Karli Devoe
The Evergreen State College
American Frontiers:
Critical Histories
2006

What first comes to mind upon reading the word Winnebago?
An RV?
Or an Indian?

We have all heard about Winnebago RV’s, Cadillac luxury cars, Pontiac automobiles and Black Hawk helicopters. Some may have heard of the University of
Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot and Chief Oshkosh beer.
We recognize these names, but don’t realize what they represent. Very few of us know anything about the Great
Lakes-area Indian tribes behind these household names. http://chiefilliniwekphotos.blogspot.com/ http://ctula.org/ http://www.conetop.com/crwn37-11.htm

In present-day US culture, it has become very commonplace and noncontroversial to see Indian names and images marketing everything from honey to motor oil, and most especially as the image of sports teams across the nation. Most people don’t think about the ethics or history behind the image when they reach for Land o’Lakes butter or
Pemmican beef jerky; they are merely familiar brands. http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2004/kadish.htm

Do we ever stop to recognize that replacing commonly stereotyped Indian names and images with those of another culture would never be permitted? We know we will never drive a Jeep Jew, use Yellow Man Motor Oil, or cheer for a team called the Detroit Slaves (or even, for that matter, the
Washington Black Skins) while a black man in historically slave-type clothing excites the crowd. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/leese.htm
http://www.costumemagic.com/JPEG/LATEXMASK/chineseman.JPG

This presentation seeks to explain how Indian names, symbols, and images were allowed to become so commonplace and noncontroversial, how our idea of what an “Indian” is got stuck in the past, to explore why we’re not angrier about it, and point out why we should be. http://theimaginaryworld.com/pix267.jpg
http://www.eztobacco.com/index.pl?t=ViewProduct&brand=American_Spirit&category=Cigarettes

The term “Indios” was first coined by
Columbus, and came to define very diverse and unrelated tribes, giving to Whites the idea that the inhabitants of the Americas were all the same. Through Columbus’ writings and reports, and those of his crew, the idea of “Indian” started to spread around the globe. Many explorers who would eventually travel to the Americas started to form their ideas and stereotypes based on information gleaned from those who had gone before. And while some of Columbus’ reports contained favorable information, they also contained descriptions such as “ferocious” and “cowardly.”
(White Man’s Indian, 26).

The essays and books written by early explorers, missionaries, and settlers were widely published and key in helping to form ideas about the new-found race of humans.
Those who wrote and read the earliest reports were usually high-class and highly-educated men of influence whose opinions were respected.
However, as travel to the New
World became more common, the tone of reports sent back home became more sensational.
(White Man’s Indian, Part
One)

Plymouth
The earliest settlers at Plymouth, who arrived with preconceived notions of what to expect from the
Natives, were able to maintain somewhat peaceful relations with the local Indians for about fifty years, until the death of the famed chief Massasoit in 1661. There was then much agitation and strife over land and land-use issues which eventually erupted into King
Phillip’s War in 1675. Thus began the hysteria and fear which encouraged viewing Indians as wild savages, and the justifications of violence in dealing with them for centuries to come.
(Dressing in Feathers, 14) http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/5600/5613/native_american_attack_1.htm

On the other hand, as the settlements matured and sought an identity for themselves, they also saw in the Indians an admirable connection to the land and to nature, and a spirited lifestyle which stood in great contrast to the stuffy, rigid social order that had been left behind in Europe. The settlers were looking to define themselves as something other than what they had left behind.
(Playing Indian, 2) l http://www.reformation.org/king-henry.htm

Revolutionary “Indians”
This idea of the seeking of a new identity through New
World aboriginals became especially clear on the night of
December 16th, 1773, with the act that known as the Boston
Tea Party. As author Phil
Deloria states, “. . . the Tea
Party Indians gave material form to identities that were witnessed and made real. The performance of Indian
American-ness afforded a powerful foundation for subsequent pursuits of national identity.”
(Playing Indian, 7) http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/02/29.html

http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/pictures.html
These conflicting emotions between attraction to “Indian nobility”, and repulsion of the
“savage” must both be understood before one can attempt to make any sense of our nation’s history of Indian policy. The use of Indian images in the quest to form a national identity was only the beginning of a “. . . twohundred year back and forth between assimilation and destruction.”
(Playing Indian, 5)

