What is a Mascot? A “mascot” means any person, animal, or object colloquially thought to bring luck. Mascots include anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society or brand name. Once the mascot or nickname associated with a sports team, it stands for the team identity as well as fills its fans with feelings of pride and joy. As a result, most mascots chosen by teams are selected for their positive image to represent the spirit of the teams.
In Major League Baseball, 8 of the 30 teams are named after some sort of fearsome or flying creature. In the National Football League, 14 of the 32 mascots are named for animals all with strong characteristics, including the Bengals, Eagles, Lions, Tigers, Bears and Rams. Also, nearly every Division One college basketball team has been named after either an animal or a mythical creature. You can tell all most each animal chosen for mascots have specific traits showing positive strength of power. Eagles have swiftness, keenness and courage. Bears have great strength and can easily put up a fight. Lions have bravery and speed. But for decades, Native American Indian mascots, symbols, and names used by high school, college, and professional teams are also seen widespread throughout America, bringing forth controversy as to why Native Americans as mascots, symbols, and names in American sports is still being used today.
Supporters of Native American Indian mascots believe that the use of these symbols and nicknames honors Indians because those symbols and names are said to represent bravery, agility, tenacity and strength. Indians, on the other hand, consider it an insult and that they are being stereotyped by non-Native Americans. Although those supporters emphasize that they use these Native American symbols to identify sports teams because the stereotypical image of Native American is warrior, brave, stoic and so on, they still reveal the negative opinions and inequality through racism to the Native American people. For example, some non-Native Americans (primarily Caucasian) believe Native Americans should take other things seriously rather than complain about mascots and nicknames. What these supporters imply is that Native Americans should stop complaining about simple things like mascots, and because they are [stereotypically] alcoholics and are not sober enough to complain about something more important like how the United States was “stolen” from them. Sports teams, additionally, always insist the name chosen is representing a positive side of Native American culture, but most of what we see is that they take part of Native American culture or features are stereotyping or racializing and excluding them.
Let’s take into consideration the Minnesota Vikings. The football team was officially named after the Vikings in the 1960’s because the name highlighted Minnesota’s prominent Scandinavian American culture. Since the football team was established, their team name was never changed or considered controversial, and the team still continues to embrace the Scandinavian American culture today. They would obviously not use names like the Horned Helmets, Blond Beards or Girly Men (because Vikings have long hair and blond beards or horned helmets) to identify their teams. But the way sports teams treat or use the name of Native Americans is just as if we were calling the Vikings, the Minnesota Girly Men. They highlighted the stereotypes and ethnicity of Native Americans: Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves (are all Native Americans brave?) and Cleveland Indians. As for the Washington Redskins, is a Native American man presented wearing a headdress, however, in reality, only certain tribes wear this type of headdress despite him being a representative for all Native Americans. Redskins also named their mascot “Chief Wahoo,” a name that “sounds” like a Native American language. It is very insulting and does not highlight the essence of Native American culture like bravery, warriors and strength properly, it only equates them with the other animals used as mascots.
Opponents of Indian mascots believe that the use of Native American symbols and nicknames is focusing on racial stereotypes and is blatant racism.
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Let’s put ourselves into Native Americans’ shoes to see how they feel. What about one day, you see sports team mascot is the image created about stereotyping your culture or ethnic community, like as the picture shows above, the stereotypical Indians, Asians, Africans and Hispanics images from Caucasian American prospective. Another interesting point to note is that you can hardly find pictures or images of stereotypical white people. Is it because they do not like being stereotyped and made fun by other people? If so, why should minorities like it? If we are all human beings, why does the minority have to be the one always being made fun of?
When the use of Native American symbols and nicknames started to become an openly recognized issue, it has never gained enough attention to be changed. Interestingly, because most people believe it should be an honor and respect to Native Americans by using Native American symbols and nicknames and disregard the complaints. Very few people have proposed to stop using those symbols or take some action to get this problem changed. If they do claim to respect the Native Americans, how are they also supposed to prove they respect them when they claim the use of Native American symbols is right and refuse to change the situation for them?
