By JIM GENARO

SWANNANOA — For activists David Voyles and Monroe Gilmour, the elimination of school mascots based on Native American characters and symbols is about more than political correctness — it’s about acknowledging a brutal legacy of genocide and murder.

The pair discussed the issue and their work with the N.C. Mascot Education and Action Group at Warren Wilson College’s Canon Lounge last Monday night as part of the school’s celebration of Native American History Month. About a dozen people attended.

Voyles presented slides of various sports teams’ insignias and commercial products that used Indian imagery. One slide showed a bottle of “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor.”

Crazy Horse, Voyles noted, was a “spiritual leader of the Lakota people.” He said it would be comparable to a product called “Martin Luther King Malt Liquor.”

“We would have riots about that, and rightfully should,” Voyles said.

Furthermore, when it comes to sports teams that use Indian imagery, even if a team intends to use an image respectfully, that respect rarely is adopted by the competing teams, he said.

“They don’t get to control the imagery — it’s the teams that play you that control the imagery,” Volyes told the audience.
To illustrate his point, Voyles showed several signs and banners made by high-school students whose teams were rivals of Indian-themed schools. The signs made use of such loaded terms as “relocate the Indians,” “massacre” and “scalp them.”
Such words may seem harmless to the students, who may have a limited knowledge of the history of Native Americans, he said.

But given events like the massacre of 300 Cheyenne at Sand Creek — mostly women and children — the phrase “massacre the Indians” can hold a very different connotation for Native Americans who do know that history.

He then responded to some of the arguments commonly raised by supporters of Indian names.

Many people defend their use by saying it is a way of honoring Indians. In response, Voyles said, Native Americans could ask, “Why don’t you honor us by naming your schools after us?”

Using sacred and religious symbols out of context at a sporting event is not a way to honor the traditions they came from, he argued.

To those who would claim that such practices are acceptable as long as they are done respectfully and not as caricature, Voyles said that “both place Indian people firmly in the past ... it’s hard to be heard now, when you’re perceived as a historical relic.”

Some would say that by presenting images of Native American culture, sports teams are helping to preserve that culture, Volyes said.

However, the responsibility to keep that culture alive falls to Native Americans themselves, he argued. He quoted Native American author Barbara Munson as saying, “Our cultures are living cultures — they’re passed on, not preserved.”

Finally, Voyles said, many people argue that the issue simply is not important. “Aren’t there more serious issues facing Native Americans?” he said he is often asked.

He acknowledged the breadth of these problems, saying that roughly 95 percent of Native Americans were killed in the years since white settlers first came to the Americas. Today, Voyles said, life expectancy for Native American men is 45 years, and 46 years for women. 

However, these issues are not going to be resolved if Indians continue to be perceived as historical relics or caricatured figures, he said.

“When you don’t even think of them as people, you think of them as mascots, then you’re not going to address these problems.”

Gilmour then discussed some of the efforts being made by various groups and government agencies to end the use of Indian mascots.

He noted that the North Carolina State Board of Education passed a resolution in 2002 that urged schools to eliminate them and called on schools that continue to use Indian mascots to provide annual reports on what they are doing to mitigate the harmful effects of such imagery.

“You may be wondering why, if they were willing to do this, why didn’t they just ban it?” Gilmour told the audience. But he said the backlash by those wanting to keep their mascots was intense, and that he and others had received death threats in 1999 when they were working toward negotiating the rules with the board of education.

Had the board outright banned Indian mascots, it likely would have resulted in a political backlash that would have been less productive, he said.

“You have to work in the background as community organizers,” Gilmour said. “We (activists) actually added a lot” of the language in the state school board resolution.

That conflict played out locally when faculty and students at Erwin High School debated over the school’s use of the terms “warriors” and “squaws” for its sports teams.

Gilmour, who was involved in the effort to eliminate the names, said that one of the mothers who spoke out against the change said, “We feel like outsiders have come in and taken our name and our heritage and our culture.”

Gilmour said this was highly ironic, given the history of Native Americans and the exploitation of their cultural icons by sports teams.

He quoted a Native American father who had been one of the people supporting the change, who said, “I feel like someone has come into my home and taken my personal things and is now flaunting them around.”

The unwillingness of some supporters of Indian mascots to hear the concerns of Native Americans is similar to the unwillingness of whites in the U.S. to hear Nelson Mandela’s call for a boycott of South Africa during apartheid, Gilmour said.
“The parallel here is, we’ve got to listen to the people being victimized here — and at least listen to them.”

A student asked Gilmour about the use of other cultural imagery by sports teams and why it does not result in the same outcry.

Gilmour responded that, for instance, comparisons are sometimes made to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
The difference, he said, is that “the Irish at Notre Dame are in on the joke.”

For that reason, the state school board focused its criticisms of Indian mascots on “non-Native schools,” he said.

Another student said she had recently visited Cherokee, home to a large Indian reservation, and seen many stores selling souvenirs with the same kinds of degrading imagery. She asked whether Gilmour and Voyles had done any outreach into the Native American community to educate them about these issues.

Gilmour responded that many of the stores in Cherokee actually are owned by white people. One store used to be named the “Buck and Squaw,” he said, but eventually changed its name to the “B and S” after a loud outcry over the use of the word “squaw,” a highly offensive and profane word to Indians.

However, he acknowledged that many Native Americans do not see anything wrong with Indian mascots. He called this a form of “internal oppression — that they’re just accepting that imagery.”