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DR. SUZAN SHOWN HARJO: Thank you for coming to our glorious National Museum of
the American Indian, and for being here for the symposium on Racist Stereotypes and Cultural
Appropriation in American Sports, a serious topic. I'm Suzan Shown Harjo and I'm President
of the Morning Star Institute. I'm Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. I'm a founder of this
museum, a past Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians,
a columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network, and a mother and a grandmother. I'm
delighted to be moderating this distinguished panel.
The people here have, some of them, come a long way, and barely made it. Some of them
have come a short way and need to get out of here tomorrow
morning before it starts snowing in their country. So I'm grateful for everyone who
has traveled far, and who are nearby, and who've joined us to make this symposium a
success. Did everyone see the panel this morning? Wasn't
that wonderful? Give them applause. [APPLAUSE]
And I hope you'll be able to stay for the community conversation later. We're going
to begin, as is the custom for some of us, to begin with our elders and end with our
elders. We begin with someone who could not join us when Franken-storm Sandy caused the
postponement of this from the original date of November 1st and we rescheduled.
We lost one of our panelists, Oren Lyons, an Onondaga Chief and faith keeper, Haudenosaunee
from Syracuse University. He is here through the marvel of technology; Syracuse University
was able to interview him and sent us the DVD of it. So if that is queued
up, let's get ready to show Chief Lyons. He was one of the main people who got Syracuse
University to drop the Saltine Warrior, and well they should have.
He was in a good position to do that. He was a lacrosse star at Syracuse and an All-American
with Jim Brown, for sports fans here. He will not say that; he is very modest and does not
say that on the clip you're seeing. He says something about, "I played a little lacrosse,"
I think, but he's a big deal. He started the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse
team, which I think is ranked number three in the world, now. I think in their last tournament
they beat USA, so they're playing other countries and doing really, really well. Those are all
Iroquois, all Haudenosaunee people. If we're ready to show the clip of Oren Lyons, let's
do that now. CHIEF OREN LYONS (via DVD): The implacable
Indian. You know, the fierce warrior; really it's something that, I think, is a white man's
image. It's much like, I hear, the Indian war whoop. They call it a war whoop
- and everybody's heard it - and it's always, "Woo, woo, woo, woo." And every time I hear
that, I know it's a white man because I've only ever, in my whole life, ever heard a
white man do it. I've never heard an Indian do that.
[LAUGHTER] Every time you hear that, I say, "Oh,
there's an Indian. This white guy is hollering again." In actuality, what I think is important,
and which has a progression in American sports, is the fact that if you look at all of the
new expansion leagues - whether it's hockey, whether it's basketball or baseball or anything
- every major sport has not put out a depiction of an Indian. They're all new; it's the
Coyotes, it's the - well, it's everything but an Indian, and I think that's very important
to comprehend because it means that the sport itself has comprehended that and has
deliberately avoided that. I think the American public and the young
people should take a lesson from that because they revere their sports and their sports
people, and that's a very strong lesson right there.
So, we know that, also, that the Washington Redskins are in a court battle and have lost
the first round and it's now up for the second round that,
yes, it is a racist and demeaning depiction. The idea of red skin and "redskins" are probably
one of the most demeaning of the terms in the history of America. And yet, there they
are. And interestingly enough, if you're watchful, and you go to some of the Washington Redskin
football games and look up into their box that they have, obviously, then you will
find Senators and Congressmen sitting in there, in this box, and in effect promoting that
whole idea. So, it cuts right to the core. It cuts right
to the basic structure and the ethical structure of the United States itself. And they're going
to lose. They’re losing now, and they're going to lose, eventually, so I think it's
time for America to move on. I know that in most cases in the schools,
in the history books, there is very little about American Indians; usually,
we're in the way of progress. We're the other, all the time. We're the ones that tear up
the train tracks. We're the ones that cut down the telephone lines. We're the ones that
get in the way of the Great Expansion West, that whole idea.
It's in the history books, and so no wonder that young people have no understanding.
There has to be an education in that direction as to the true history of this country. And
until it's a standard in American history books, how do you expect the children
to understand that? So, I think, on an ethical basis, you have
a strong group of people in Ontario, where they're just having this problem. You had
a very courageous school board decide that they were going to drop that depiction of
a mascot and rightly so. The reaction they got was coming from
ignorance, and that's what we have to really deal with; we have to deal with the ignorance
of the American people concerning Native peoples and the true history of this country. And
the fact is that we are in serious times now, and we're going to need one another's help
to survive. Now is not the time to be fighting each other, now is the time to be
moving on. So I think that the opportunity is really
there, and it will happen. It'll take time, but it will happen. And we, the Native people
who are depicted as these fierce warriors, will have
to stand our ground, and we'll have to hold our position, and in time it will prevail,
and we'll be vindicated, and America will have grown up one more notch.
[APPLAUSE] DR. HARJO: Well, I'm glad he could be here,
a little bit. Our last speaker is going to be the Honorable
Ben Nighthorse Campbell, my Cheyenne brother who is on the Council of Chiefs of the Northern
Cheyenne tribe. He is President of Nighthorse Consultants, he is a trustee of the National
Museum of the American Indian, an award-winning artist and jeweler, and, oh, by the way, he
was Representative of Colorado in the U.S. House of Representatives from
1987-93, and a U.S. Senator of Colorado, 1992-2005. Our next to the last speaker will be Delise
O'Meally, Esquire, who is Director of Governance and
International Affairs, National Collegiate Athletic Association - oh, that's what is
stands for, the NCAA. [LAUGHTER] Before her, will be N. Bruce Duthu, Esquire,
who is Houma, and Chair and Professor, Native American Studies, Dartmouth College.
Ms. Lois Risling, an educator, land specialist for the Hoopa Valley
Tribes, a retired Director of The Center for Indian Community Development at Humboldt State
University. She's a medicine woman and has worked with other young women to revive the
Hoopa flower dance, which was outlawed for so long by the United States Civilization
Regulations, which outlawed all Native ceremonies. Dr. Lee Hester, who is our first presenter,
is an Associate Professor and Director of American Indian Studies and Director of the
Meredith Indigenous Humanities Center, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.
And he is all Oklahoma, everything Oklahoma; he got all of his degrees, including his doctorate,
at the University of Oklahoma, and just missed the part of the OU experience where they had
the dancing idiot as he used to be called, "Little Red," the mascot, who was the very
first so-called Native mascot in the United States to fall.
And before he presents, I want to say something. Here's the good news, that we collectively
have eliminated over two-thirds of these so-called Native references in sports.
[APPLAUSE] There were a little over three thousand when
"Little Red" was dancing, and now there are just over
nine hundred. So that's a sea change, societally, in America, and we are part of the maturation
of America every time one of these goes away. You can know that there were hundreds and
hundreds of people - mostly Native people, but not exclusively Native people - who were
the ones in the trenches trying to get rid of a mascot or a name or a logo or a behavior.
It could be as simple as "the chop." And, Dr. Hester is here as evidence and to attest
to the fact that the University of Oklahoma has a
long way to go, as well. Dr. Hester? DR. LEE HESTER: Well, thank you very much.
[SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE] Which is to say, "Hello, how are you? My name is Lee Hester."
I am a citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I usually begin my talks with a little bit
of the Choctaw language because, in a lot of cases, it is the first time that anyone
will have ever heard a Native language, but the
great thing here at the National Museum of the American Indian, I know that Native languages
have been spoken many times, and really have a home away from home here.
So, I'm very happy to be here, and I'm very humbled to be a member of this fine panel,
and to speak in this setting. I'd like to thank my host for their kindness in asking
me. I was a student at the University of Oklahoma
for twenty years before they got rid of me. I started at OU in the same decade that OU's
mascot, "Little Red," was banned, as Suzan has already
told you. So I know about that from my own youth. Since then, I have written about the
mascot issue and specifically about mascots at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma
City University. Additionally, I've had access to the research
materials that were collected by Jeff Kettle and Chelsea
Masters specifically for this conference, and I really wanted to thank them.
Up there, you'll see a picture of "Little Red" as "Little Red" was. At
different times, "Little Red" was portrayed from the 1930s on to 1970 by various individuals.
Some portrayals were more stereotypical than others, but always dancing to a very stereotypical
tom-tom beat provided by the University band. Though activists like Clyde Warrior spoke
out against these demeaning and stereotypical portrayals as early as
the early 1960s, the banning of "Little Red" at OU was really part of a larger social mobilization
that Vine Deloria called "The Red Power Movement." A key part of that movement was the National
Indian Youth Council, created in 1961 by a group of young Indian leaders who felt that
the National Congress of the American Indian was too conservative.
In 1969, Gerald Wilkerson and Bill and Steve Whansuno [phonetic] were among those seeking
to establish a chapter of the National Indian Youth
Council at OU. They saw "Little Red" as an issue that was both important in itself and,
also, useful in grabbing headlines to help establish that chapter at OU.
In 1969, the newly established chapter submitted a petition to halt the use of "Little Red."
By February 1970, the University committee has recommended that the use be stopped,
and OU's president at the time rapidly did so, within two months.
