Letter: High school mascots should be able to honor Native Americans in Illinois
I see that the Illinois legislature is trying to outdo itself in eradicating any indications that Native Americans ever lived in our state.
It wasn’t enough to have taken their land by treaty (sometimes at gunpoint), If the representation of this minority had been derogatory or insulting, one can understand it. That may have been the way that Chief Illiniwek was portrayed in 1926, but it certainly was not in the years leading up to his banishment from the Champaign-Urban campus in 2007.
More: Native American mascot ban proposed for K-12 schools in Illinois
This came to the Knox College campus in 1993, when President John McCall announced that Siwash would no longer be used by athletic teams or in any other context.
His explanation was that Siwash was used in the Pacific Northwest to indicate that Indians were savages. That may indeed have been the reason that George Fitch created Dear Old Siwash as the fictional setting for his short stories printed in the Saturday Evening Post 120 years ago.
Everyone knew that he was referring to the Knox College of his student days. Those were delightful stories and the only negative cultural stereotype I could see were Swedes, who were big and dumb and deadly on the football field. (Knox presidents could have learned something from this. The Siwash were competitive with Monmouth College on the football field; the Prairie Fire not so much.)
I was witness to some of the ensuing debate, having been contacted by a student who remembered my teaching a medieval history class at Knox.
The alumni did not necessarily disagree with McCall’s decision, but they disliked his making a decision without any discussion with students and faculty. That was just not the way things were done at Knox College. (Maybe at Siwash.)
The case in Springfield is very similar. The activists want to outlaw Braves and Warriors because that is an unhealthy stereotype. I call on Alexis de Tocqueville as a witness to the contrary. This French visitor wrote Democracy in America based on his 1830 visit to our country.
His concluding chapter, the Red and the Black, should be read by every American who wants to understand our racial history. He noted that the Blacks wanted to become Americans but were not accepted, while the Reds would have been readily accepted but declined because they wanted to retain their own customs and traditions. Two tragedies.
Why were white people ready to accept Native Americans? Because they admired their courage, stamina, and independence. Those are surely the reasons that athletic teams adopted Native American names.
Now the legislature has taken up the issues, apparently on the assumption that all whites are bigots who could never admire anything in another culture.
In the nineteenth century Missouri became known as “the Show Me State.” Illinois was “the Sucker State.” Apparently, nothing has changed.
William Urban, Monmouth
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Letter: High school mascots should be able to honor Native Americans
