1991, Atlanta Braves ontroduced the "Tomahawk Chop" chant.
Stanford, Drtomouth College, Western Michigan University changed names and mascots.
Coalition Against Racism in Sports and media addresses the issue.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
research Topic
The Indian Craftsman: A Magazine not only about Indians but mainly by Indians
I should see how widely this was distributed
Research Topic
Marianne Moore: Carlisle Student who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, was discussed by TS Eliot and Sports Illustrated interviewed her about Carlisle.
Chief Bender's Burden
Swift, Tom, Chief Bender's Burden; The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star, University of Nebraska Press, 2008
They called him Chief. Of course. Nearly every man of Native descent who stepped onto a ball field during the first half of the century was called Chief. The moniker, some have likened it to calling a black man '"boy", was a tidy way for whites to place a race of people under their thumb. As scholar Jeffrey Powers-Beck said, the tag was a means to "appropriate" Bender in the "manner of the cigar-store Indian or the Wild West Show Indian." Historian John P. Rossi called the epithet "a perfect reflection of the naivete and racism of the age." Bender resented the constant bigotry. "I do not want my name to be presented to the public as an Indian, but as a pitcher," he said almost a decade before. The newspapermen didn't listen.
There was scarcely a time when Bender was written about when his race was not prominently mentioned. Bender didn't win games. He scalped opponents. Bender wasn't a talented pitcher with an impressive repertoire. He pitched in his best Indian way. Bender wasn't a player with guile. He was Mack's wily redskin. The prejudiced descriptions were (p.4) almost unyielding. Consider a lead sentence following Bender's effort in Game 4 of the 1911 World Series; "Charles Albert Bender, a child of the forest, pitched the Athletics to victory..." After BNender's sterling performance in the 1905 World Series, Sporting Life writer Charles Zuber said that "Bender, according to reports, is a typical representative of his race,..."
Bender was often portrayed as a caricature and was the subject of many cartoons..." p. 4-5
Many other whites saw Indians as exotic novelties, and Bender was their noble savage. It became en vogue to nickname teams the Braves or Indians. The club Bender was about to face was one example. As Powers-Beck pointed out, teams all over the country began calling themselves Indians and recruiting American Indian players as gate attractions. In describing such teams' fortunes the press had easy, colorful verbs, and readers gobbled them by the spoonful.
Children who loved to "play Indian"-How to Play Indian:Directions for Organizing a Tribe of Indians and Making Their Teepees in True Indian Style was published some dozen years before-often approached Bender when he was in public and greeted him by mimicking Indian gestures. p. 6
Baseball wasn't just popular; it was part of being an American. p.8
The first decade of Bender's career coincided with an explosion in (p.8) baseball attendance. Americans ate box scores for breakfast; even those rarely, if ever, afforded the chance to see a game looked for every scrap of news about favorite teams and players. And by the start of the 1914 World Series that was an easier task than it had ever been.
An American Indian wasn't supposed to reach this point. Bender had obliterated the stereotypes, dispelled the misplaced bromides:Indians are lazy. Indians are not competitive. It wouldn't have been difficult to find other men and women defying the warped ideas about what could be done by a man of Bender's pigmentation, though it would have taken some work to find one doing it on such a grand stage. Even American Indian people who had never seen him pitch were inspired by Bender's success. He had effectively turned over the actuarial tables. p.9''
Bender was regularly quoted and written about in magazines such as Baseball Magazine, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated,American Golf and the various newspapers of the day.
Often, Pratt's school did just that. "Before Carlisle, the public saw Indians as unredeemable savages, a threat to the nation, and an obstruction to progress," Bell said. "After Carlisle, all that changed. Carlisle came to symbolize the possibilities of assimilation; it presented a different sort of Indian education, and it gave the American public a new kind of Indian." p. 31
During Bender's career prominent ballplayers received endorsement deals from companies that made candy bars, chewing tobacco, soft drinks, automobiles, and baseball equipment. Bender received an endorsement deal, too. His profile was seen in newspaper advertisements for a rheumatic remedy. Late in his career, Bender endorsed Mike Martin's Liniment, a rheumatic balm. p. 43
North American was a magazine that reported on Bender's health. p. 45
As a baseball player he downplayed his racial identity while he was forced to become accustomed to the characterizations in the press. He was regularly described as the "grim Chippewa chief", the "artful aborigine" and "the Carlisled son of the forest". p. 60
The point of the above being that people cheered for a man who was regularly pointed out to be a Native American.