The issue polarized the American Indian community. Large numbers adamantly supported "Little
Red," making the University's abrupt abandonment something of a mystery. Why were so many American
Indian people so strongly on both sides of the "Little Red" controversy, and why
did the University so readily accede to demands? Well, the answer to these questions really
lies in OU's identity. [POINTS TO SLIDE] OK, that's the seal
of the University of Oklahoma. As you can see, it's a farmer sowing the metaphorical
seeds of knowledge, and, of course, the farmer there is reminiscent of the early settlers
who came to Oklahoma for land. The other major symbol of OU is the "Sooner
Schooner," and there that is. It's a representation of the prairie schooner that carried settlers
to Oklahoma. Those are the same schooners used
in the land runs to claim Indian land taken by the federal government in defiance of treaties
guaranteeing that land to American Indian people forever.
OU's fight song, "Boomer Sooner," is just a constant repetition of those two words.
"Boomer," referring to those people who would wait until the
boom of a cannon used by the government to signal that it was OK to stake their claim
on Indian Land, and "Sooner," referring to the settlers who jumped the gun. From an
Indian perspective, both the Boomers and the Sooners were stealing Indian land.
OU's identity as a colonizing settler institution is clear, and that identity explains the reactions
of the Native American community on both sides of the issue, as well as the actions of the
University in rapidly abandoning "Little Red." For Native supporters of "Little Red," the
mascot was the only tangible symbol of the presence and contributions of American Indians
at OU. To protesters, "Little Red" was a cruel irony, underscoring OU's colonizing identity.
To University administrators, "Little Red" was largely a non sequitur with no real connection
to the University, easily abandoned when it became a source of controversy,
leaving the University of Oklahoma to go about business as it always had.
The banning of "Little Red" delighted protesters and infuriated supporters, but
it didn't do anything to change the problematic relationship of OU to the Indian community.
Without "Little Red" as a focal point, the Indian protest withered, though protesters
did have a few other victories. They got an American Indian student coordinator, a student
lounge, and a some Native studies courses started, but by the time I arrived
at OU, the lounge was in disrepair, and the courses were seldom offered.
Like most students, I focused on my own future, and didn't notice the institutional problems,
thinking they had been solved by the previous generation of Indian students. I'd been at
OU for about nine years before I began to experience my own problems
there. My proposed dissertation topic on Native Philosophy was not allowed, and when I switched
to federal Indian law, the graduate college blocked my study of the Choctaw
language. I was initially bewildered, then angry, but my committee allowed me to go ahead
and study the Choctaw language informally, so we kind of got around the graduate college
in that way. I went ahead and let the matter drop because it was easier to do so, and I
just moved forward, but all around the University, other Indian students were
facing the same kind of problems. Student resentment boiled over in March of
1994, when members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity got drunk, stripped naked, and danced to whooping
and hollering around a tipi that had been set up for Native American heritage week.
This desecration infuriated Indian students, but the University's actions made it far worse,
and shifted the focus of our anger from the fraternity to the University.
From our perspective, the University had acted to protect the fraternity and its members,
never revealing the names of the perpetrators, never sanctioning the fraternity.
American Indian students and faculty came together in another wave of activism with
representatives of every American Indian student organization on campus meeting weekly
in what became known as the American Indian Roundtable. Though we identified a number
of major areas of concern, we all agreed that the biggest problem was really the institutional
culture of the University. The solution we sought was a very traditional
one, what the Iroquois call "polishing the covenant chain."
We wanted a real relationship between the University of Oklahoma and the Indian people
through regularly scheduled meeting with Indian students, faculty, staff, and
administrators of the University. The problem is that the University never really understood.
I suspect that some of the folks in the University administration thought we were seeking shared
governance, which we weren't. I think that a lot of them thought that it was just a huge
waste of time. Protests heightened, including a two-month fast by one of
our students, and resolutions of condemnation by some tribal governments.
Eventually, the University made some substandard improvements, including the funding and staffing
of a Native American Studies program, which has, to some extent, helped to provide an
American Indian voice on campus. The University's actions decreased
tensions and, like most student protests, this one kind of slowly ground to a halt as
students graduated. For my part, I spent about two years
of my life taking up in those protests, and even though it did some real good, the University
of Oklahoma's teams are still really rightly known as the Sooners. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE] DR. HARJO: Is Professor Victoria Phillips
in the audience? And-- PROF. VICTORIA PHILLIPS:
[Interposing] Yes. DR. HARJO: Could you stand? Give a round of
applause to Prof. Phillips and her students. [APPLAUSE]
And I'll tell you why. They've created the beginnings of a really good archive for the
National Museum of the American Indian on this subject and they - she and her
students - did a tremendous amount of research in a very short period of time on these four
big universities that were among the very first to rid themselves of their racist
stereotypes: the University of Oklahoma, Stanford, Dartmouth, and Syracuse University. And they
really did extraordinary work, and I'm so happy that they did that, and that some of
them are here, and thank you for doing that. We'll be careful to say American University
because AU sounds an awful lot like OU, but we really are
indebted to you and to your law clinic for doing this extraordinary research, and we
now have an archive to build on. Our next presenter was at Stanford at the
same time that the mascot was there, and the mascot was a fellow tribal member, so as Lee
passes the baton there. [MUFFLED CONVERSATION]
MS. LOIS J. RISLING: [SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE] Greetings. I want to thank all of you for
coming to this forum, and I want to thank the museum for having this forum, and
thank Suzan for thinking about me and inviting me to present.
Before I begin to address my experience at Stanford when the mascot was then removed,
I want to give you a little background on Stanford and the Indian mascot so that - I
don't know if everybody is familiar with how they got to be the Stanford Indians.
Stanford was officially known as the Indians from 1930-1972. Stanford didn't have an official
nickname until the Indians was adopted in 1930, and there were a number of factors that
came together, one of them being that Pop Warner came there to be a coach, and he had
had this long legacy at working at Carlisle Indian School.
They adopted the Indian as their mascot on November 25th, 1930, and they said that the
Indian was recognized as the symbol of Stanford and captured its spirit, and that the
Indian was the symbol of Stanford. In January 1931, the Stanford Illustrated
Review published an article by two Stanford graduates that expressed what they give as
the reasons for why this, having the Indian at Stanford, was so important, and what gave
the justification for having that. I'm going to read you excerpts of it.
It's kind of long, but I think it captures really what the Stanford mascot is about.
DR. HARJO: [Interposing] The photo is up there. MS. RISLING: Oh. This is the Stanford mascot.
"At last, the Stanford Indians are real Indians. The Red Man has stepped forth to claim his
rightful heritage. The Scalpers, a society composed of Stanford Indians,
escorted the drum with great pomp and ceremony to the cheerleader stand, and from the booming
of the drum, emerged the Indian chant. It went like this: 'Stanford
Indians, scalp the bear, scalp the golden bear. Take the axe to his lair, scalp the
bear, Stanford Indian.' This Indian business has been brewing for a long time. Anza, when
he passed from San Jose to San Francisco on his first visit here in 1792, remarked upon
the astonishing number of Indians he saw. You should
pay a visit to the Stanford museum, go to see the Indian relics. Arrowheads, decorative
oyster shells, and other paraphernalia scattered about in the numerous showcases serve to remind
us that this 'red skin' tradition is the oldest one we have. Quite large Indian mounds where,
it seems, dead digger Indians were buried, occupied commanding positions
all over the peninsula. In fact, there was one on the Stanford property, near Mayfield.
It was quite a stamping ground for the old Indian grads of the 18th century. So
there has been, always, plenty of opportunity for the Indian to figure in Stanford tradition.
And now, after all the apathy and opposition, the Stanford Indian has come into his own.
May we long sing, 'Scalp the bear, Stanford Indian.'"
So that was their rationale for why we should have a Stanford Indian. And thus, the Stanford
Indian was born, conceived in racist, demeaning, distorting
ideas. "A scalper society escorted by a drum." That
drum was a beer keg. Stereotyping Indians, an Indian chant, which was all about scalping
people, scalping bears. "The Indian business had been brewing for
a long time," starting with the Spanish arrival, with "Anza, from San
Jose to San Francisco in 1792." They said, "There was an astonishing number of Indians
he saw." No tribal name, except "digger," and in California, when you call an Indian
person a "digger," you're using the word we can't say - the N-word.
They were just Indians, no name. When I got to Stanford, they couldn't tell me the name
of the people who lived there, and still live there. They couldn't tell you at the beginning,
but they could tell you all those "digger" Indians were now Stanford Indians.
"Go to the Stanford museum. It's all about relics, and arrowheads, and oyster shells,
and paraphernalia. It's all about Indian mounds." These Indian mounds were burial grounds that
they dug up, and they brought in to their museum; that they partied on and danced on,
and that they asked that that tradition be equivalent.
These mounds were all over the peninsula, they were on Stanford's grounds
themselves, and he said, "It was quite a stomping ground," and that it was a place you should
"go and visit." "So there's always been," these two gentlemen
say, "so there has always been plenty of opportunity for the Indian to figure in Stanford tradition,
and we are going to make that the Stanford Red Indian. The tradition: Indians as diggers,
Indians as relics, Indians as nameless things that you can visit at the museum on Stanford.
He goes on to talk about the colorful qualities of the Indians’ costumes and customs would
go well at rallies, and the war dances that could be held around the bonfire that we will
now be able to do because we're Stanford Indians. He doesn't talk about clothes that Indian
people wear; no, he talks about "costumes," dressing up to be
like that; that anybody can put on the "costume" and not the clothes.