Indians as Entertainment
A popular form of literature around the time of the French and Indian wars was the “captivity narrative,” where those who had been kidnapped by the Indians for political purposes, and had then escaped, described in great detail their experiences, (White Man’s Indian, 85).
These narratives became hugely popular and fueled the demand for greater sensationalism in writing and therefore the “narratives” were often born of a wild imagination. The first narrative strictly written for “commercial gain” was published in 1793. Thus began the downfall of the Indian from a serious literary and scholarly topic to a popculture veteran. The newly-liberated
Americans did not want to rely on tried and true literary subjects of their
British past, they wanted something entirely new and unique to call their own, and Indians perfectly fit the bill .
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/kjohnso1/rowlandson.html

http://www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/chap1.html
Following the Revolutionary War, when Americans had won their independence and had begun in earnest to seek to form a new and unique culture and identity, Indians
(again as a contrast to British society) became the popular subjects of literature and plays.
Many on the populated Eastern seaboard of the country felt that the question of Indians in their territories had been mostly settled, and since they were no longer a daily menace, they could be romanticized and admired. Or, as S. Elizabeth Bird explains it, “Once Indians were no longer a threat, they became colorful and quaint.”
(
Dressing in Feathers, 4)

Metamora
One of the most popular and long-running plays of the time period was Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags which was loosely based on the life of Metacom, son of
Massasoit. This play starred acclaimed actor Edwin Forrest, who brought to the stage a performance which “impressed people as realistic-because it matched their own preconceptions.”
(Dressing, 19)
His Metamora spoke little, preferring to grunt, and used
“an emotional expression . . . thought to be quite Indian as well.” http://www.npg.si.edu/img2/1846/6600038a.jpg

As racist and biased as his performance may seem to modern theater-goers, for the time period it was seen as quite advanced. He portrayed the
Indian character as having noble, human tendencies and characteristics, but at the same time reinforced the idea of inherent Indian savagery with some intensely violent scenes.
This performance sealed for many Americans the idea of the
“noble savage” and became the standard on which dozens of contemporary playwrights based their Indian characters.
(Dressing,
20-21) http://www.josephhaworth.com/images

These Indian-based plays became so popular that soon the public had tired of them. Parodies began to appear with lessthan-favorable portrayals of Indian characters. Also, as westward expansion picked up a greater pace in the 1840’s and the demand for new land grew, popular literature and entertainment preferred to portray Indians as “a beast that must be eliminated.”
(Dressing in Feathers, 22)
It was widely believed that any noble tendencies among native populations were exclusive to those tribes on the East coast, thus making it easier to justify dealing harshly with the more “savage” tribes west of the Mississippi. http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/fasi/American_Progress_GAC_1870%20midsize.jpg
This painting entitled “American
Progress,” inspired many with its message of manifest destiny .

http://www.worsleyschool.net/socialarts/longfellow/page.html
The Song of Hiawatha
Another artistic endeavor that further entrenched Indian stereotypes into American culture, although in a seemingly innocent way, was the 1855 release of
Longfellow’s poem The
Song of Hiawatha . One of the most famous (and still recognized) passages follows:

(Way Out West, 281)
Huge Beings - Hiawatha

By the time of its release, the poem had been critiqued and ripped apart by newspapers, and had already been parodied. It went on to be enormously popular, and became standard summercamp fare for young Americans, who “learned to give recitations of the poem . . . dressed in dyed feather headdresses and mock buckskin, and delivered . . . with an elaborate system of hand signals to indicate a wigwam, a rising moon, and baby Hiawatha being rocked in his linden cradle
‘safely bound with reindeer sinews,’”
(Out West, 281).
This work of poetry defined for many the lifestyle and belief of
Indians in general and made it seem that the wisest were the ones who quietly and easily gave up and accepted their powerlessness. http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/nae/to_1600.html

(Dime Novels) http://www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/dn-a.html

