It was up to the University to prove that the Chief wasn't "hostile and abusive," or else it would lose the (lucrative) right to host post-season tournament games. This changed the terms of the debate, by adding a new element: money. Things began to move very rapidly at that point.

Another university in a similar situation, Florida State, was able to demonstrate to the NCAA that their mascot, the Seminole chief Osceola, was supported by the actual Seminole tribe, who had officially approved the name "Seminoles" for the sports teams. The University of Illinois, though, had no such luck. The Illini -- a federation of four Illinois tribes -- were pretty much wiped out. They're known now as the Peoria Tribe, of Miami, Oklahoma. There are about eight hundred in that reservation, a group so small that they lost Federal recognition as a tribe in the late 50's, gaining it back in 1978. And the Peoria tribe went officially on record in 2000, calling Chief Illiniwek "demeaning."

The University spent a year exhausting the appeal process. Finally, a week and a half ago, they accepted the writing on the wall. On February 16th, the University issued a press release saying that it was time to end the "Chief Tradition" -- capitalization theirs -- to allow the University to host post-season basketball play. They announced a mixed bag; they'd been able, in their negotiations with the NCAA, to keep the names "Illini" and "Fighting Illini," arguing (correctly) that these names were initially adopted to commemorate the U of I students who had gone off to war in WWI (and whose fatalities are still marked on stone columns in the creepier part of the stadium).

Reaction was, natch, explosive. Letters poured into the local papers, some in support of the decision, but most angrily denouncing the Board's "groveling" in the face of the NCAA sanctions and "politically correct" activists. Many letters came from angry alumni announcing that they would never again donate a dollar to the University. Local blogs got clogged with red-faced polemics about how Americans are losing their rights to the predations of liberal secular thought police. (That this comes on the heels of a recent smoking ban in local restaurants made some people scratch their bash-the-liberals itch just that much harder.)

The battle's still raging in the local paper today, with Chief's supporters by turns angry, maudlin, semi-literate, recycling the same handful of rhetorical tropes ("What about the Fighting Irish?" "It's political correctness gone mad!" "A tiny, tiny minority is dictating to the majority." "No Chief, no money!").

The Board of Trustees is now getting criticism from all sides: those who disagree with the decision, those who agree with the decision but think the announcement was badly handled, those who argee with the decision but think it's twenty years overdue (i.e. me), those who agree with the decision but not with the capitulation to NCAA, and thirty-one other flavors of condemnation.

It's worth pointing out that neither Stanford nor Dartmouth saw any substantial dip in their contributions when they dropped their respective mascots, so there may not be much impact -- the folks who make the threats aren't the ones who make the contributions. But Illinois is a Big 10 school, with a large sports tradition, so I expect a noticable notch in contributions from those who want to punish the University.

The supporters of the Chief are now going through something like Kübler-Ross's stages of grieving. First, denial -- a couple of decades' worth -- that the Chief was an anachronism, and that time would inevitably catch up with him. Then came anger -- quite a lot of it, and more to come. It's going to take a while for the Chief supporters to pour out all their anger at the Board, the "tiny, tiny minority," the University president, the NCAA.

But after that comes bargaining, and this is where it's going to get really interesting. Because the University still owns the copyright for the mascot and the associated graphic. Arrangements are being made to transfer those rights to an organization led by former portrayers of Chief Illiniwek (one of whom, incidentally, I know from other connections; he's a really nice guy, and I saw him do the Chief dance at his wedding) called "The Council of Chiefs." As an independent organization, these guys will, if I'm guessing right, have the right to print up Chief T-shirts and other paraphernalia without bringing down NCAA sanctions. So, in that sense, the Chief isn't dead after all.

So the Chief now is in a zombie state; not dead, not living; not our mascot, not not our mascot. Ambrose Bierce once defined interregnum as "the period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne." At the moment, the University of Illinois symbol is a warm spot on the paint of a basketball court. The University hasn't done any planning yet on creating a new symbol; that's the next order of business. Whatever they come up with, it'll be hated for a generation, but in a college town like this one, a generation is only about four years long.

But what a rough, divisive, scream-at-your-neighbor four years it's going to be.