He doesn't talk about culture. They don't talk about cultures or lifestyles, only that
they'll be good at rallies, and he talks about war dances
around a bonfire, reinforcing stereotyping and a Hollywood image.
This was the official beginning of the Stanford mascot in 1930 and 31, because they were honoring
Indians, and this was our honor. When I got to Stanford in 1971, I asked, "Who
lived here," and they said, "Indians. Digger Indians." I
said, "No. Ohlone people. Ohlone people live here. They still live here." No one knew their
name; they don't care to know their name; so only the Stanford Indians, the diggers.
So, between 1930 and 1972, the mascot has always been held up as a great honor for American
Indian people. Because of time limitations, we are
now fast forwarding to 1972. In 1972, fifty-five Native American students and staff at Stanford
presented a petition to the University ombudsman, Lois Amsterdam, and she presented
that petition to President Richard Lyman, and President Richard Lyman dropped the Indian
symbol at Stanford University in 1972. The Stanford student senate voted 18-4 to
drop the Indian symbol. The petition presented to the ombudsman asked for several things.
They urged the use of the Indian symbol be permanently discontinued, that the
name "the Stanford Indians" displayed has a lack of understanding, and that Stanford
had placed the name of a race as entertainment, and race is not an entertainment - so they
asked that it be changed and deleted. When Lois Amsterdam forwarded the petition
to President Lyman, she said this: "Stanford's continued use of the Indian symbol in the
1970s brings up to visibility a painful lack of
sensitivity and awareness on the part of the University. All of us have, in some way, by
action or inaction, accepted and supported the
use of the Indian symbol on campus." She went on to write that Stanford's mascot symbol
was a reflection of our society's "retarded understanding, dulled perception, and clouded
visions," and forwarded it to the President. A second demand in the petition was regarding
the mascot "Prince Lightfoot," and the Dollies cheerleaders. That demand was that a major
part of the symbols used involves Prince Tim Williams Lightfoot, and the Stanford Dollies.
Neither the mascot nor the cheerleaders wear traditional dress and their performances are
degrading to the Indian population of the Stanford community.
Lightfoot is especially insulting to the Plains Indian students, for the mascot's
dances and costumes are improperly designed after their traditional practices and dress.
So, they asked that he no longer be able to perform, as the athletic department said,
at games. From 1951 until 1972, Prince Lightfoot, portrayed
by Tim Williams, a Yurok Indian of Northwestern California, was their official mascot. He
was a River Yurok, and he was the mascot for 20 years. He was the chairman of the California
Rural Indian Health Board, and he helped start the National Indian Health Board.
There were three major symbols of the Stanford mascot. The first one, which was the Big Nose
Indian, then they later made one into a Plains Indian without a big nose, and then this is
the mascot Prince Lightfoot in the dress that he is in. Those were the main, common manifestations
that there were.
So, I came to Stanford, and I joined with the other students, and we were told it was
an honor to have an Indian mascot, to be chosen as the
symbol of a great university. It's very honorable that we were being used, that this was really
the action of the Stanford radical left fringe, and they're just using a bunch of gullible,
young, real Indians for their own purposes. They claimed that Prince Lightfoot performed
a traditional Yurok tribal dance in traditional regalia, and he
performed at games without taking a break, and that all of us Indians were just taking
this personal, and we should just get over it. But it was personal.
I am part Yurok. I'm enrolled in the Hoopa tribe through my mother, but my father is
Karuk and Yurok. We only allow enrollment in one, citizenship in one tribe. My grandmother,
my father's mother was a River Yurok, also. My
father was born in a Yurok town of Mowr-rekw, which is on the Yurok River, which is upriver
from where the mascot's family comes from.
My father's father, my grandfather, was Tim Williams' friend and fellow political worker.
When I was a child, we went to Dad's camp. Dad's camp was where Mr. Williams lived and
his family lived. We went to Dad's camp at the mouth of Klamath River in California,
in Yurok territory. After I married my husband, who is a
Hoopa tribal member, he and I took our children and we went to the mouth of the river, which
is where Dad's camp is located, of the Klamath River, to go eeling during the eeling season.
It was personal. It was very personal to me. It was very personal to the Plains Indian
students who watched him do this dance and put a
hex on the other tribe. That was personal. I had never seen poor Tim do this dance until
somebody said, "Let's go watch." They were playing the Trojans, and this Trojan comes
out on this big, huge white horse, and he got
out there and he did his dance and he put a hex on the horse, and on something else,
and I walked away from there shaking my head, saying, "I am going to take a stand against
this." And it was personal because I had to go against
my grandfather, I had to go against my grandmother and her
cousins who had married into that family, I had to tell them why I was going to do this.
It was very personal. What were some of the reasons? The dress.
You see how this is dressed? We don’t dress like that. We have mayanasitans [phonetic].
We have kisekolks [phonetic]. We have wolf blinds. We have jump dances and world
renewal and deer skin dances and women's dances, called flower dances. We don't dance like
this. We don't dress like this. It's nothing like this. But, as Stanford told me,
Stanford Indians dress like this, and everybody who goes to Stanford is a Stanford Indian,
so this is OK. It required a personal discussion and a personal
sacrifice to be able to stand to do this, but all of us, all of the students that were
involved in this, had to make - it was personal -and they had to make what was, at that time,
the right answer because the Ohlone people in California are not even
recognized as a tribe by the federal government. They don't have the same ability to interact
and are left out of things that other tribes can do. So, one of the things that happened
is that when we decided to do this, and we had to take this stand against the exploitation,
it was very difficult, but as students we decided that it had to be done so that
in the future, if we had other tribal members going to Stanford, they wouldn't have to face
these issues. Well, my daughter went to Stanford many years
after I did, and bringing back the mascot raised its ugly head when she was there. And
then, two years ago, we had a tribal member go to Stanford - we've had three or four tribal
members go to Stanford - and they are raising, once again, bringing back the mascot.
So this issue is still here today, but you know, they still don't know the name
of the tribe from there. We're still diggers, or now we're all Stanford Indians. So my question
is why - we never understood this when we were going through this - they accused us
of it being personal to Indian people, but when you said, "Stop the Stanford mascot,"
it was personal to them. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE] DR. HARJO: Thank you. That was marvelous.
Our next speaker is Bruce Duthu, and we've heard mention today, already, of one person
who was at Dartmouth during the time of the change
there, and that's Michael Dorris, the wonderful writer.
Another person who was there at the time was Duane Birdbear, a Mandan Hidatsa Native person,
who was sort of the student organizer, and he's the person who coined the phrase "cultural
drag" to mean when people dress up like Indians, and act the
fool and go, "Woo, woo, woo." And Bruce knew them and knew all the other
people and was part of that effort to get rid of the so-called Native references and
to fight back the people who are trying to bring back the Indian to Big Green whenever
they can. So, Bruce. HON. BRUCE DUTHU, ESQ.: Thank you very much.
I also want to thank Suzan and the organizers of this conference
for inviting me, again, since this was to be scheduled last November, and I'm one of
those that has to leave a little early to try to
beat the snowstorm back to New England, so I hope that that can happen.
I'm going to talk about some of the themes that were raised this morning; the Savage
- the Native as Savage - and I'm going to talk about it in the context of embedding
savagery in symbols and law. One of the things I should mention,
by way of background, is that I am a lawyer, and I'm now a professor, but before that - I
tell my students this is my fourth or fifth profession, depending on how you count - but
as Suzan said, I'm from the Houma tribe in Southern Louisiana Coastal Community, and
like the Ohlone people, my people are not federally recognized for many complicated
reasons. That's for another conference that I hope we can have, actually, maybe here at
this museum. I went to Dartmouth as a student. I arrived
on the campus in 1975 on a recruitment trip. Dartmouth, at that time
and still today, has a very, very aggressive recruitment program where they fly Native
students - high school students - to visit the campus, attend classes, talk with other
Native kids about their experiences there. So I was one of those recruited back in the
mid ‘70s, and lo and behold, to my shock, I
got in, so I joined the campus in 1976. And so, to use one of the phrases from this morning,
I arrived during the “afterlife” phase. The symbol had already been officially discontinued,
or the administration had voted to discontinue the use of the symbol as antithetical to the
spirit of community and inclusion and diversity, and I'll talk a little bit about
that. Like Lois, I want to give you a little bit
of background about Dartmouth’s association with Indian
imagery, and it goes back to its founding purpose. Some of you may know this history,
but many of you may not. Dartmouth is an old institution, going back
to 1769. Its charter from the British crown states that it was "founded, in part, for
the education of the youth of the Indian tribes, and British youth, and
others." So for 200 years, it was those others who really got the education--
[LAUGHTER] --because in two hundred years, from 1769
to 1969 less than twenty Native students actually received degrees from Dartmouth. Many more
attended, but most didn't graduate. Our best estimate says about 19 Native
students graduated from Dartmouth in those 200 years, people like Charles Eastman, well-known
Lakota, but not a very good track record. That changed quite dramatically in
the late ‘60s and early ‘70s for a wide range of reasons, including the activism of
the 60s where institutions of higher learning could no longer ignore or keep the curtain
closed on their own abysmal failures of diversifying their student bodies.
