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 a 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.
Meet the New Chief 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.
After graduating next semester, he said he would work to do
"whatever I can to help people to see the chief tradition
in the way I see it, for the good that it is, for the
respect that it deserves."
"It would be very tough to see the Chief go right now," he
said.
The pull of the mascot for many people involves tradition,
the lure of Illini athletics and college memories.
"I can still remember the first time I saw the chief in law
school," Gadaut, the lawyer from Champaign, said. "The hair
stood right up on my arms. It's my whole heritage in front
of me. Hey, these people can be my heritage even though
this guy's skin is not my color."
He dismissed Carroll and other opponents of the chief as
"leftist social engineers."
The people who want to retire the mascot note that
virtually every major American Indian organization has long
called for the elimination of sports-based Indian
references, as has nearly every civil rights and national
church organization.
American Indians have rarely been heard in the dispute over
the chief, but several members of the university who are
American Indians talked about it one afternoon at the
Native American House on campus.
"The chief is symptomatic of how American society co-opts
the Indian identity and simultaneously romanticizes and
denigrates that identity," said John McKinn, a Maricopa
from the Gila River Indian Community who is assistant
director of the Native American House. "Pseudo-spiritual
dances are passed off as authentic. It just dismisses who
we are."
Tenoso, the great, great granddaugther of Sitting Bull,
described herself as a "reluctant activist."
"I wanted to ignore it and join the Native American club to
learn to make fry bread and go to powwow," she said. "But I
looked up on the wall at a fan shop and saw the chief head
on a seat cushion. Then I went online and noticed one of
the new items for sale is a chief bathroom scale and a
little two-piece toddler set that said, `Love Me and Love
My Chief.' I was pulled in."
Eppley, the chairman of the board of trustees, acknowledged
that he was uncomfortable with the rationale for retaining
the chief.
"A lot of people see it as the dancing rabbi or the black
minstrel," Eppley said. "Logically and historically, it is
really tough to build a case for having it. It's likely a
Boy Scout dance, at best.
"But you can't draw a straight line back to that for people
who like the chief. It's more complex."
Eppley said he would have voted against Carroll's
resolution last month, because he thought she had rushed it
onto the board's agenda.
"I do think it's a matter of when rather than if," he said,
"but we have to find the right time."
Carroll, among others, isn't willing to wait much longer.
"We're in the 21st century in a global society," she said.
"We have to be sensitive to images, thoughts, behaviors
that affect other cultures - cultures that we now know we
were misinformed about."
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I had never thought of it this way. But I still can’t agree."Chief Illiniwek is part of my geographic heritage," he said. "For anyone to dismiss that because I'm Caucasian, that's racist."
This sums up my thoughts very nicely."The chief is symptomatic of how American society co-opts the Indian identity and simultaneously romanticizes and denigrates that identity," said John McKinn, a Maricopa from the Gila River Indian Community who is assistant director of the Native American House. "Pseudo-spiritual dances are passed off as authentic. It just dismisses who we are."
I think U of I and the other remaining 1,000 U.S. Universities with athletic programs still referring to American Indians in nicknames, logos or mascots need to change them.
But this is coming from someone who isn’t a typical fan of UW Athletics (I support my friends that are on sports teams but that’s where my interest ends) and couldn’t care less about Bucky the Badger. This point is view is that of someone who is active in the multicultural groups on my campus.
What do the rest of you think about this issue?
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12/02
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