Doubters and Dreamers

Indian Mascot, 1959

1 Indian Mascot, 1959 Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall, the weird debauch and daring debacle of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead, defeated Indians cut from trees, where, in the twilight, they had earlier been hung. “Just dummies,” laughs our dad, “Red Indians hung or burned—it’s only in jest.” Every fall brings the Big Game against Stanford, where young scholars let off steam before the debacle they may face of failed exams. “You’re dead wrong,” he says to Mom. “They don’t mock real, live Indians.” Around UC campus, mock lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle that happened three generations ago in California’s hills, where Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where did they go, those Indian ghosts?) “Their kids perform mock war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle white folks let loose,” chides Mom. “Meanwhile we hang 2 portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead because he fought in a White man’s war. How many dead Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears on my soul.” In the dark car we go silent, and the fall night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs over the tule fogs. I’ve never heard the word “debacle” before and wonder what it means. “What’s a debacle, Mom?” I ask. “Oh, honey, it’s a terrible and deadly collapse. Complete ruin.” I’ve noticed how the hung Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moccasins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall, living Indians at Feather Falls leave tobacco to mark that, indeed, we’re still here, lungs full of indigenous air. ...