Dartmouth, like most institutions, were predominately white, and Dartmouth was all male, and was
all male until 1972. So, in that spirit of activism,
the college inaugurated a new president in 1970, a mathematician named John Kemeny, who
himself had some education to go through in terms of, if we do welcome these new folks
onto our campus, what will that entail? What will happen if we invite in significant numbers
African American and Native Americans to our campus? What will be entailed with
that? There had been a handful of students, Native
students, on Dartmouth's campus prior to the formal beginning,
or we call it the recommitment to Indian education, in 1970. And one of those students, who was
already on the Dartmouth campus, happened to be back on campus this week.
This is very timely because we're celebrating our 40th Anniversary as an academic program
at Dartmouth College. Native American Studies was founded in 1972, and one of the
people who spurred the - in addition to Duane Birdbear - was Howard Badhand, a Rosebud from
Lakota. And Howard was on our campus just this week, and he told some profound stories
along with people like Dave Bonga, an Anishinabe from Minnesota; Drew Rice, a Mohawk, grew
up in the south side of Chicago, actually, and a classmate of Justice
Sotomayor on the U.S. Supreme Court when they were at Yale together; and Michael Hanitchak,
a Choctaw. Those four individuals were on a
panel earlier this week and educated our current generation of Native students--and the current
generation of Dartmouth students, generally--about our origin story. That's we called the panel,
An Origin Story, because it was really was a new beginning for the college.
Howard told a story about when he was taken in by President Kemeny, who was
just about to assume the presidency, and President Kemeny invited him into his office, just the
two of them, and he asked Howard to sit in the President's chair. He sat on the opposite
side, and he said, "Imagine that you're the president of Dartmouth, and I'm listening
to you to figure out what do we need to do to welcome Native students to
Dartmouth?" And Howard had lots of answers because they
had been talking amongst themselves about what they saw when they arrived on the Dartmouth
campus. This kind of imagery, for example, imagery
where white kids dressed up, the cultural drag, that Dwayne coined, at football games
and other sporting events, something that actually has a very recent history. Most Dartmouth
folks don't know how recent the actual use and the incorporation of Indian imagery in
their sporting teams, in terms of Indians on helmets and jerseys, is relatively
recent, but references to Dartmouth as Indians began in the first third of the 20th century.
So this is not a long, long history, but at Dartmouth the motto is, "If it happens twice,
it's a tradition." [LAUGHTER]
So this is a longstanding tradition because some bits of it traced back
to the ‘60s, so that makes it a very, very longstanding tradition.
So, Howard, and then in 1970, he was joined by a group of fifteen guys-- this was the
first class recruited under the recommitment era of the Kemeny administration,
and this is the group that included Drew and David and so forth. So they arrive on the
Dartmouth campus, they go to one football game, and they see these kinds of things.
These were in the programs that you could get, and they always archive everything so
you can always look back in time and see how this was folded in terms of - this is the
football program - and so they would always do these clever little takes on Indian imagery
to scalp Brown or Harvard and so forth. So within, really, a matter of months after
being on the Dartmouth campus-- these guys were not wallflowers, at all--many of them
had already been very active on the national scene,
and so they organized very quickly and made a list of demands to the administration, and
they said, "The first thing you have to decide is do you want real Indians on this campus
or your cartoon Indians, because you cannot have both." They actually, not too many months
after that, drew a line in the sand and said, "Unless you do change, none of us are coming
back next fall, and you're going to look pretty stupid. You're making all this hoopla about
rededicating yourself to American Indians and Indian education, and what if none of
us come back?" So they really were quite activist, and I
was so happy for our current students to hear--and to hear descriptions about what activism really
means on the ground because these are folks committing themselves to a cause and going
beyond their own personal self interest; personal self interest is a bit of that, but a
couple of them admitted, they said, "Well, we got kicked out because we were so busy
doing this that we forgot to be students." And Howard was one of those.
So, the list of demands included: number one, you have to get rid of this symbol; number
two, you have to start an academic program in American Indian studies, not for us, we
know what we're about, it's for you guys, because we're surrounded by a sea of ignorance,
not malevolence necessarily, but massive ignorance-- didn't know there were any still
Indians in the U.S., didn't know there were any Indians in the Northeast, and so on. They
also wanted demands for a structure, a programmatic structure. You can't bring students on campus
without some sort of support structure. And this is, to Dartmouth's credit, and all
of these guys pay tribute to the positive institutional changes
that Dartmouth did bring about; the creation, for example, of a Native American Program.
This is the student support network, with a director, a position that today is
endowed, actually, by a Dartmouth alum. They did create an American Indian Studies program
in 1972. They created what we call the Native American visiting committee; this is a group
of alumni who come back regularly. In most of the ‘70s and ‘80s, this committee came
back twice a year. Now it comes once a year, but they are advisory to the president,
they have a direct pipeline to the Dartmouth president. What they do when they come to
campus is they meet with the students, they meet with administrators, they meet with the
faculty, and they hear how are we doing. And they put all of this in their report to the
President. I thought that was a very far-reaching institutional development, to
entrench Dartmouth's recommitment. So you might say, "Well, where are the problems,
then? That sounds pretty good. You're recruiting Native kids, you've already beat the record,
almost, in terms of how many Native students have graduated within a few years." We had
already broken the record from the previous 200 years; that didn't take much effort.
[LAUGHTER] But where were the problems? The problems
were in the afterlife; those alumni, mostly, and current students who felt that something
had been taken from them. Now they could never really
articulate what that something was, but you've heard some of the elements of that story this
morning, integrated or incorporated with a sense of identity, they had somehow melded
their sense of being at Dartmouth with being a Dartmouth Indian.
I remember an alum telling me, "You know, this has nothing to do with you people,"
to my face, in the 1970s. He says, "This has nothing to do with you people. This is an
aesthetic, and it calls back to our founding purpose." I said, "Oh. Founding purpose? That
does have something to do with me because I'm here because of that founding purpose.
Why would I have left the Bayou to come to New England where it snows, a lot?" Well,
climate change is helping to change some of that.
[LAUGHTER] But you know, this afterlife thing
was serious business, and as Lois said, it was very personal, and people who were on
the front lines experienced some pretty horrible things. So even while we had these institutional
structures that, to the outside eye, would seem quite progressive - and they were, for
their era, they were very progressive - the on the ground story was much
more negative and difficult. Suzan mentioned one of my mentors, a mentor to all of us in
those days, Michael Doris. Michael was the first chair of Native American Studies; my
predecessor in that role. You cannot imagine the kinds of things that Michael experienced
in that role, how many arrows he took for us. Alumni coming to his office, white men
- and you would think that these people are sane, but there's a story, and Michael didn't
burden us with this, I only learned this many years later. Three men showed up at his office
door one day, opened their jackets, all had the Indian head t-shirt, and yelled, "Wahoo-wah,"
which was one of our war chants, and urinated on his floor. These are Ivy Leaguers. [LAUGHTER]
[BACKGROUND CONVERSTATION BETWEEN PANELISTS] And I could go on and on with other kinds
of indignities that would have just been all the excuse all of us would have
needed to leave and never set foot - none of us needed to endure that kind of indignity.
And yet, we persisted, because we believed in what the college wanted to do,
which was to play an active, meaningful role in the education of Native students. But they
also knew that this was going to be very hard because there would be lots of resistance,
and there was. Many of us who went to the football games and saw how quickly politicized
being a Native student on the Dartmouth campus could be, it was a very difficult and
challenging time. And the more you protested, the more some of us fell by the wayside, like
Howard; not all of us were suspended, but we paid a price because you have to decide,
do you go to that protest or do you study for your English exam for the next day?
All of us had to make that choice in terms of where do you devote your time; very,
very precious time. Let me, as Lois, because of time, move forward and say that, you know,
in those intervening years, from the early ‘70s to the present, there have been
tremendous gains. The college can now boast of an alumni - Native
alumni population - of over 800; pretty impressive. Many of them are here in Washington. Many
of them are my former students. The first work-study kid I ever hired when
I went back to Dartmouth to be the Director of the Native American
Program - which is the student advisory body, the first thing Dartmouth created - the very
first student that I hired as a work-study student was Hilary Tompkins. I don't think
Hilary's here today. Hilary is a solicitor of the Department of Interior, the top lawyer
in the entire Department of the Interior. Jodi Archambault-Gillette, President Obama's
Chief Policy Advisor on Indian Affairs, class of ‘91. And the list goes on in terms of
very, very prominent Native graduates who have
gone on either to service in the federal government or the state government or their own tribal
governments as political leaders, as educators, as doctors, as business people, as teachers,
and now, even, a professor; or at least they call me professor.
But, let me finish up by saying where I really feel some of the real
dangers come from, beyond just the personal impact on people and in their lives as students,
and the culture of academic institutions, is this process of embedding savagery in symbols
and in law. There's a very insidious quality to this process
of viewing Native peoples as savages, as playthings, as a dead society, who have not
become part of the public domain. Because if you have a nonliving, a dead culture, society
somehow feels that liberty to go foraging through their archives and use whatever bits
and pieces, including the dress up bits, to play Indian.
And when that happens with the point of law - it's one thing for the college campuses
to endure these sorts of things, but when that savagery becomes embedded in law, as
it is, you have some real problems. Let me just give you a couple of examples.