Malaeska
The Beadle’s first novel,
Malaeska , was published in
June 1860, and dealt with an
Indian “princess” who marries a white man. It sold 65,000 copies in its first few months.
Their novels dealt with many topics, such as pirates and patriotic backwoodsmen, but two frequent and extremely popular topics continued to be
Indians and Indian raids on white settlers, and the Western novel genre was born. These novels usually contained
“conventionalized plots, stereotyped characters, and standardized settings.”
(Dime Novels) http://www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/dn01ill01.html

The popularity and sheer numbers of available dime novels meant that the stereotypes and misconceptions of earlier generations would be dutifully continued by Civil
War-era generations (they proved exceedingly popular among soldiers), up to the
1890s, when dime-novel popularity finally began to decline.
(Dime Novels) http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/indian1.jpg

http://www.sharpsbooks.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=6_19&products_id=371

“The Last of His Tribe”
Another myth that was reinforced with the literature and entertainment of the time (and which served to justify extermination of the Indians) was the myth that they were doomed to vanish. The name of the most famous play of the time states that Metamora was the “last of his tribe.” Subsequent works included:
Last of the Mohicans , The Last of the Norridgewocks , The Last of the Shkikellemus , The Last of the Serpent Tribe , The Last Night of a Nation , and Sharratah; or
The Last of the Yemassees .
(Dressing in Feathers, 21) http://www.americanartarchives.com/what_is_illustration.htm

Enter Catlin, Savior of
“Authentic Indians”
There were few more fervent believers in this vanishing
Indian myth than George
Catlin. In the 1830s, Catlin devoted himself to preserving a record of the “pure” Western
Indian existence that an encroaching civilization was destined to destroy. He was a believer in the idea that
Eastern tribes had already become tainted by contact with white settlers (by forced assimilation) and had thus lost their authenticity.
(Legacy of Conquest,
185) http://www.sulinet.hu/cgibin/db2www/ma/et_tart/lst?kat=Agag&url=/eletestudomany/archiv/2001/0107/indian/i ndian.html

Foreseeing the imminent destruction of tribes west of the
Mississippi, he took it upon himself to come: “to the rescue of their looks and modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction . . . and trample them to death; yet phoenix-like, they may rise from the ‘stain on a painter’s palette,’ and live again upon canvass, and stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race.”
(Legacy, 182) http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/Images/chromol_catlin.bufd.lg.jpg
Catlin’s “War Dance”

Catlin often held what he saw as Indian virtues up as a contrast to the
“contaminating vices” which ran rampant in
Western civilization, and waxed almost poetic in his description of Indian life.
(Legacy, 182-185) http://www.nga.gov/kids/catlin/catlin2a.htm

From 1830-1836, Catlin traveled the West, painting Indian warriors, leaders, tribal members, ceremonies, and daily life. He then took his paintings to New York City to be displayed in galleries, and on tour to Europe. His writings and paintings were a great influence on how people of that time period viewed Indians and served to reinforce many of the pre-existing stereotypes.
(Legacy, 184) http://www.vmfa.state.va.us/catlin/act.html

Catlin’s Legacy
One of the most enduring legacies of Catlin’s paintings and writings, one that still plagues Indian cultures today, is the creation of the concept of “authentic” Indians , or those
“uncontaminated” by Westerners, and how “the tainted
Indians were mockeries of real Indians.”
(Legacy, 186)
He created what historian Patricia Limerick calls an “imposed notion of purity.”
(Legacy, 189)
Imagining how Catlin would react upon meeting Indians who had indeed managed to survive into the
20th century, and had not vanished as he had so painstakingly predicted, Limerick says,
“They would not be real
Indians, Catlin and his heirs could be certain, and the proof of their fraudulence would be this: they would not match the stereotype that Catlin himself had enshrined.”
(Legacy, 188) http://chnm.gmu.edu/exploring/19thc.php

http://antiquelabelcompany.com/store/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=394

The Devastating Effects of Advertising
From the end of the Civil War until the 1900’s, paid advertising rose from a $50 million to a $500 million industry, and advertising became much more of a recognized and accepted profession.
(Slave in a Box, 87)
A very damaging and dangerous occurrence in early advertising was the tendency to present conveniently-altered historical events as facts.
http://www.msu.edu/course/iah/211c/bellfy/temagami/TEMAGAMI.htm
http://www.vintagepostcards.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store
_Code=VPC&Product_Code=ETHNNA-I2602&Category_Code=ETHNNA

