Autumn Dawn White Eyes: The fight against racist mascots

Today, Savage Media will release a video of Preston Wells’s poem entitled “If the Indian Mascot could speak.” It invokes a sense of anger, which I’ve never been able to express.

I often find myself thinking about the time before I came to college. I grew up in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, a small Lakota community, one that takes care of its own but also neglects its own. Pine Ridge is a community that has Indian mascots in high schools and middle schools. Before coming to Dartmouth, I did not see the mascot as a big deal; I never gave any thought to it, good or bad. If someone had told me they were “honoring me,” I probably would have believed it. There weren’t any predominantly white schools with Indian mascots that I knew of. I had never seen red face in my life. At home, Lakota boys would pray and put war paint on before sporting events as if they were going into battle.

My first term at Dartmouth College in the fall of 2010 changed my thoughts on the Indian mascot. Loud music and girls in skimpy costumes filled Fraternity Row, it was just like any other Halloween night on a college campus. It was my first time stepping into a fraternity; I was excited and nervous, my only plans were to have fun. The first fraternity basement I stepped into, I saw a white man standing next to a pong table with a fake headdress, or “war bonnet,” as we call it. I couldn’t help but be angry, my new home and community put an image in my face that I didn’t know how to respond to. I left the fraternity with my friends to avoid the scene. As we made our way to another part of campus, a white girl in a skimpy Indian costume walked towards us. Oh, hell no! were the first words that came into my mind. This time I could not control my rage. I screamed at her, “What the fuck do you know about being Native, you dumb white bitch?”