The very first case involving land rights of Native peoples, a
case called Johnson v. M’Intosh, which I'm sure Lee teaches about all the time, relies
principally on this rhetoric of Indian savagery to justify the taking away of Native lands,
and saying that you could never have been the owners because of your societal inferiority,
the savagery. John Marshall didn't mince any words: "Fierce savages. And to leave
them in control of this land would be to leave this land to wilderness." That's almost a
direct quote from Johnson v. M’Intosh. A case closer to Oklahoma, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock,
1903, justified the unilateral abrogation of treaties. "We don't need to go back to
tribes and renegotiate treaties for further land cessions, we can just help ourselves
to it. Why? Because of their inferiority, their savagery, their dependency on the United
States." And more currently, 1978, a case called Oliphant v. Suquamish that held
that Indian tribes can't prosecute non-Indians. And when you think about who is committing
violent crime against Native women, just as one example, *** violence against Native
women, four out of five offenders are non-Indians, and the governments closest to the problem
are disempowered from doing anything about it because of the Supreme
Court's ruling. As many of you know, Congress has a bill pending
right now the reauthorization of VAWA, Violence Against Women Act, that would include provisions
to restore this power of tribes to prosecute all offenders in a limited context of ***
crimes. At least on the House side, they're objecting
to that because it is beyond Congress's power. Suddenly, Congress doesn't have power to do
what it wants in Indian affairs, to manipulate tribal sovereignty, what I
call Play Doh sovereignty, let's make it what we want that we can tolerate.
Well, and one last sort of embedded savagery, if I could show you an ORG chart of the Department
of the Interior, I always show this to my students. Notice where the Bureau of Indian
Affairs is, who else is in the Department of the Interior? Fish and Wildlife, you know,
animals. And that to me hits home, in terms of mascots.
Who gets to be a mascot in the U.S? Animals and Indians. Who's paired together in the
federal architecture? Animals and Indians. That's embedded savagery. That's the extent
to which we really need to expunge that kind of attitude in our structure. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE] DR. HARJO: That was terrific, Bruce. Thank
you so much. Another Dartmouth alum was Mateo Romero, who is one of our top Native painters
and he was one of the original plaintiffs in our
lawsuit against the dreadful name of the Washington football team, and he joined a distinguished
group that included Vine Deloria and Norbert Hill, Manley Begay, who you heard earlier,
Bill Means (Lakota), and Ray Apodaca. We refer to that as the old people's case, even though
Mateo is very young, and that's been taken over now by the young people, and we wish
them well; Amanda Blackhorse and the 18- to 24-year-olds who have taken up the same case.
There will be a hearing in the Blackhorse case
against the Washington franchise on March 7th before the U.S. Patent and Trademark,
Trials, and Appeals Board - the T-TAB judges. These are the judges who know what they're
talking about when it comes to trademarks, and so if you're here in the local area, turnout
for the March 7th hearing. Speaking of taking arrows for us,
Delise O'Meally has done that and more, and we owe her at least a shield. She has really
done quite a remarkable job with the NCAA in dealing with some of these hostile and
abusive names and behaviors and symbols. She's going to go through very quickly what she
is able to say, you know everyone sues the NCCA, so there are some things that she's
not able to cover, but she'll share with us what
she can. Thank you. DELISE O'MEALLY, ESQ.: Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure for me to be with
you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the NCAA's policy on the use of Native
American mascots at our championship events, and I'll use these next several minutes to
give you just a brief overview of the policy, talk about how it was adopted, the colleges
and universities that were impacted by the policy, the reactions that we got
after the policy was implemented, and then where we are today.
Let me provide some of the background and a little bit of the historical perspective
on the genesis and the evolution of this policy. But it's also equally important that you understand
a little bit about the structure of the NCAA. That will shed some light for you on why we
went about the policy the way we did. The NCAA is a membership-driven organization.
We are comprised of over 1200 colleges and universities and conferences all across the
country. All of our rules, regulations, and policies are initiated and adopted by our
member institutions. So, the issue of the use of Native American
mascots and nicknames and imagery in college sports was first introduced to the NCAA around
about 2001. There were several key events that prompted our discussion, and
this included an internal request from our membership to review the issue, as well as
a very strongly worded statement, at the time, from the United States Commission on Civil
Rights calling for an end to the use Native American images and team names by non-Native
schools. So, if you think about our membership structure,
we carefully studied this issue for four years. We engaged our membership.
We have a very vast committee structure, and we worked directly with all of those institutions
that carried these nicknames and these images.
Our study included review of numerous articles, consultation with experts, testimonials from
tribal groups and members, student athletes, the NCAA membership, and the general public.
Additionally, each of these institutions was asked to complete a self-study that described
its use of these references, the impact that had
on student athletes, on the campus community, on the Native American people, and then on
the general public at large. As we researched this issue, there was overwhelming
evidence of the potential harm created by the continued use of Native American mascots,
nicknames, imagery, and logos. Additionally, we received letters and statements
and resolutions from numerous Native American tribes, organizations, and agencies that corroborated
this research data. The pervasiveness of the use of these nicknames
as well as the documented harm to the Native American people, and the very, very strong
opposition to the continued use from those that we saw were affected the most persuaded
the NCAA to focus its attention on this issue. Ultimately, the decision by our highest-ranking
committee, which is the NCAA Executive Committee, was grounded
in three constitutional principles for the NCAA. First of all, our principle of nondiscrimination,
which calls on our members to promote an atmosphere of respect for and sensitivity to the dignity
of every person. Then we have a principle of cultural diversity and gender equity, which
requires colleges and universities to establish and maintain an environment that values these
elements. And finally, the principle of sportsmanship and ethical conduct
which speaks to the enhancement of integrity in higher education and the promotion of civility
in society. So before I go much further, let me set the
stage for our discussion by outlining the specifics of our policy, what it does and
what it doesn't do. And I would note that we received quite a bit of criticism on both
sides of the coin on this. There were those that said the NCAA had far
outstepped and overreached its boundaries, and there were others who said the NCAA just
had not gone far enough. As a membership-driven organization, we operate
by carefully balancing those issues that require national governance, and those issues that
we believe should be left institutional autonomy, and so the policy relates specifically
to NCAA championship and post-season events, events that we control. It does not relate
to regular season competition or to conference championships that are controlled
by other groups. And then, while the NCAA strongly discourages the use of these nicknames
and imagery and mascots, the policy did not mandate that an institution had to change
its nickname or its mascot as a condition of membership.
So essentially, what the policy does, it impacts an institution's ability to host
an NCAA championship, it required those who were awarded championships previously to cover
all such references, it precluded the use of these names and imagery on uniforms during
our championship events, and also precluded the appearance of mascots, precluded the names
and imagery on band, cheerleader, and dance uniforms, etcetera.
As I noted, what it doesn't do, it does not preclude an institution that had this imagery
from participating in our championship; they just could not wear
or bring any of the paraphernalia. It does not require an institution to change its nickname,
and then does not govern regular season competition. We strongly believe that our championship
events should promote an atmosphere of respect and sensitivity for the dignity of every person,
and this includes participating student athletes, students
on campus, fans, and other supporters of college sports.
So those institutions that encouraged a culture of racial stereotyping through the use of
this imagery would not be able to host NCAA championships. At the time of the adoption
of our policy, there were about 20 institutions that were subject to
the parameters of the policy. These institutions had some variation of imagery, some nicknames,
or some other clear association with Native American culture.
Since 2005, several institutions chose to change their nicknames or their mascots, and
to remove the corresponding imagery. Now, very early in the process, we were faced with
situations where an institution carried a very specific tribal name, and the local tribe
in question was supportive of the use of that name.
This resulted in an exception to our policy, and we were roundly criticized, also, for
creating this exception to the policy. Institutions that could demonstrate endorsement by these
tribes were then no longer subject to the parameters of the policy. It was a very, very
difficult discussion for us because although the committee continued to
believe that stereotyping Native Americans through nicknames and imagery was wrong, it
recognized that a Native American tribe is a distinct political community, and therefore
respected the authority of the tribe to permit the university or the college to use its name.
We also recognized that there were disagreements among Native American people on these issues,
and so whenever a tribe endorsed the use of the name, the NCAA deferred it to the judgment
and the will of that tribe. Another interesting question for us
was how to handle kind of generic names. So, even in the absence of specific imagery, generic
names like Indians or Braves were widely recognized as stereotypical references to Native American
people. And so these were institutions reviewed through
somewhat of a different lens than those that adopted specific tribal names.
We agree that while both representations contributed to the perpetuation of a one-dimensional stereotype
of Native American people, we found that generic references had
an even wider impact. And as we did our research, and this was mentioned earlier today as well
as this morning, we found that along with Eagles, Tigers, Bulldogs, and Lions, the term
Indians was one of the most widely used athletic team nicknames in the country.
So, when our policy was adopted in 2005, there was immediate reaction.
Initially the loudest voices were primarily negative. We were accused of venturing into
social justice issues beyond the scope of our authority.
Headlines read, "Political Correctness Run Amok, NCAA Has Other Things To Worry About,"
"NCAA Does Not Belong In The Social Change Arena," "This Should Be Dealt With at
the Campus or Local Level." Then, people who were affiliated with the institutions were
saying to us, "The way we use the symbols, imagery, it's not negative. We're honoring
Native Americans. We don't find it to be offensive,
of course. It's part of our tradition." They told us that what we do next is eliminate
Tiger and Bears if we went as far as to eliminate Native American mascots.
