Grounds Claims Nationalism Behind Racist Mascots
Lecture Reaches “Depths of Mascot Issue”

BY ADRIAN LEUNG

On April 4 at 8 p.m. in the Carnegie Root Room, University of Tulsa Anthropology Professor Richard A. Grounds delivered a lecture entitled “The United States of Amnesia: Mascots in the Symbolic Economy of American Nationalism,” to 35 people.
Grounds attempted to measure the fanaticism within the support for mascots and symbols caricaturing Native Americans. He gave evidence of people’s responses to protests against these mascots, and concluded that American nationalism drove their perpetuation of racism.

Grounds began his lecture with a Yuchi greeting. Yuchi and Seminole himself, he explained the endangered status of the Yuchi language today. It is only spoken by four or five native speakers.
He then proceeded in trying to reach the “depths of the mascot issue.”
First, he read letters in response to the United Church’s donations towards a coalition in Champagne, Ill., which attempted to change a local school’s Native American mascot. 
One letter commented that the coalition “did more to cause division/racism than the chief has ever done. When will the coalition realize, like the rest of us, instead of resting on ancestral identity, we are Americans.” 
Grounds also cited an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education where a student in North Dakota received death threats after protesting his school’s mascot. 
Continuing with these examples of hate crimes, another letter threatened a man with the rape of his wife and slaughter of his animals after he wrote an editorial concerning his dismay at the local high school symbol.
“People care about this. We’re not talking about a surface change, these aren’t isolated cases. Issues are starting to boil up, especially here in Ohio where more than 200 high schools use [Native Americans as] mascots,” Grounds said.
He then described the many levels of the negative effects of mascots.
On the first level, Grounds proposed questions of stereotypes — visual, auditory, concerning postures and language.
On another level, he examined how religious symbols, like feathers, drums or face-paint were desecrated as toys instead of revered as sacred.
He raised the concern of economic issues: the hierarchy created by the mascots and the enormous financial benefit they produced as well as the disadvantage status they rendered for Native Americans.
On still another level, Grounds spoke about displacement, both the physical displacement and the replacement of identity.
Grounds pointed out that the major impact was on all children, not only Native American. Recounting his experience in Atlanta he remembered the pervasiveness of the Atlanta Braves’ Tomahawk logo appearing everywhere in the city. After a talk on stereotypes to sixth-graders there, Grounds finished only to be asked by one of the students, “Have you scalped anybody?” Grounds was shocked, asking his Oberlin audience, “How can we understand that level? This child couldn’t get past this ubiquitous image of indigenous people as violent.”
He proposed that there was a deeper issue lurking. “When I think about these issues, I think about the core problem [concerning] American self-understanding. When historians talk about self-perception, people end up thinking, “America is the land of freedom and justice.’ We can talk about documents, public symbols, the national anthem. The core problem is if this is the land of freedom and justice, how can we reconcile the genocide that has taken place, the destruction of indigenous people, generation after generation?”
He pointed out that one major solution to this contradiction was to ignore it. Thus the title of his talk “United States of Amnesia.” He emphasized this notion of ignoring the past by citing dictionaries where the term “Yuchi” was equated with “extinct peoples.”
Grounds explained that even today, Yuchi are denied in their attempt to gain federal recognition. To give further evidence of this erasure, he told of asking his college students where the people, who their state was named after, were. His students couldn’t answer.
Grounds drew on examples from sports teams, official state seals and United States coinage to illustrate the everyday place indigenous people play in the minds of society. He summarized, saying, “Thus use of mascots aids in young people receiving the message that if it’s Indian, it’s ours.”
Professor of African American Studies A. G. Miller strongly agreed with the lecture’s content. “I thought the lecture was excellent. This is not just a Native American issue. It’s more than about dishonoring these people and dehumanizing them. The larger context is the socio-political economy of American nationalism. The negative response to anyone who raises questions about this issue because it goes to the very core of asking, ‘what is it to be American?’ It’s that deep analysis that challenges us in why we cling to those representations.”

Regarding Larry Dolan, college trustee and owner of the Cleveland Indians, Miller felt the talk illustrated Oberlin’s contradiction. “I wish Larry Dolan had been there to hear the analysis. To gain a better understanding of what it means, his insistence on using that symbol, the ideology against a true representative democracy that that symbol represents. And I think it will point out some of the contradictions of us as Oberlin folk as to what that means for someone in Oberlin who supports that image, the money he makes off that image, that dilemma we face at Oberlin. I wish more administration and faculty would’ve attended and engaged [Grounds], too.”