Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy

Abstract

"Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy" edited by C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood is reviewed.

Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy. C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 356 pp.

Team Spirits presents an overview of the debates and conflicts surrounding the use of American Indian figures and imagery as mascots for sports teams. The majority of the chapters in this volume edited by C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood examine the histories and controversies over mascots at colleges and universities, including Syracuse, Arkansas State, Central Michigan, Michigan, Florida State, Illinois, Springfield College (Massachusetts), and Marquette. Two more chronicle the battles over Indian mascots for professional sports teams, specifically the Cleveland Indians (Ellen Staurowsky) and the Washington Redskins (Suzan Shown Harjo), and one chapter recounts the unique history of the only all-Indian professional football team, the Oorang Indians (Springwood). Two chapters probe more deeply into mascots and the media (Jay Rosenstein), and mascots and education (Cornel Pewewardy), while King and Springwood's introduction and conclusion place the entire collection into a larger framework of questions about race and stereotype, culture and imagery, power and resistance.

This volume is by no means an objective investigation into the question of American Indian mascots, nor should it be. The harm perpetuated on American Indians, especially children, by demeaning mascots has been decried by Native people and recognized by bodies as diverse as the Los Angeles Public Schools (Ann Marie Machamer) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office (Harjo). Several of the chapters were contributed by activists working to eliminate Native mascots (Machamer, Harjo), while others come from academics interested in chronicling how and why some collegiate mascots have been retired (Donald Fisher, Laurel Davis, and Malvina Rau), while others are retained (Richard Clark Eckert, Patrick Russell LeBeau, David Prochaska).

Because Team Spirits is a collection with many and diverse authors, it is sometimes uneven and disjointed. King and Springwood have placed the contributions into five sections that organize the varied contributions; an introduction to each section might have helped the reader to relate to the essays more easily. Because the authors are from a variety of academic disciplines, their styles differ widely. While the chapters examine a broad range of issues involving Native mascots, there is no in-depth discussion of the economics of mascots, or athletic team names. This issue has come to the forefront most visibly in the recent controversy over the name of the University of North Dakota sports teams, the Fighting Sioux, and the efforts of a major donor to retain the name, over the objections of American Indian students. While this is an extreme example, the potential loss of alumni contributions or sports fans' dollars is a powerful motivator for teams to hold on to their racist mascots and needs to be included as a complicating issue.

Team Spirits makes a valuable contribution to the sparse literature on American Indians and sports imagery. Used in classes such as Contemporary Issues in Native North America or Race and Ethnicity or Diversity in Education, it will provide the background needed for students to understand the conflict over American Indian mascots and will provoke rich discussion.