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During my schoolboy days in the greater Greeley area, our Evans Rams sometimes played the Eaton Reds. We usually got trounced, since Eaton was a bigger school. And that's as much attention as I ever paid to the Eaton mascot until last week.
But the color is only part of it. Eaton teams are the
Fightin' Reds,
symbolized by a caricature of an
Indian with a big nose who wears a loincloth and an eagle
feather.
This annoyed some Native American students at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, who wanted to talk to the Eaton school administration -- but the desire was not mutual.
The college students had an intra-mural basketball team,
formally known as Native Pride.
Last week they
decided to be the Fightin' Whities.
They turned the tables. If a bunch of mostly white
players are Fightin' Reds
with an emblem that Native
Americans see as demeaning, then why not a bunch of mostly
Native American players as the Fightin' Whities,
with an unflattering emblem of a middle-aged white guy?
If the plan was to make us white folks rethink our ways,
it didn't work. The answer to How would you feel if
someone used your ethnic group and a crude stereotype as
the emblem of a team?
has been Where can I get one
of those T-shirts?
That shouldn't have come as any great surprise, because hardly anybody takes this mascot stuff seriously.
For instance, go a few miles south of Greeley, and you're in the farming town of Gilcrest, home of the Valley High School Vikings: the tall, blond, blue-eyed vicious warriors who plundered and pillaged from the Mediterranean to North America and terrorized early England.
Some recent scholarship suggests that the Vikings weren't nearly as warlike as their reputation, that many may have been farmers, rather than raiders. So this school-mascot Viking could be as inaccurate a stereotype as the tomahawk-wielding Native American. But have you ever heard any complaints from anyone of Scandinavian ancestry?
To be sure, there are others besides Native Americans who find offense in school mascots.
Every few years, we endure another mascot battle in Chaffee County. The Buena Vista High School teams are the Demons. Various Christian groups quietly build up steam for a while, then start agitating for a change. The upholders of community traditions successfully resist. The issue goes away for a while, then returns.
The anti-Demons imply that this mascot signifies approval of satanism and thus some impressionable children might go down the wrong path on that account.
If this did happen, it would be the first time -- how many graduates of Alameda or Cotopaxi High School have gone on to careers of piracy? My own career as an Evans Ram ended in 1965 when they closed the school and bused us away to be Greeley West Spartans.
The Spartans of antiquity were soldiers in a police state. My class had its share of draft-dodgers. Spartans were renowned for a simple life, so free of luxury that they didn't even use pillows when they slept. Despite three years of Spartan indoctrination, I still like my pillows and other luxuries, and as far as I know, so do my classmates.
Of course, the team name could be sending other messages. In this sensitive age, I am somewhat surprised that I haven't read of any complaints by the abstinence lobby against the Trojans of Longmont, Antonito and elsewhere. Nor have I read of any complaints about the Windsor Wizards, even though it sounds occult and has unsavory Ku Klux Klan connotations.
Most Colorado high school teams have rather generic names that could go anywhere: Wildcats, Eagles, Mustangs, etc. But there were some pleasant exceptions on the Colorado High School Activity Association web site.
For instance, there are teams that reflect the local economy, either present or past: Aspen Skiers, Brush Beetdiggers, Creede Miners, Idaho Springs Golddiggers.
Others use animal names, but not the usual ones. Limon's Badgers honor a tough critter. South Park High School in Fairplay has Burros, and it fits, since Fairplay has our only monument to a burro and it's the birthplace of pack-burro racing. There are the Lobos of Rocky Mountain High in Fort Collins and the Scorpions of Sand Creek in Colorado Springs. And though it isn't in Colorado, I must mention the name of a team one brother-in-law used to coach, the Gregory Gorillas in South Dakota.
But there are some names that just make you wonder. The Roman Coliseum was known for contests between Christians and lions -- so how do we get Christian Lions, from Alpine Christian in Basalt? Our nation is at war with terror -- so will the Palmer High School Terrors in Colorado Springs change their name? What does the ACLU have to say about the Denver East Angels?
Thus there appears to be plenty of fodder for future
mascot controversies. Meanwhile, I want to get one of
those Fightin' Whities T-shirts, so that I can honor my own
warrior heritage -- remember those brutal savages with
blue-painted faces in Braveheart
?
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