Many of these calls I took personally. My integrity was questioned. I was called stupid.
It was really quite a trying circumstance and situation for us in the nine
months just after the policy was adopted. But eventually, a chorus of voices started
to grow, and these were voices that were offering very positive comments, and they got louder,
and they were saying things like, "You did the right thing. That this would have positive
impact on our lives."
One of the quotes that stuck with me - and it stuck with me because it was very early
in the process while all we were hearing in the media and from
the many telephone calls and the e-mails that we were getting anonymously, and I'll just
say this, when you can send an anonymous e-mail, you could say just about anything, is what
I've discovered, and they did. They said just about anything and I responded to them.
But the quote that stuck with me was from a young woman, and she said,
"You've made the right decision, and when it comes to an issue as divisive as this,
the right decision is always the hardest decision to uphold. The people of the Cheyenne River
Sioux Tribe would like to offer their sincerest thanks."
It was one of the first, we had many others after, but it stuck with me because it was
just the most positive message that we had heard. So, where we are
today, on the slide in front of you are the institutions that were originally impacted
by the policy. We have continued to have dialogue
with them over the past eight years. We've been through congressional hearings, legal
cases, settlement agreements, a lot of media attention. We have received criticism as well
as praise. The NCAA policy is still effective, now seven or eight years later, and we believe
that we have in some small way helped to reduce stereotyping and discrimination, at
least within the sphere of our control. On this slide, you'll see in red the nicknames
as they existed previously, and those that changed their names, I've indicated the current
nicknames. Some of them that were generic nicknames, they removed all imagery, and moved
away from representing that nickname as a Native American
nickname, like the William and Mary Tribe. The ones on the right are those institutions
that sought and received endorsement from specific tribes; basically we called it the
namesake tribe endorsement. I thank you for your interest, and for your
support, even for your disagreement because it's only with open and honest dialogue that
we can move forward. I anticipate your questions. [APPLAUSE]
DR. HARJO: Well thank you very much for all your hard work and for that
presentation. I'd like to point out that there are heroes on every one of these campaigns
to get rid of the local mascot or the local name, and some of them have been mentioned
here before, but I wanted to mention one from the University of Illinois, Marcus Amerman,
who was the very first Native artist to oppose Chief Illiniwik, and he did so publicly in
the newspaper and was vilified to such an extent and had so many death threats that
he had to leave the school, and that work was carried on by Debbie Reese
and lots of Native students there, and they did a wonderful job, and with the Fighting
Sioux, and it's in its death throes now, Jesse Taken Alive and others who worked so hard
to bring that about. And one thing that you've seen that's really
interesting is a shift from the people who are the front line. People who really take
the hardest hit on all of this are the students, the Native
students on each of these campuses, and there's been a shift by people who want to hang on
to these mascots and these symbols too by saying, "Well, if the local tribe doesn't
find a problem, then we're fine with it, you should be fine with it," and they've taken
it out of the hands, in some cases, of the students
and put it in the hands of a tribe who will be complicit in the bad acts that are committed
against the students. So, this is complicated and a power
dynamic has shifted in some cases that is undesirable, so while we do good things in
one area, we're not protecting the people who need the most protection in all of these
efforts, and those are the students because they're the ones taking it every day and whose
lives are being threatened and who are being vilified, and held up to ridicule
every day. One of the people who introduced legislation,
who did it another way, tried to introduce legislation, did what he could when he was
in the Senate, and the owner moved the team out of the District of Columbia because of
it, and I'll let him tell that tale. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
[APPLAUSE] HON. BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL: Thank you, Suzan.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
As Suzan knows, I'm a retired U.S. Senator. I'm about halfway through
my ten-step recovery program, and I'm almost well.
[LAUGHTER] Some can stay for life, but I couldn't. Most
of us on this panel, we come from a people in which cars, candy bars, beer, tobacco,
and t-shirts are all named after us and marketed using our image, but we don't get many benefits
from those. We come from a people in which hundreds, if
not thousands, of small towns, particularly in the American West, if you pick up any Chamber
of Commerce brochure, they use our image in the same area where we have 70-80% or more
unemployment and our kids are ten times more likely to commit suicide than anyone else
in the United States. So there's no question, we've been used a
lot in American history, probably because we didn't have a way of communicating other
than our own language in the olden days, and by
the way, I noticed our nice lady here using sign language, many of those signs are the
same in Indian Sign Language, and sometimes we watch them and we can understand some of
the things she's saying because Indian Sign Language is very similar.
But, I don’t want to digress. I often wonder about the difficulty of changing names and
almost everybody has talked about that, and I think it's ingrained
in us, several things. First of all, you know Americans are kind
of raised from childhood to be loyal to the team, to your team. And so you're loyal to
your elementary school football team, and your high school basketball team, and your
college team, and so on. And whenever somebody tinkers around with
your team, it gets everybody on the fight. We have some pretty interesting names in the
state of Colorado, my home state, but some names just grate on
all of us. "Redskins" is not the only one. "Savage" and "Squaw" and "Buck," those four
are considered just terrible names to most Indian people because we know where they came
from. Most people on the outside, meaning non-Indian,
don't know where they came from, don't know where they originated from, and nobody did
mention that here, and I didn't sit in the earlier panels, but maybe somebody did mention
it in the earlier panels; "Redskin" came from the time when bounties were give for Indian
people during the French and English war, where all you had to do was turn in some black
hair or a patch of skin and you could get paid for it. That's where it came from.
Who wants to be remembered for that? Nobody I know.
"Squaw," "Buck," and "Savage" are equally terrible names. It's difficult to change,
partly because this loyalty kids who grow up with, but I
have to tell you, I think in some cases, too, it's because of a cowardice on the behalf
of elected officials. They tend to lean very heavily towards getting re-elected, as you
probably know, and not many will stand up and do the right thing if they think it's
very unpopular. University of Illinois was mentioned,
I remember Paul Simon, a former Senate friend of mine from years and years ago, and he came
out publicly about changing the symbol of the University of Illinois, Chief Illiniwik
or whatever they’re called up there. He showed me some of the hate mail he got, and
you absolutely wouldn't believe it; death threats, hate mail like you would not believe.
MS. O'MEALLY: [Interposing] I got some of those.
HON. CAMPBELL: I'll bet. And when I introduced the bill that Suzan mentioned, and by the
way, I didn't pursue that bill when the owner of the Redskins
decided to move to Landover, but when I introduced that bill, I got some very, very angry mail
and calls, too, but if I could talk to them personally, and I noticed obviously that if
that person was Hispanic American or Black American or Chinese American or something,
and I asked them, you might say, to walk in our shoes for awhile,
and they would complain, "That's my team. You shouldn't be trying to change the name,"
and, "I support that team," that kind of thing. And I would say to them, "You're an African
American? How would you like us to change the name of that team to the Washington Darkies
or something like that?" And they'd say, "Oh, God. You can't do that."
But you know as well as I do, everybody in this audience knows as well as I do, there
is a derogatory nickname for every ethnic group, I
think, in the world, and certainly in this country, whether you're Irish, whether you're
German, whether you're Black American, whether you're Hispanic, whether you're Chinese. You
name it, there's some kind of a derogatory word that simply shouldn't be used.
I think the African Americans have taken a lead on that by just, I mean,
creating an awareness among all Americans, the N-word is a no-no, it's as simple as that.
Well, there are many other words almost equally as bad that should be no-no's, but we haven’t
had the stature or the political clout or the so on to make more people aware of it.
But elected officials, it seems to me, through benign neglect and a
worry that they might not get re-elected are really headed for the tall grass on this one,
and I have to commend Mayor Vincent Gray, who just a couple weeks ago said publicly
that the Washington Redskins needed to - oh, I
wrote it down, in fact. They needed to consider changing their name before coming back to
Washington, and they should. [APPLAUSE]
I, personally, don't have a problem with the team. I was an athlete, I was in the Olympic
games of 1964, Suzan didn't mention that, but I know
a little bit about sports. [LAUGHTER]
I know something about sports. And so, I'm a big supporter of athletes no matter where
they are. I know the kind of training they went through. I know the injuries, I know
the difficulty, the healing process, and the long-term effect of having a bad back and
bad knees, and everything else because you committed yourself to ten
years of being on the field or on the mats or somewhere.
In addition to that, Mike Shanahan is personal friend of mine. Remember, he
was the coach for the Broncos for years, and he was a political supporter of mine, a fine
man. I think the world of him, and the team, too. I don't like the name, and that's the
real rub. It's the name. Now, there have been all kinds of questions
raised about the use of names. Some people say, "Well, wait a minute. There's Indian
teams that call themselves Indian names like the Chiefs
or the Warriors, something of that nature." Well that's right, they do. I know a number
of high school Indian school teams that call themselves names like that, not these brutal
names that I mentioned awhile ago, but Indian people are not just a racial minority, they're
also a form of government, a sovereign government as defined in the U.S. Constitution. They
can do that. And so, if a tribe like the Seminoles reaches an agreement with a university in
Florida to allow them to use that word "Seminole," that's their business. No
problem. But I can tell you this, no Seminole, no Seminole - and I'm not Seminole, but I
know I can speak for them on this - they would not support the use of any of those four names
that I mentioned. So those are individual cases where a tribe
and a school may reach some kind of an agreement, as Delise
mentioned. That's OK with me, too. If it's all right with them, it's OK with me.
