1990 "Team nicknames often are a celebration of American folklore" - NFL spokesman Greg Alello.

Native Americans contend 

Indian mascots are racists, cruel 

1990 Dec 24, Asbury Park Press

      Naperville, Ill - Her peers cheered wildly at the pep rally scalping of an Indian, but Wabigonence White wasn't laughing. 

      A Native American whose family left a Wisconsin reservation about four years ago, 17-year-old Miss White found the skit a cruel stereotype of her heritage. She felt stung when her school's mascot, the Naperville North High School husky, ravaged the Redskin of crosstown rival Napervill Central.

      “They really cheered when the husky beat up that Redskin and scalped him,” Miss White said. “I wanted to leave. Everyone though it was fun. I didn’t stand, cheer, clap or anything. I told my mom and dad when I got home that I was upset by it.”

      Miss White’s humiliation last October is the kind of incident that a group of American Indians is using in seeking the removal of the school’s mascot. They say the word “Redskin” itself is a racial slur, and the buckskinned mascot dancing on the sidelines makes a mockery out of the Native American culture and its religious rituals.

      Despite their protests, the mascot won’t be changing, school officials said.

      “They’re a caricature of Indian people,” said Wabigonence’s father, Dennis White, 43, an Ojibwa (or Chippewa) India who moved his family from his tribe’s reservation in Hayward, Wis, in 1987. He had taught mathematics to reservation schoolchildren, and he now works at Bell Laboratories in Naperville developing software. “They should change it,” he said.

      The opposing response by many students, teachers and parents at Naperville Central resembles that of other schools nationwide whose Indian mascot has been targeted by Native American activists. Mascot supporters say they find nothing offensive about the Redskin and call it a symbol of pride, dignity, strength, honor.

      Principal Tom Paulsen said his school presents the mascot tastefully – whether as a costumed student at athletic contests or in an artist’s rendering on a logo. 

      “We do not portray it in a derogatory way,” he said. “We feel it is appropriated.” 

     The Naperville Central controversy parallels the arguments of last year’s dispute over the University of Illinois’ Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek, which Indian activists failed to change.

      James Yellowbank, coordinator of the Indian Treaty Rights Committee in Chicago, was among the Indian leaders protesting the Chief Illiniwek mascot and is now helping lead the protest against Naperville Central.

      He said the effort to abolish Indian mascots had mixed success.

      The Niles, Ill, high school district board voted against changing the Indian mascot for Niles West in early 1989, but Stanford University and Dartmouth College dropped the Indian as their mascot in the 1970s. Faith Smith, president of the Native American Educational Services College in Chicago, added that several Minnesota schools had dropped mascots relating to the Indian.

      Ms Smith and Yellowbank began meeting with Naperville school officials and students this fall when they were contacted by a resident, Andrea Nott, a 37-year-old software engineer at Bell Laboratories and a co-worker of Dennis White. 

      Ms. Nott, who said a family legend holds that Mohawks are among her ancestors, began the protest after viewing a recent television program featuring Yellowbank. She lives five houses away from Naperville Central and decided to do something after driving by the Redskin portrait every day outside the football stadium.

       Ms. Nott said she found the mascot demeaning and sacrilegious toward Native Americans. 

1990 Dec 24, Asbury Park Press 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

• "Team nicknames often are a celebration of American folklore" - NFL spokesman Greg Alello.
  
• Redskins name is “offensive and derogatory” and “totally unintelligent.”  And both the name and the team’s mascot, who dresses up in stereotypical Indian garb and dances, perpetuate a false stereotype of Indians, Kee Ike Yazzi, a Navajo education official, said “We do not all live in teepees. We are just as different (from each other) as the Russians, the Germans and the Spanish.” 

1990 Dec 28, Asheville Citizen Times 

1990 Arcadia Apaches 

1990 headline