Pratt placed Carlisle students in white homes as a way to end prejudice-both ways. p. 69'
The number of people who housed Carlisle students or hired them would certainly spread different ideas about the Indians as a whole.
Bender continued to have a lot of influence by playing in the minor leagues, then coaching with the Athletics into the 50s. In 1954 Bender was put in the Hall of Fame. Thus from 1905 through the mid fifties a Native American was often in the public eye as one of the premier players in a popular sport.
The 1911 World Series was hugely popular and featured Chief Bender against Chief Meyers. The 1911 Series was noteworthy in some quarters because the game's two greatest American Indian players were squaring off against each other. p. 167
After the Series Bender, along with several other baseball players such as Christy Mathewson were in the movie The Baseball Bug which featured Bender as a major plot point.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Celluloid Indians:Native Americans and Film
Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn, Celluloid Indians:Native Americans and Film, University of Nebraska, 1999
Paradoxically, the perception of an inherent native closeness to the earth has led some to endow Native peoples with a certain nature-based nobility and spirituality-the Noble Savage, the alter ego of the Bloodthirsty Savage, on and off (xvii) the screen. This presumed spirituality and closeness to the earth has spurred in recent years the creation of a related stereotype, the Natural Ecologist. pgs vvii-xviii
It is interesting to note that these stereotypes contradict reality by a great deal. Consider the buffalo hunts where they would pile up thousands of them by running them off the cliff or the way their farming habits were far from ideal and only marginally effective. (my thoughts in standard font, book quotes in italics)
Discussing James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, ...who most thoroughly established in the realm of fiction the stereotypical extremes of the Indian-the noble savage and the bloodthirsty savage-and introduced a depiction of Native American behavior that book and film audiences would come to expect. Cooper's most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, has been made into a Hollywood film five times, the latest in 1993, a time of supposedly heightened sensitivity and new sensibilities. p.2
Chingachgook and Uncas are positively regal characters, but it is important to note that they are the last of their breed. These proto-American allegories were conveniently vanishing, leaving the land open for Euro-Americans to take their "rightful" place. p3
Cooper's creation of the "manly" and Indianized white intermediary would later become a buttress of the film industry, with stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and even Paul Newman playing savvy woodsmen or plainsmen who were raised by Indians. p.4
The above is a reference to the story arc where a white person is raised by Indians and becomes better at "being Indian" than the Indian themself..and therefore has a certain affinity for the Indian to the point of defending him against wrongs done while taking advantage of his skills as woodsman to defeat the evil white or Indian antagonists. Need to gather some movie examples.
In the early 1800s, Euro-Americans were increasing in power and numbers, and these numbers needed more land, Indian land. Acquiring that land was one of the most problematic issues of the early nineteenth century. p.6
This hearkens back to my point that re-imagining the Indian as needing killed was needed to fulfill Manifest Destiny.
(Robert Montgomery) Bird's Indians were among the first to discover that they were pronoun challenged.
Unfortunately, the pronoun fault and the addition of 'um' to every other word became the all-purpose Indian speech for authors who came after Bird, so it is he we can 'thank-um' p.8 for the only recently diminishing dialect of the all-purpose Hollywood Indian. p.8-9
Robert Montgomery Bird had Indians say stuff like, "Me wantum trade foodum." It was completely a fabrication made to present Indians as stupid and in fact he typically did present them as dumber than a box of rocks.
The opening of the Oregon Trail and the gold strikes in California spurred a swarm of white men, women, and children moving across Indian lands. Clashes were frequent, and the government assigned thousands of military men to protect the Euro-American citizens from the non-citizen Indians. It was the stuff of which legends are made, and the excitement of real and imagined dangers created a reading public that was well prepared for the heroic Indian-fighter of the dime novels, first published by Irwin P. Beadle & Company in 1860.
