More on Indian Mascots

I am glad that my friend Cold In Laramie has started blogging. He has yet another good post here on the contentious issue of Indian mascots.

CIL addresses the key issues here, and the one that people often forget is the appropriation of Indians for their purposes. As he notes, this is not a new issue, but one that goes way back. White settlers saw Indians as part of the wilderness--both things to be feared and conquered. They cheered when they found camps decimated by disease (crediting God for clearing the land--incidentally, I heard D. James Kennedy defend this position once--argh!) and fought native peoples with a vengeance. The "savage" war idea meant that Indians were irredeemable--kind of like the 18th century version of "axis of evil." It also meant that those who were captured by these ignoble savages were forever tainted. Often times, those captives were killed in order to be rescued--this even happened in Oklahoma when Custer led the attack on the Washita. In all of those cases, Indians were used to represent fears--fears of miscegenation or the deep underlying fear that European cultures weren't superior at all.

But throughout American history, Indians have played like a projection screen for white Americans--reflecting liberty or savagery or closeness to nature or the evils of drink. Rarely were native peoples taken as real people--with real issues and complex pasts and cultures. Mascots are just the most recent iteration of this problem. It is shameful and something that we should stop. "People not mascots" is a good rallying cry.

Anyway, CIL thanks for the post.