Vicente Diaz: Legacy of racist Indian mascot lives at university

As a faculty member at “ground zero”—the term our director, Robert Warrior, has chosen to refer to our program in the wake of the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign’s (UIUC’s) de-facto firing of our colleague, Steven Salaita, I can only describe the university’s actions as the intellectual negation of critical indigenous scholarship, and one that resonates well with a longer history that is all-too-familiar to native peoples in particular: the will to eliminate the Native in the interest of preserving the colonial occupation of the Native’s land and in the interest of policing indigenous intellectual and especially indigenous political thought.

This is what happens when an institution of higher learning, in a state that removed its first peoples in favor of a caricatured Chief, also decides that a routine faculty hire in American Indian Studies, is deemed uncivil and unfit for the academic community due to the nature of that faculty member’s highly political tweets.

To be sure, against the backdrop of the overall treatment of native people in the last 500-plus years, what UIUC did to Salaita and to our program is only on par with the violence that western colonialism and empire continue to visit upon native peoples around the globe.

Still, it was stunning, even for a faculty habitually alert to the history of such mistreatment of native peoples, to see just how bold and brazen the administration could be in sacrificing established principles of academic culture, such as academic freedom, shared governance, unit autonomy and evidentiary based reasoning, while also spouting platitudes like “inclusivity” and “diversity” in order to legitimize and justify its actions.

As I had come to learn so quickly after my arrival in 2012, UIUC was still a remarkably hostile environment on account of the administration’s tolerance and even sympathy for the supposedly retired Chief mascot, the school’s formerly treasured racist symbol of white supremacy and private property. And because it was AIS faculty that held the university accountable to every instance of the Chief’s continued and public reappearance, it was also AIS faculty who bore the biggest brunt of the reaction and outcry from the most rabid and crazy Chief lovers. I mean, we are talking hate mail and threats and acts of vandalism to the program’s and to our personal properties.