Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots

The Wistful Reservoir

The Wistful Reservoir When I used to drive through North Carolina, there was a Cherokee Indian village and at the entrance, there was always a bonneted Indian. One time I asked him, “Why are you wearing Plains Indian dress?” And he grinned and said, “Because that’s what the tourists want.” —DEE BROWN Accuracy and authenticity have often been invoked as criteria to evaluate images of American Indians. Critics invoked accuracy when they discussed the early American painter George Catlin’s portraits. Although they couldn’t visit the Indians themselves to make an independent evaluation, the critics decided the artwork must be accurate. After all, he drew himself in one portrait sketching an Indian chief. And why would he travel so far and endure such uncomfortable conditions to paint Indians inaccurately? In 1839 photography was invented. Matthew Brady, thinking that Americans would want to see the Civil War firsthand, as only photography could show it, assembled a corps of photographers and mobile developing equipment. He thought there was a fortune to be made in prints of important battles. However, when he tried it, he was faced with the tragic reality of new military advances and armies that moved too quickly to stay fixed on a photographic plate. What Brady and his corps were able to capture was the devastation that remained after the battle. His photos of the dead and wounded did not find many buyers and Brady was nearly ruined financially. His glass plates were sold to build greenhouses . After the Civil War, his corps of trained photographers was looking for 185 work and many of them went along on government surveys of the American West. No one questioned the accuracy of these images, for they were, after all, photographs. John Wesley Powell led an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1867 and collected botanical and mineral specimens and Indian vocabularies. Powell, a one-armed veteran of Shiloh with boundless curiosity, founded the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. He was a firm believer in the idea that societies passed through stages of social evolution. The transition from a tribal society to an industrial one was a matter of evolutionary progress. It might require hundreds of years for tribes to evolve into civilized societies like ours, but it was inevitable that eventually they would. By studying tribal cultures , Powell and his followers, the pioneer American anthropologists, believed that they could reconstruct the evolutionary history of our own society. The newly formed Illinois Industrial University, which became the University of Illinois, contributed to Powell’s expedition and received botanical and animal specimens in return. Powell was made a professor of natural history at Illinois and given a salary of six hundred dollars to support his second expedition. Powell never taught at Urbana-Champaign and he resigned his position in 1869. But the bearded, one-armed explorer did come to the new campus to meet with the trustees and to report on the specimens he had collected for them. Perhaps he brought photographs of his expedition and passed a stereoscope around the table so that the trustees could see the wonders of the West for themselves. Printed on cards, these stereoscopic photographs of rocky canyons and Indians were sold in sets and viewed in eastern parlors. Powell had costumes made for the Ute and Paiute people who sat for the camera, including feather bonnets. Powell must have felt that the costumes he commissioned were authentic , for when he was finished with them, he donated them to the Smithsonian for its collections. Of all the photographs of the West viewed through THE WISTFUL RESERVOIR 186 stereoscopes, the portraits of Indians—both savage warriors and bare-breasted princesses—excited the most interest. Most of us feel we know how Indians looked and lived because we have seen reprints of Edward Curtis photographs. Between 1900 and 1930 Curtis filled twenty volumes with photographs of American Indians. Sepia-tinted faces lined with wrinkles. Eyes that seem to gaze into a mythic past or a darkening future. There is something so beautiful, so melancholy, and so convincing about the tints of that sepia. His photos are certainly works of art, for Curtis was a master of dramatic composition with light and shadow, but as ethnographic documents , they leave a lot to be desired. As the Native American writer Vine Deloria, Jr., put it, “Since the photographs did not in the slightest degree...