Native American pride

Press, 5 December 1989, Page 16

Native American pride

From a correspondent in St Lpiris, Missouri, for the “Economist”

AT HALFTIME a solitary figure, dressed like a Hollywood Red Indian, strides into the spotlight, performing a dignified parody of a Native American ritual dance. Students at the University of Illinois, who call their football and baskball teams the Fighting Illini (the long-extinct tribe of Native Americans from whom the state took its name), have supported this tradition for 63 years and nobody questioned it. Now the state’s junior senator, Mr Paul Simon, has raised an objecting voice. Mr Simon, whose adopted son Martin is a Native American, signed a petition circulated by a Chicago-based native American

group asking the university to drop Chief Jlliniwek’s ethnically insensitive performance. His colleague, Senator Alan Dixon, rallied to the tradition’s defence. The university decided that it would keep-;' the chief, but ordered the band and cheerleaders to stop- wearing orange and blue warpaint Stereotyping of Native Americans is a last bastion of open racial prejudice in America. People who would never call a black person a negro,; and are getting ready for the change from “black” to “African American,” still use the term ’Tndian” for Native Americans and perpetuate images like squaw, happy

hunting ground and scalping. Washington calls its football team the Redskins; Atlanta calls its baseball team the Braves and Cleveland calls its the Indians (nickname: the Tribe). Why, asked one Native American group, aren’t teams called the Jews, the Darkies or the Pollacks? What is unthinkable for other groups is routine for Native -Americans. Except, perhaps, for Pekin, Illinois (so named, it is said, because it is across the globe from Peking), which calls it high-school teams the Chinks. .©The Economist