Printed Ephemera
In the early days of commercial advertising and the rise of spectacular consumerism, piggy-backing on the popularity of Indian stereotypes perpetuated through the popularity of plays, poems, and dime novels, the advertising form of choice was a trade card (similar to modernday trading cards), or what came to be known as “printed ephemera ,”
(Dressing, 46).
Romanticized Indians were seen as exotic and desirable, which made them “‘a natural vehicle for advertising,’”
(Dressing, 48).
http://home.att.net/~arbycards/arbph20.htm

Arbuckle Brother’s Coffee, released a set of trade cards in
1892 representing the pictorial history of the United States. A great number of these cards showed idyllic settlement scenes on one section, and then bloody massacres (with Indians as attackers or victims) in another, suggesting that Indians stood in the way of civilized progress and were inherently violent and savage. Many of the cards also showed scenes of white men conquering the Indians in battles, supporting the popular belief of manifest destiny. The back of an Arbuckle Bros. card representing Wisconsin history and featuring a bloody scene from the Black Hawk War states: “The
Black Hawk War (1832) was an important factor in the opening of this region to public view,”
(Dressing, 59).
http://home.att.net/~arbycards/arbph41.htm

When Indians were not portrayed as violent savages, they were often portrayed as childish and cartoon-like, as in the case of an advertisement by the Enterprise
Bone, Shell, and Corn Mill. It shows three child-like and greatly impressed Indian men huddled around a corn mill while historical
(and more adult-looking) William
Penn stands off to one side with his famous treaty in hand. The advertisement says:
“In sixteen eighty-two, you surely have heard
How William Penn an honest treaty made
All good Indians mourn him still
And remember his proclamation of good will
To use the Enterprise Bone,
Shell, and Corn Mill.”
Enterprise Mfg. Co; 1893
(Dressing, 56) http://www.scripophily.net/bonshelandco.html

http://www.antiquebottles.com/rl/tc/IndianPerfume.jpg
Because the country was in a confusing time of rapid expansion and reconstruction, there were few restrictions or guidelines for advertisers to follow. Thus, they were left to their own imaginations and devices to the “release of racial fantasies that might have been contained in more stable circumstances . . . nothing prevented the producers from digging deep into the mine of racial fantasy.”
(Dressing, 47)

Two examples of text from patent medicine advertisements:
(Patent medicine salesmen were some of the first marketers to use printed advertisements)
“Gradually its benefits were extended to the whites, and as the Indians faded away before the onward march of civilization the secret passed from their hands into those of the conquering race.” Austen’s Oswego
Bitters, 1882
(Dressing, 51)
“The Indian dreams of days gone by,
When he raised hair, his knife for a lever;
His country is gone, but then he has left
Taylor’s Sure Cure for chills and fever.”
Kickapoo Indian Medicines’ Taylor’s Sure
Cure
(Dressing, 59) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/ephemera/medshow.html

Buffalo Bill
Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West
Shows set in stone the stereotypes that had been forming and surviving for two hundred years. This cannot be denied or understated, although he generally championed Indian causes and considered Sitting
Bull a close friend. He began his
Wild West Show in 1883, featuring reenactments offamous battle scenes, skills exhibitions, and dazzling displays of Indians and western personalities on horseback.
(Out
West, 281) http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10122877/SP--A/IGID--
866029/Buffalo_Bill_Wild_West.htm?sOrig=SCH&ui=558D911553864FE191BA70948CE38E53

He toured for twenty years with his show, even taking it to
Europe. The Indians he employed were mostly Dakota
Sioux, and “to many people unaware of the diversity of
Native American cultures, they formed the basis for the singular image of the American
Indian.”
(Out West, 281)
From then on, all Indians would be associated with tipis, painted ponies, peace pipes, feathered headdresses, and fringed buckskins. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/seven/w67i_bull cody.htm