Authors of these short, fast stories took the ingredients in Cooper's works about woodland and plains Indians, Bird's attitudes about all American Indians, and the romance and danger of the frontier and made them into a mix-and-match recipe for western fiction that has survived well over a hundred years of use in novels and provided the basis for the model Indian in Hollywood's movie-making. p9
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, acculturated Indians had become a rare commodity in the East. All that most Eastern Americans knew about them was gleaned between the bright yellow covers of the novels, mostly written by men like Ned Buntline (Edward Z.C. Judson) who didn't actually meet an American Indian until late in his life.
The setting for the Western dime novel and later the western film is necessarily the point of contact between the civilizing white presence and the savages of the West providing the conflict central to the genre. p. 10 for above 2 pieces
The reasons for the public's misperceptions of western Native peoples are numerous, but Grant's Board of Indian Commissioners pointed to at least one source of the problem:
In addition to the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the frontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian wars, for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all times, in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They incite the lowest class of men to the perpetration of the p. 10 darkest deeds against their victims, and, as judge and jurymen, shield them from the justice of their crimes. Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed or palliated; every offense committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it...
The publications to which the Board referred were newspapers, of course, and one could also point to the dime novels that found their way into the hands of countless Euro-American readers.
The frontier formula developed in those novels requires that the "savage" presence must give way to the dominant white presence, but not before offering a challenge to the heroes, the point men of "civilization". Although the actual moment of this interaction was of relatively short duration, the western saga gave it a broad field in time and space, allowing plenty of room for heroics.
The woodsman of Cooper's work was usually transformed in these stories into the six-gun-toting cowboy whose role was to eliminate the opponents of civilization, either outlaws or Indians. An Indian man was a particularly useful character, since he could fill either description. As outlaw-Indian, he was usually a bloodthirsty savage intent on wreaking havoc among peace-loving white settlers. There was little or no motivation given for his actions, aside from a nasty nature. This image still lives on in novels and films such as Larry McMurtry's popular Lonesome Dove, whose character Blue Duck is an amoral killing machine.
The very popular dime novels thrilled readers with outrageous feats of gun-slinging, riding, and bravery, all of which quickly became a part of the definition of what an American was/is, a definitive part of the "imagined community", as Benedict Anderson has named it, and a bulwark of American national identity. They also reached a frenzied level of sensational violence that spoke loudly about the perceptions of Indians held by the common reader. p. 10-11
Occasionally, the dime novel Indian could assume the noble savage guise and function as a trusty sidekick to the white hero, assisting in the demise of the white-or Indian-outlaw. The Native Other as sidekick has always been comforting to that part of the audience that desired a painless solution to racial harmony, and one could be certain that Tonto would be true to Kimo Sabe, no matter who might be wearing the black hat that week. Eventually, the perceive disappearance of actual, threatening Indians made it even easier to romanticize them as part of the past, and the sidekick provided the direct link between the natural nobility of the vanished American Indian and the Euro-American hero. p. 12
By the late nineteenth century, the bloodthirsty savage and the western hero were firmly entrenched in the new American mythology, and one of the American heroes in perpetual confrontation with the savages was Buffalo Bill Cody. A prolific self-promoter, Buffalo Bill was one of the most popular of the dime novel heroes and a seminal figure in the rise of the modern cinematic western. A natural showman, he used his popularity as a dime novel hero to launch his Wild West Show, which ran for most of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. p. 12
Slight factual error as it was operating well into the 20th century.
It is largely due to the Wild West Show that the cowboys and Indians became so closely intertwined. For a nation infatuated with the heroic deeds of Indian-fighters but who had never seen either an American Indian or a cowboy, Cody's show provided a dip into the life of adventure and danger that was rapidly passing out of existence by the 1880s. It was a combination of circus and melodrama, with plenty of shooting and whopping to keep things interesting. The eastern United States in the last half of the nineteenth century was becoming industrial, and the shows were enormously popular with factory workers and immigrants, but everyone, including presidents of the United States, came to see them. p. 13
Audiences initially jeered Sitting Bull because they held him responsible for the death of Custer, an American hero of mythic proportion. However, the newspapers soon found that Sitting Bull made for great stories, and he was increasingly depicted as noble or dignified. p. 14
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