The Director of the Indian Museum Says It's Time to Retire the Indian Motif in Sports

When Kevin Gover was a kid growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, college students at the nearby University of Oklahoma had begun protesting the school’s mascot. Known as “Little Red,” the mascot was a student costumed in a war bonnet and breechcloth who would dance to rally crowds. Gover, who today is the director of the American Indian Museum, says he remembers thinking, “I couldn’t quite understand why an Indian would get up and dance when the Sooners scored a touchdown.” Of Pawnee heritage, Gover says he understands now that the use of Indian names and imagery for mascots is more than just incongruous. “I’ve since realized that it’s a much more loaded proposition.”

On February 7, joined by a panel of ten scholars and authors, Gover will deliver opening remarks for a discussion on the history and ongoing use in sports today of Indian mascots.

Though many have been retired, including Oklahoma’s Little Red in 1972, notable examples — baseball’s Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, and football’s Washington Redskins — continue, perhaps not as mascots, but in naming conventions and the use of Indian motifs in logos.

“We need to bring out the history, and that’s the point of the seminar, is that it’s not a benign sort of undertaking,” explains Gover. He’s quick to add that he doesn’t regard the teams’ fans as culpable, but he likewise doesn’t hesitate to call out the mascots and the names of the teams as inherently racist. 

Many of the mascots were first employed during the early 20th century, a time when Indians were being oppressed under policies of Americanization. Children were forced into boarding schools. Spiritual leaders could be jailed for continuing to practice native religions. “It was a time when federal policy was to see that Indians disappeared,” says Gover. Looking back on the timing of the mascots’ introduction, Gover says, “To me, it looks now as an assertion that they succeeded in getting rid of the Indians, so now it’s okay to have these pretend Indians.”

A push for Native American equality and tribal sovereignty emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. “That’s when the response started,” says Gover. “There’s a lot of activism around it. Since that time, slowly but surely, a lot of the mascots have been done away with.”

Gover made an effort to get a range of expertise on the panel but significantly, he says he was unable to find anyone willing to defend the continued use of the mascots. That doesn’t mean those people don’t exist, says Gover. At some of the very schools which banned racist mascots, alumni are calling for a return to the old ways. “I actually saw a website a couple of weeks ago where a lot of Stanford alum were wearing this clothing that had the old symbol on it,” Gover says.

But he still believes that momentum is on his side. “The mood is changing,” Gover says, “and I have no doubt that in a decade or two, these mascots will all be gone.”