But the heading for the tall grass on behalf of a lot elected officials, I think, is just
inexcusable. There are over a hundred names of federal locations using the word "Squaw."
Squaw Valley, California, where the 1960 Olympic Games were held is one
you might mention, but there's Squaw Peak, Squaw Valley, Squaw Lake, Squaw this, Squaw
that, and so on. You track where that word "squaw" originated
is from one of the Northeastern tribes, and it defines, in a
longer word, a part of a woman's anatomy. Nobody wants to use that word, for crying
out loud, for a location, if they knew what it meant, but nobody has taken that on.
And I thought about it and did a little bit of survey when I was, you might say, still
in the Senate and wanting to make some change, but,
boy, I'll tell you the difficulty of changing hundreds of names nationwide, and changing
the maps, and running it under the bureaucracy, and all the local opposition, and everything
else; I just couldn't get enough support in the Senate to take on those kinds of things,
but those should be changed, too. So it's not just a matter of teams;
they should be, too. There are a number of schools, I think, that are at different levels
of how bad the names are. In Colorado, we have three different
high school teams that have three different names. One in Montrose, Colorado, they call
themselves the Indians. The other one, La Mar, Colorado, call themselves the Savages.
And another one, Arapaho High School, calls themselves the Warriors.
In the case of the Arapaho High School, they went to the Arapaho
tribe of Wyoming and talked to them, and asked them to help them find some kind of common
ground, and the Arapaho tribe did. And every year, the Arapaho tribe sends delegates to
the school where they have some seminars on cultural diversity and the history of the
Arapaho people, and it's a pretty nice relationship, but the school never tried to do that without
working with the Arapaho tribe. I haven't, frankly - even though my wife's
a graduate of Montrose High School - I never have asked if there's been much opposition
to using the name of Indians around Montrose.
But the third one, the La Mar Savages, boy, did I get into a tangle over that one years
ago when I was in office. When they asked me if I thought that word was offensive, and
I said, "You bet it's offensive using the word savage." I said, "Our mothers and fathers
and grandparents were not savages. They were Indian
people." And whoa, did I get the hate mail from some of the people. So I said to them,
in a dialogue with the supporters of that, I said, "It's OK. You want to use the word
Savage? It's fine if you want to be a savage. Use your own picture."
[APPLAUSE] They didn't do that, but I thought, "You know,
you want to use your photograph up there and say your mother and
father were savages, OK, but don't use our people." But then the second line of defense
for them was saying, "Oh, no, what we really meant was noble savages." Oh yeah, OK, sure.
[LAUGHTER] We've all heard that before. So I know we
have a long way to go, but clearly the enlightened universities that have already changed their
name, and Stanford was one of them mentioned. I was a student doing some graduate
work at Stanford. I went to San Jose and then to Stanford. I was there when they were still
the Stanford Indians and many people that were there at the time, they didn't care for
that name even then. And, like a good enlightened university, they kind of took the lead on
changing that name as others have. So it's a long process, but I think
part of it are forums like this, we can explain, you know, walk in our shoes for awhile. You'll
understand our beliefs, you'll understand what is to be used in so many different
ways in American culture without having almost any recourse. I think, maybe, one of the other
difficulties, too, we have, and I remember some of the phone calls I got when I was dealing
with the word "redskins," - and, by the way, I didn't pursue that bill when then-owner
Jack Kent Cook decided to move to Landover, but that was the one of the reasons he decided
to flee the scene and go to Landover - but one of the things I used to get calls on in
those days, people would say, "Wait a minute, Senator. I'm part Indian and I don't mind
using that name at all." Well, come on, you know, if you've seen Dances with Wolves, and
you do a poll afterwards, you find out there's a whole bunch people who weren't Indian before
they saw Dances with Wolves.
[LAUGHTER] And it goes away after the movie goes away,
too, by the way. So that's a real common thing, and a pretty poor
excuse, but I look at it this way, if you ask a person, let's use the African American
experience. Who in the world would ever believe something like this: I'm part black and I
don't mind using the N-word? Well, you should mind if you don't, and you're probably a liar
to begin with. But there are certain words you can't
cover up and hide and dodge around and say, "Well it's OK because this or that or the
other." They're wrong from the beginning and they're wrong to the end. And, maybe, I probably
ought to just leave it there before I start pounding the table here.
[LAUGHTER] She's known me a long time. I tend to get
my blood up, as they say. But certainly, forums like this and the people
that are here, when they go back, hopefully you will talk to your friends and neighbors,
and have them recognize, we've come a long way, but
we still have a long way to go. And part of it, I think, is maybe our own fault. You know,
we didn't have a written language in the olden days, we couldn't defend ourselves, and so
we're a culture, that by and large in American history, was defined by somebody else. We
were not able to define ourselves, and only, let's say, since the ‘70s, what I call the
time of a reawakening of ethnic pride for almost all Americans, that Indian people said,
"Wait a minute. You're not going to define me. I'll tell you who I am. You don't need
to try and tell me who I am." And now, it's great that we have movies coming out of Hollywood
with wonderful Indian actors. Well, most are. I don't know what Johnny Depp is.
[LAUGHTER] I heard he was adopted in the Comanche nation,
so maybe he is now, but he didn't used to be. But, we have great Indian actors, and
I think we're telling our own story on film and in
books, and so on. Years ago, I introduced a bill to change the
name of the Custer Battlefield because it was the only battlefield I could find in the
whole United States that was named after the loser instead of the winner. [LAUGHTER AND
APPLAUSE] Seems to me, we ought to have equal
honor on the battlefield as the soldiers that were up there, and so we changed that name.
It wasn't easy. We got a lot of hate mail because of that, too, and at that time, before
that name was changed, the bookstore at the battlefield would not allow any books written
by Indians to be sold in the bookstore. That's a fact. There are now. In
fact, I was up there just about a month ago, and it's much - there's been a lot of change.
Now there's much more access to Indian people writing and telling their side of the
story as it was told by their grandfathers and so on.
So we're making progress. We just need more help, and we hope everybody in this audience
is going to help us do that. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
DR. HARJO: Thank you so much. Ben didn't mention that not only was his bill introduced by himself,
the only Native person at that time in Congress, but
it was also introduced, a companion bill, the identical bill introduced on the House
side by Civil Rights hero John Lewis, Representative Lewis, and I always like to thank people who
others might think have no stake in it, who stepped forward to say, "This is my fight,
too." So, I really appreciate that on his behalf, and also that Ben stepped
forward, and did this. Many times people say to us, "Don't you have
other, more important things to worry about rather than this?"
Well, we're the people who do those more important things, and the people who ask that question,
in my experience, have never done anything to help our people. So, I so appreciate the
people who have done things to help our people. I want to ask our panelists to make concluding
remarks, brief concluding remarks, not brief like the presentations, but
[LAUGHTER] --where everyone was marvelously eloquent
at length. But, really brief concluding remarks, things that you want people here in the theater
and watching this around the country through the webcam, through the webcast, what you
would like to say to them and what thoughts you would like
to leave them with. Lee? DR. HESTER: One of the things that I think
should be said is that I really don't believe that anybody goes into having any of these
mascots, doing any of the things that we've discussed on
this panel, with evil in their heart. I don't believe that. I like to believe that most
people really are, at base, fine individuals, that if they really understood, that they
would come to change. And I think that that’s what a forum like this is supposed to do,
is to help people to understand so that the better angels of their nature, as a wise man
once said, could take hold, and they could end up becoming better people themselves and
go ahead and drop these. Thank you. DR. HARJO: Lois?
MS. RISLING: Indian people are alive, breathing, living in their homes, both on reservations,
off reservations, all over the United States, even Washington, D.C., and that having
someone reduced to a mascot and reduced to a symbol so that a whole other group of people
can become Indian, and then negate all of these living, breathing, functioning
people. We have been here since time immemorial. My grandfather used to tell me, if a redwood
tree could grow here, so could a Yurok, Karuk, or a Hoopa person. And if we don't get anything
else, I think we have to realize that every time we think we can change non-Indian people
into Indians by just making them a mascot, we're saying Indian
people don’t exist and that the ownership belongs to the non-Indian. But we are living
people. [APPLAUSE]
DR. HARJO: Bruce? MR. DUTHU: I guess my parting suggestion or
plea would be to join the project in enhancing our nation's cultural literacy about Native
people, and it's quite related to what Lois has just said. Some of you many know this,
but there was an event happening in the early part of the 20th century where Congress set
aside some land in Staten Island, a big parcel of land, on which would be built a statue
of a young Indian brave, and it was going to be known as the monument to the departed
race. There was a big ceremony. Members of Congress, the President of the United States
was there, and several old chiefs were trotted out to kind of, I guess, symbolize the passing
of these people. We're always planning Native people's
funeral, but this was a real funeral. Had the statue been built - and there's a book,
Lucy Maddox's book, you can actually see an architectural rendering of this statue - had
it been built, would've been about fifteen feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now
imagine, had that been built, how we would have to explain this to our children and to
visitors. What does that statue - we know what Lady Liberty represents - but what's
that one over there? And we would have to tell
that story, and so in joining the project to enhance our nation's cultural literacy,
it's a plea to stop acting as if we had actually built that monument.
