Take Me Out of the Ball Game

Sarah Mae Martin is frustrated. The high school freshman is part Choctaw and part Lakota and although she hasn’t been in very many teepees, she knows that they are very sacred places. “They're for being quiet and praying and opening your mind,” says Martin.

It makes sense, then, that the 14-year-old resident of Broken Arrow, a town outside Tulsa, Okla., hates going to football games at the nearby Union High School, home of the Redskins. Not only is the Union mascot a Native American boy in a headdress, but at the pre-game shows Martin has been to, she says it’s not uncommon for students to erect a fake teepee as a prop and climb the so-called teepee polls in a plume of fake, machine generated smoke.

“It feels like my race is being used as a prop,” says Martin, who has spoken in front of the Union school board on several occasions. When she does so, it’s been as a representative of the Tulsa Indian Coalition Against Racism, a group that has recently gotten fed up with arguing with school boards and is now working to pass a Senate bill in Oklahoma called the Native Mascot Act. The act is focused on eliminating the mascot names "savages" and "redskins" from all public schools, in an effort to “protect Oklahoma’s children from the consequences of racism.”

Forty years after the civil rights battles of the 1960s, Native Americans and civil rights advocates are still fighting a decades-old battle to end the depiction of American Indians on football helmets, basketball courts and team jerseys. They say such images foster a shallow and inaccurate understanding of Native American cultures, reinforce stereotypes of the noble savage or red-faced warrior, and encourage racist behavior among sports fans.

Oklahoma is not the only state where this battle is being fought. This January, California Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg re-introduced a similar mascot bill for the third time. She too is focused on banning “redskin” from Golden State schools, as it refers to the way Native people were scalped, beginning in the 1600s, by white settlers who were paid by the government for killing Indians.

Despite these and other important gains in the past 40 years, there remain nearly 2,000 schools in the United States with Native American sports mascots. In a country increasingly aware of racial tension and stereotypes, many seem to have forgotten about the original victims of American racism: the original Americans.

Respect or Caricature?

Why haven’t Native Americans benefited from the larger move towards civil rights in this country? Opponents of these mascots point out that comparable depictions of other ethnic or religious groups in sports would never be embraced in our culture.

“Can you imagine a team named the Blackskins? That would never be allowed. These mascots are one of the last vestiges of racism allowed in the U.S.,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the national Indian rights organization Morning Star Institute.

Many sports fans profess as much devotion to their teams’ racially-charged Indian mascots as to the players themselves, insisting that the mascot is a tribute to this country’s native peoples. Supporters point out that there are many Native Americans who say they are not bothered by their likeness on a jersey or football helmet. Perhaps the most famous group to have willingly lent its name to a sports team is the Seminole tribe in Florida, immortalized by Florida State University’s Florida Seminoles.

But critics of the Florida Seminoles point out that while the team logo and mascot uniform are sanctioned by the Seminole tribe, the behavior of sports fans at home games is not. The school’s respectful tribute to the Seminole nation, crafted so carefully in collaboration with the tribe, crumbles quickly when keyed-up sports fans start hollering ‘war chants’ and doing the ‘tomahawk chop’ at halftime. Advocates for change also argue that the consent of some Native Americans does not lessen the hurt and embarrassment felt by others, all so that sports fans can have an image to rally around.