[Peace-discuss] NYTarticle re the chief

[Lisa Chason]

  The New York Times
  December 16, 2003
  p1 sports section

  The Squabbling Illini: Rallying Cries Lead to Rift
  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."

  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 as 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."
Aprel L. Thomas
Assistant to the Director/Office Manager
Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society
1108 W. Stoughton
Urbana, IL 61801, MC-253
Ph: (217) 244-0188
Fax: (217) 333-8122
Visit us on the web at http://cdms.ds.uiuc.edu 
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