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show helped to bring stereotypes that had been forming for centuries into the twentieth century. They continued to flourish through popular-culture vehicles such as magazines and calendars, western novels, movies and TV shows. http://www.vintagepostcards.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Scre
en=PROD&Store_Code=VPC&Product_Code=ETHNCO-
I4551&Category_Code = http://www.posterglory.com/goingplaces/chief.htm

http://www.doodlebugs-online.com/News/Newsletters0702.htm

Anthropology Professor S. Elizabeth Bird conducted a study in Duluth, Minnesota, where ten groups of Indians and non-Indians were asked to create a sitcom that had one Indian character. All groups contained four people, were divided by gender, and the average age was 30. They were instructed to create six episodes of a series they would be interested in watching, which must include a white person, an
Indian, and a female character. The students were not informed that the study being conducted was on Indian representations and portrayals in the media .
(The Audience In Everyday Life, 92)

Bird found that all the non-
Indian groups had trouble knowing what to do with the Indian character. When it came to deciding how to portray the Indian character, they usually fell back on stereotypes or limited the character to making a “one-line saying at the end of the show.”
“ . . have her say something rather, um . . . prophetic as though she knew what the outcome of the situation was going to be.”
(Audience, 95)
(See the USA, 117)

Most non-Indian groups based their Indian characters on well-know media personalities that already existed, such as
Marilyn on Northern
Exposure, while their non-Indian characters were developed through
“dialogue about personal experience and knowledge.”
(Audience, 95) http://home.comcast.net/~mcnotes/LHJ1.jpg

• S: Selma’s our Native American Elder Woman.
• M: Yup, elder lady . . .
• S: What’s Selma’s last name? She don’t need a last name, we just go by Selma.
•
M: It could be Selma Morning Star.
•
L: I like Selma Morning Star.
•
M: Make her last name more Native American . . .
Blackfeather . . . or . . .
• S: Sunbear.
• M: Blackhawk . . . or . . .
• S: Brownbear, Selma Brownbear.
•
M: Or Redbird.
•
S: Selma Blackbear. Or how about Redbird?
•
M: She has beadwork classes and she sells her beadwork at the pow-wows in the summer.
• G: Not just beadwork. She does it all.
• S: Weaving and basket making and makes rugs.
(Audience In Everyday Life, 97) http://lucisblackie.spaces.msn.com/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=blogmgmt&_c=blogpart

(Out West, 276)
Not one of the non-Indian groups was successful at creating a fully-participating, non-stereotyped Indian character.
(Audience In Everyday Life, 99)
A random sampling of some of the words used to describe the Indian characters thought up by the non-Indian groups:
Wise Prophetic
Earthy Calm
Soft-spoken Drunk
Intelligent Silent
Hippie Spiritual

How did Indians portray themselves?
One group of Indian males decided to base their sitcom on Joe, an Indian who feels he has lost his way in a whiteman’s world. They stressed the need to show in their sitcom that Joe was welleducated and successful, and one participant said, “A lot of it’s never told
. . . that our people have success stories.” Also, they felt it was important that the show be humorous. As one participant stated, “You turn that whole thing around, and what you’re doing while you’re laughin’, while you’re learnin’, is you’re correcting stereotypes, and learning how to laugh at them, together.”
(Audience, 102-103) www.cdc.gov/youthcampaign/ american_indian/

A group of Indian females stressed the fact that it was important that Indian reality was portrayed in the series, and instead of a “spiritual savage” they wanted to portray the squalor of reservation life that is the reality for many
Indians.
(Audience, 104) http://www.warnas.net/reviews/smokesignals_pics.html

It is obvious from the study that non-Indians struggled with how to portray Indians in anything but stereotypical ways. It was hard for them to imagine an Indian living a life in modern times, with normal everyday worries.
And these were people from Minnesota, which has a very dense Indian population. The
Indians, on the other hand, wanted to be sure that they were portrayed as people living in a modern world, with real-life problems, and with issues that needed addressing. They made it clear that they were fighting stereotypes that continue to plague them after nearly four centuries.
(Out West, 297)