[APPLAUSE] MS. O'MEALLY: So I think, for me, this was
a tremendous learning experience. I'm a Jamaican national. I was born and I grew up in Jamaica,
and I came to this country about 25 years ago. So I did not experience the anger of
the Civil Rights Movement. I learned about it through history books and reading about
it, but I got to experience some of the same venomous behavior when we went through this
process in the mid 2000s, and I was amazed that people in this day and age were still
so angry, still so unwilling to put themselves
in someone else's shoes, and still unwilling to recognize the pain and suffering that they
were causing other people. But saying that, we went through the fight, and we're
in a place much better than we were, and so I would leave you with an encouraging message.
I would say that change has been slow, it's painfully slow at time, but keep at it. Keep
going. Everyone in this room can be an advocate, no matter age or your background. Beautiful
young lady sitting in the front here, she can be an advocate, and hopefully within
the next few years, by the time she is grown up, we won't be talking about these issues.
[APPLAUSE] HON. CAMPBELL: I think we have it a little
more difficult probably than most people because most people when they immigrated to these
shores, including some of my ancestors on my
Anglo side, they were in a position that we sometimes say is upward mobility. In other
words, they had everything to gain by coming to this new land, and nothing to lose because
the place they came from was a whole lot worse; this was the land of opportunity and Eden
and so on. The only cultural group, the only racial group that I know in the United States
that does not follow in that pattern are the American Indians. While everybody else came
to these shores and had everything to gain, Indians had everything to lose,
and almost did lose everything by the 1900s, you probably know if you read the history
books, they almost lost everything. They were almost erased, literally, down from millions
and millions, something like fourteen and a half million before pre-Columbian times
down to like 200,000 in the year 1900. But they were here long before anybody else. I
happen to live just East, about 50 miles off Mesa Verde,
if your ancestors are from Israel, you know that Mesa Verde was built about the same time
as Masada, the stronghold on the top of the mountain. And those wonderful people that
live there and were gone about 500 years before Columbus even fell off the boat, they had
already migrated downstream. They were gone. They had towns as large as any town in Europe
and they had doctors and astronomers and teachers and all the sophisticated things that they
had in Europe too. Only glad maybe that the Mayan calendar was misinterpreted so that
we can still be here today. But they had all those wonderful things. But they didn’t
have a way of recording them or writing about them and so when they left and the new immigrants
took over, they tended, as I mentioned earlier, to be defined by somebody else’s definition.
Somebody else’s way of defining it. But if
you ever have a chance to visit some of those ancient places, whether it’s Cahokia near
the present city of St. Louis or Mesa Verde out where I live, you know, that those people,
they had no disease, they had no prostitution and AIDS, drugs, all the societal problems
that we have in a modern America. They didn’t have any of that. Surely if we could learn
from those people, we’d be better off as a nation. There’s no question in my mind.
We just have to somehow bridge that gap and understand there is a way to do that. But
it won’t come easy and it won’t come fast. But certainly
forums like this help tell our story and we hope you’ve enjoyed it. Thank you.
DR. HARJO: Carolyn, I wonder if you have any online questions for us? We have precious
little time but-- CAROLYN: [Interposing] We’re going to double-check
the online but a member of the audience would like to
ask a question first if that’s all right? DR. HARJO: Sure thing.
FEMALE VOICE: Hello everyone. I really enjoyed your presentations. I
learned so much. My remark is to Ben Campbell. DR. HARJO: I’m sorry. We can’t hear.
FEMALE VOICE: Oh I’m sorry. Thank you so much for your remarks so far. I’ve learned
so very much. My question and a remark first is to Ben Campbell. You know, I’m wondering
why it’s not recognized amongst the white population that this is racial profiling.
You know, the lies and the hidden agendas and such. So I’m wondering if you could
expound on that and before you do, I just wanted to thank you for recognizing the interpreters
and the use of sign language. HON. CAMPBELL: Thank you. I
didn’t hear you very well--dealing with racial profiling?
FEMALE VOICE: Right. The idea just that these symbols, these images, the names that are
used, why is it not considered racial profiling and why
don't the white majority recognize it as such? HON. CAMPBELL: Well we consider it racial
profiling and maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe part of it is it’s incumbent on us
to try to tell our story a little better and a little more forcefully. But I think those
people--more and more people-- are recognizing it. I mean,
when I mentioned that sometimes I would talk to African American people or Hispanic Americans
who are big supporters of the Redskins and I’d ask them if they would mind if we used,
you know, a derogatory name that they understood for the team here in Washington, they recognized
that very well as sort of racial insults. And it is a form of racial
profiling. FEMALE VOICE: Thank you.
FEMALE VOICE: Thank you very much. Yes? FEMALE VOICE: Hi. Yeah sorry. This
will be directed at Mr. Hester. FEMALE VOICE: We can’t understand you.
FEMALE VOICE: Mr. Hester, you said that you believed that most people in their goodness
if you could reason with them if they lived close to Native people that they would understand
how harmful these mascots are; however I, like Mr. Duthu,
am Houma Native American. My mother was born in a small indigenous village in Dulac, Louisiana,
and taken as a 4-year-old child and the Methodist missionaries that raised her, I’ve come
to know them almost like grandparents. In a recent visit, I had noticed and was appalled
by the fact that the Houma police force uses a logo emblem that
is very similar to the Redskins mascot, you know, profile, head, completely bright red
for whatever reason and a Siouxan headdress that has absolutely nothing
to do with our tribe. And I was appalled by this and I brought it up at dinner and I was
so confused as to why they had it, brought up that local tribal elders didn't agree with
it. I had just spoken to them that day, Kerwin [phonetic] and Louise were not at all supportive.
And these women that had raised my mother, given her food, shelter, seen
the struggle of the Houma people and seen what it had done to my mother, looked at me
in disgust and told me that I had no right to be offended by this and that most people
probably didn’t even recognize or know that they were using that emblem even though it
is printed very largely on every police car patrolling the area and none of those policeman
are Houma. So I guess my question would be that
that situation exists, I mean, I’m living in it. So you have the goodness of these missionary
women who have dedicated their lives to helping Houma children but at the same
time they’re looking at me, my baby sister, my mother, generations of Houma women and
they are telling us, we have no right to have any feeling about the racial oppression and
the legacy of that in our own family. MR. HESTER: Yes. Well yeah. She actually addressed
it to me and I think that your pointing to that is an instance
in which it’s hard to see the good nature that might exist beneath that surface. And
I have to say that’s exactly right. So many times there are people out there who are so
driven by different views, different beliefs, you know, for example one of the big problems
that we have in Oklahoma is that it is a state in which the settlers--I mean, our big
celebration day is ‘89er day. Okay. And ‘89er day is the day in which the settlers
came to take the land, okay. There isn’t any way that
an Indian person is going to feel good about that. On the other hand, it’s part of the
heritage of the settlers. So unfortunately you really do have a complete disconnect.
You have one group of people whose history in many cases that they would like to be able
to celebrate has in it so many bad things that they essentially ignore to be able to
feel good about the other things, that there’s
really kind of false consciousness there. And that can be horribly, deeply ingrained.
So I’m not saying that it isn’t hard but I do believe that they are motivated by what
they think are good things. And I think that there are good things in every group of people.
And I want to hang onto that. So yes, I do think
that there is something there but yes, I agree with you, it’s very, very hard sometimes
to see where it might be, where that spark of decency, that spark of goodness is.
And you just have to keep on working at it. Just keep on trying. It’s going to be a
tough row but I think you’re a strong person and I think hopefully through continuing to
engage them, at some point or another maybe that you can break through.
MR. DUTHU: Can I just, Suzan? Thank you very much for your question. I grew up in Dulac.
That’s the village I grew up in. I will slightly disagree
with Lee when he said that he believes mostly in the goodness of people. There’s a big
part of me that would like to be that generous. But I also believe there are very evil people
in our society. Most people in Houma--there’s a distinction between my tribe, the Houma
people, and the city of Houma. And I bet if you did one of those Jay Leno,
pass the microphone, the jaywalking episode, and said, “Why is this community known as
Houma?,” probably nine out of ten people in
Houma would not know that there is a Houma tribe all around them that numbers over 15,000
people and that this image that they’ve emblazoned on the police car--which is the
city of Houma, not the tribe, so it’s not our tribal government--would have no idea
of what they’re talking about there. Thank you. You mentioned missionary, and let me
just say one thing. The missionaries--and I grew up Roman Catholic.
But the missionaries in our area in Dulac were basically in competition for parishioners,
not to convert to Christianity but to support their parishes. While they were also reminding
them that they couldn’t fully partake in the benefits of Christianity. My mom went
to one of the Catholic mission schools where she was repeatedly told, “You
know God really appreciates that you’re trying to make the effort to earn your place
in heaven. You never will because you’re a dirty Indian,
but he appreciates and loves you for trying.” That’s what your folks were dealing with.
FEMALE VOICE: Suzan? DR. SUZAN SHOWN HARJO: In closing this out,
I want to thank hardly Elizabeth Kennedy Gische and Eileen Maxwell and Leonda Levchuk and
of course our illustrious museum director, Kevin Gover, for putting on
this marvelous, marvelous symposium and to the wonderful Carol Rapkievian, we’re out
of time. Thank you very much. Come back at 3:45 promptly.
[END RECORDING]