Native American team names mean honor and respect. That’s what executives of pro sports clubs often say. History tells a different story.
Kevin Gover punctuates this point with a rueful smile. He is director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. The Capitol dome looms outside the windows of his fifth-floor office as he talks about the historical context of an era when Native American mascots proliferated like wildflowers.
Baseball’s Boston Braves adopted their team name in 1912. The Cleveland Indians took theirs in 1915. Scores of high schools and colleges across the country assumed these and other Indian team names in the 1920s and 1930s, even as so-called civilization regulations forbade Native Americans to speak their languages, practice their religions or leave their reservations.
This meant real American Indians could not openly perform ceremonial dance at a time when painted-up pretend ones could prance on sidelines, mocking the religious rituals of what a dominant white culture viewed as a vanishing red one.UsaToday
Why do Mascots Matter?
Before we get into the analyses, it may be useful to make a couple of comments regarding why or why not mascots matter. There are a variety of theories about sports fandom, and almost all emphasize the importance of factors such as team history and fan community. These are related because it is often the historical accomplishments of a team that provide a basis for fan communities. For example, in Chicago fans still talk about the 1985 Bears, and it is doubtful that you can find many Steelers fans that don’t know about the “Steel Curtain.”
Mascots provide a symbol that can be a focal point for a fan community. At a very simple level, when fans wear a jersey with a Redskins or Cowboys logo they are identifying themselves as part of a fan community. There is research in psychology that that has studied the wearing of team symbols following wins and losses. Researchers, unsurprisingly, find that team logos are worn more frequently after victories than after losses. The term “Basking in Reflected Glory” has been used to explain this phenomenon.
Mascots may play a similar role in that they provide a shared experience. When the University of Illinois dropped the “Chief,” t-shirts that commemorated the “last dance” of the Chief quickly appeared. Illinois students witnessed the Chief’s halftime dance for decades, and this experience has therefore been shared across generations of students.
Teams’ and fans’ reluctance to drop or change mascots may be based on fears about how losing a focal symbol will alter the fan community. In our first analysis of “Native American” mascots we looked at college basketball revenues for schools with and without this type of mascot. We also included time since mascot change in our statistical models. The key result was that switching away from a Native American mascot didn’t have a long-term negative effect.Scholarblogs
