The "H" (humanities) Amerindian automatic notifications are examples of just how high-flown and abstract discussion of basic and emotional issues can get when dealing with Native American. Something like sports gimmicks -- cartoons and mascots or gestures like the tomahawk "chop" can be so elemental that people have lost all the significance of them, and yet some thinkers want to figure it out in complex ways.
My problem with the "H" lists is that their access is so guarded that I can't make a link, so I'll just give you a sample here. The posting is not of the book but a review in the context of similar books. I had no idea all this was out there. To me, "Indians" or "Native Americans" are mostly just a bunch of people I've known over the years, which accounts for many of my blunders
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Andrew C. Billings, Jason Edward Black. Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representations in Sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Illustrations. 256 pp. $14.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-252-05084-8; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04209-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08378-5.
Reviewed by Jennifer Guiliano (Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis) Published on H-AmIndian (October, 2019) Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54039
A Path Forward? The Limits of Public Surveys for Understanding Indigeneity and Mascotry
In Mascot Nation, Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black, professors of broadcasting and communication studies respectively, deploy “empirically driven social scientific data and a humanistic approach undergirded by both rhetorical and cultural criticism” to understand what Native American mascotry is and how it plays out in public spaces (p. 15). Establishing self-categorization theory (chapter 1) and postcolonialism (chapter 2) as its foundational underpinnings, Mascot Nation delves into “the public” and the public’s understanding of the naming, visual imagery, and ritualized performances surrounding mascots and associated debates.
Readers get a glimpse of fan commentary on YouTube videos (chapter 3), the discourse around naming for the University of North Dakota and the NFL's Washington football team (chapter 4), the cartoonish logos associated with mascots and their offensiveness (chapter 5), and the rituals of Florida State University and the Cleveland Indians (chapter 6). Billings and Black also provide a comparative case study of mascot eradication at the University of Illinois and Florida State University (chapter 7) before concluding with an analysis of the 2017 Supreme Court decision regarding the Washington team and the more recent decision regarding disparaging trademarks and the Lanham Act.
Mascot Nation serves to update C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood’s edited collection Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (2001) and King’s edited volume The Native American Mascot Controversy: A Handbook (2010) with more recent historiographical work, including additional case studies. For nonspecialists, Mascot Nation fills a gap by casting a wide net and offering conclusions backed by the diverse cast of disciplines that are engaged in mascot research. The work of Jacqueline Keeler, Jay Rosenstein, Laurel R. Davis, Brenda Farnell, King, Springwood, Sudie Hoffman, Ellen J. Staurowsky, James V. Fenlon, Lawrence R. Baca, Carol Spindel, Stephanie Fryberg, and others allow Billings and Black to incorporate a wealth of deep and complex research. Brief histories, contextual vignettes, and short narrative arcs about selected high schools, colleges and universities, and professional teams move the reader between local, institutional, and virtual environments as needed. This allows the authors to illustrate the complexity of mascotry as cultural phenomenon without bogging the reader down in any one single case study or issue.
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There's much more. "Indians" are a subject everyone feels entitled to claim as something they know about or even are genetically related to. Kid enthusiasms, the dreams of Romantics, the pomposities of professors, the folk theories in rural settings, the identification with war, and the rage of the real thing all mix in an unmanageable, largely unconscious, million examples a day full of "savage" imagery, religious fervour, and practical measures taken to help people.
The simplest and deepest convictions are rarely aware of how intricate and referenced an academic reflection can be. (What the heck is "self-categorization theory?) And the latter completely overlooks a lot of ground level lived-life.
People who read go one way, people who watch movies go another. Identity is achieved by embracing and identifying or by blaming and demonizing. Few people just leave it all alone or on the other hand realize how demographically layered it is among socioeconomic or even generations. Arcane subjects like the differences between oral and written materials or the different tribes according to the ecosystems of their locations -- which were totally scrambled by the invading Euros though they were the defining forces of their identities -- are clear outside the kind of arguments that show up in social media.
What everyone remembers is the last identifiable "Indians" to be confined: the Plains bison-based people. Feathers, horses, and yelling "Ki-yiyi" are what we all know because of the Fifties movies. They're mixed up in American wars -- paratroopers yelling "Geronimo", Vietnam as Indian country -- and literary wars over authorship and content. Editors and publishers are convinced "Indians" are a selling point for those commodities we call books.
But when tribal people go to write books, hoping for a big bag of bucks, they write the same stuff that 19th century anthropologists wrote: Napi stories. Tales that go to the heart are often written by non-tribal people. The routine histories are written in libraries instead of the shocking but confusing archives of tribal and BIA offices. It's a tangled and incoherent subject.
Which can make it fascinating -- one never runs out, one never escapes the politics, and some of the worst schlock can be deeply meaningful to someone. Someone just commented to me that "Hanta Yo!" changed their life. "Piegan" was a prize-winning book. All I can say is they clearly did not know Ruth Beebe Hill or Richard Lancaster, both white. It's all so personal.
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