Crazy Horse Liquor Battle
Consider this page (emphasis added) from the “Modern Drunkard Magazine” website:
Crazy Horse
Alcohol Content: ?
AKA: Hoss, Crazy H.
Rep: The politically incorrect powerhouse.
It may court controversy with its name, but there’s nothing contentious about how it goes down: smooth, slightly fruity with an extremely clean, almost zinfandel finish that holds together all the way to the dregs of the bottle.
Personally, we think the chief should be proud.
http://moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/03_03/03-03_forty_fury.htm

http://www.conetop.com/crwn37-11.htm
There have been multiple court cases in the last decade dealing with the marketing of alcoholic beverages bearing
Indian images and names, such as Crazy Horse Malt
Liquor and Chief Oshkosh
Beer. The state of Minnesota has taken a hand in toughening laws concerning the use of Indian imagery by barring “licensing of any malt liquor brand which ‘implies in a false or misleading manner a connection with an actual living or dead American Indian leader.’”
(Brewers Challenge “Crazy Horse
Law,” 1)

Congressman Tim Johnson of South Dakota made the following statement in a congressional hearing on “Confronting the
Impact of Alcohol Labeling and Marketing on Native American
Health and Culture”:
(Hearing, 10) http://www.lakotatour.itgo.com/

The use of these images in the marketing of alcoholic beverages is particularly appalling when one considers the following statistics, provided in the same hearing:
1. The rate of alcoholism among Indians is six times greater than the national average.
2. The leading causes of death among Indians ages 25-44 are car accidents and cirrhosis of the liver , both alcohol-related.
3. The rate of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome among
Indian infants is twenty times higher than the national average.
4. Approximately 80% of suicides among adolescent
Indians are alcohol-related, and the suicide rate is 2.6 times the national average.
(Hearing, 7-8)

In the previous examples, a congressman discusses the use of Indian images in marketing (which began full-force in the 19th century), and the statistics imply that such uses have negative effects on Indian people.
However, while fighting to preserve and protect their cultural identity, Indians and activists are often confronted by opponents who say they are too sensitive and too quick to cry foul,
(Racists, 2) or that they are focusing on nonimportant issues.
(The Stereotyping of
Native Americans,1 and 'Red Face' Does Not Honor Us ).
http://www.oppression.org/cgibin/viewnews.cgi?category=5&id=971146779

http://eightpawsclipart.myfauxpaws.com/peterpan.htm

Consider the following:
“As a counselor I am frequently asked to lecture on diversity at various universities. One little self-test I offer to the students to see if one harbors stereotypes is, I ask the students to close their eyes and envision an Englishman using a computer. Then I ask them to envision an Italian using a computer...then finally I ask them to envision an Indian using a computer. They always are surprised at themselves as they realize they envision the English and Italians as regular people and they invariably envision the
Indians in buckskin, feathers, etc., and give no consideration to the Indian as a person.”
Matt Sherman http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stquotes.htm
http://www.canyonart.com/about.htm

“Indians are like that. You know, they can be very intense emotionally but able to suppress it and not show it.”
White woman commenting on an episode of Dr. Quinn,
Medicine Woman
(Audience, 89)
“Once I asked them what they were looking for. Their reply was that they were ‘looking for real Indians.’”
Makah Tribal Elder, talking about and encounter with tourists.
( Selling the Narive American Soul, 3)

“Native Americans have the highest high school drop out rates, the lowest rates of college-age youth enrolled in colleges or universities, and the highest rates of teen suicide in the entire country. Other self-destructive activities are also commonplace, such as alcoholism and other substance abuse. The poor selfimage Native Americans have as a people [has] contributed to these tragedies. That poor self-image is a direct consequence of the persistent misrepresentation of Native Americans in popular culture, by the media, athletic teams and organizations, and the refusal of the mainstream public to acknowledge that these are indeed a major root cause of all the larger problems.”
H. Mathew Barkhausen http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm
http://logsart.com/Products.asp?id=10333

http://www.msu.edu/course/iah/211c/bellfy/temagami
/TEMAGAMI.htm
“ American Indian mascots are harmful not only because they are often negative, but because they remind American Indians of the limited ways in which others see them. This in turn restricts the number of ways
American Indians can see themselves.”
Psychologist Stephanie Fryberg, PhD, of the
University of Arizona http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm

“Calling Indians ‘redskins’ is a self-esteem issue, which is exactly what is at stake in a community where the suicide and alcohol rates are so high.”
Suzan Shown Harjo
Humanist: The Stereotyping of Native Americans
“Certainly, there are other areas of life that need to be addressed and which may appear to be more urgent. Crime, substance abuse, incarceration and many other ills are relevant problems that require solutions. However, the root of many, if not most, of these is the lack of self-esteem our children experience.”
Jonathan B. Hook, Ph.D. http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm
http://www.twohillbillies.com/ebay/1954%20flo rida%20orange%20injun.jpg
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/native/images/NArefrigerator_ma gnet_injun_orange.html

“As a group of mental health providers, we are in agreement that using images of American
Indians as mascots, symbols, caricatures, and namesakes for non-Indian sports teams, businesses, and other organizations is
We should like to join with others who are taking a strong stand against this practice.”
Dr. Cornel Pewewardy http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm
http://www.msu.edu/course/iah/211c/bellfy/temagami/
TEMAGAMI.htm

Wisconsin Menominee Richie Plass described in an interview a run-in with an Indianpurist (echoing Catlin’s notion of “authentic Indians”):
He was waiting in line to go into a pow-wow dance, and a non-Indian came up behind him and told Richie that he had read a book, and that the eagle feather in Richie’s hat was reserved for chiefs and that he should remove it.
“I told him to take that book and stick it.” http://www.racismagainstindians.org/Indian101/index.htm

“Policymakers don't make good policy for cartoons.”
Portions of a transcript from and online chat session between activist Suzan Shown
Harjo and ESPN.com users (emphasis added):
•
Noah Hurwitz: I'm alarmed at the number of offensive remarks that people have made during this chat. Why is it that there is so little respect given to Native Americans?
•
Suzan Shown Harjo: That's one of the problems with dehumanizing, objectifying images, names, behaviors -- promotion of disrespect. It affects federal Indian law because, for one thing, policymakers don't make good policy for cartoons or for people who are used for others' sport.
•
R-Skin Fan: Are you drunk???
• lil' indian: Hey, go back to your reserve that we as a country set up for you and chill there!
•
Suzan Shown Harjo: Reservation comes from the word reserve. Native nations reserved certain lands in treaties ... But, to your overall point -- wow. I stand amazed.
http://www.tdrfan.com/tdl/fantasyland/peter_pan/ http://espn.go.com/otl/americans/harjochat.html

Indian youth are the key to the preservation and perpetuation of their cultural heritage. How do they confront, react to, and work to change the stereotypes they are confronted with daily?
Following are excerpts from the book Rising
Voices: Writings of Young
Native Americans.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/fischer/SellingIdentities/Americanindiancollegefund.htm

http://www.jimemery.com/dc/NMAI/oldindianinheaddress.htm
“I praise the elderly
Native Americans who have tried to keep the traditions and customs alive by telling and showing young people what we really are and not what non-Indians believe we should be.”
Brian Willis,
Choctaw

“It must be understood that times have not changed that much. We
Indians also understand that the Whiteman is continuing to take what little we have left today, but through education taken in by us Native people and the practice of our ancient ways, he will continue to fail. It is for these reasons that we Indians understand that those difficult times are not entirely over . . .
We will never forget.”
Cameron J. Cuch,
Ute-Wampanoag

“Dignity will pave the way of your trail a trail of nature a trail of grandma a trail of mine a trail for my children a trail for generations to come . . .”
Priscilla Badonie, Navajo http://www.jimemery.com/dc/NMAI/blackfeetsingers.htm

http://www.jimemery.com/dc/NMAI/indianboy.htm
“If you can survive in today’s society and maintain your soul self, and if you can do these things and know who you are as a person, you are a true warrior.”
Murray Stonechild,
Cree

The previous psychologists and activists all agree on the fact that stereotypes begun many centuries ago and passed down to the present continue to have detrimental effects on Indians.
Many non-Indians still think of
Indians as wearing buckskin and sleeping in teepees, not as neighbors or competent fellowcitizens. These images and ideas have become so much a part of our culture that non-
Indians often don’t even consider the harm they are causing. http://www.jimemery.com/dc/NMAI/womanblueheaddress.htm

http://www.washoetribe.us/vote/nndc_contact.asp

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