Chief topic of discord

NCAA fever rising, but mascott still a contentious issue

By David Haugh

Chicago Tribune Staff Writer

      Television news crews showed up back in 1989 just to watch Tom Livingston pack for an Illinois basketball road trip.

      As cameras rolled, Livingston carefully folded the buckskin uniform he wore proudly for two seasons as Chief Illiniwek. Then he meticulously stowed the headdress of turkey feathers just as the Lakota Sioux Indians had taught him at a powwow.

      In his role as the school's mascot during the University of Illinois' Final Four run, Livingston and his face, painted blue and orange, represented the program nationally almost as much as coach Lou Henson's did.

      For those three weeks during the NCAA tournament in March, the senior alternated between symbol and celebrity, feeding the insatiable interest of fans and media as the Illini marched through Indianapolis and Minneapolis on their way to Seattle.

      "We advanced to parts of the country that had not been exposed to the tradition of the Chief," Livingston, now 37 and living in LaGrange, recalled. "For me it was electrifying. You know a lot more camera lenses are pointed at you and a lot more pens poised. You wanted to live up to that."

      But as this season's No. 1-ranked Illini begin a postseason journey Friday in the Big Ten tournament at the United Center that many believe will continue on to the Final Four next month in St. Louis, the Chief will accompany the team only in spirit.

      Since Livingston's 15 minutes of fame, a 15-year debate over the appropriateness of Chief Illiniwek has ensued. Other, slicker forms of halftime entertainment have made visiting teams' acts all but obsolete. About a decade ago, the dancing stopped everywhere but at Illinois home games and specially designated sites, and venues at the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments are not among them.

      Thus Kyle Cline, this year's Chief whom the school declined to make available for an interview, will cheer on the Illini in the tournament as the electrical engineering major he is instead of in face paint and Indian regalia.

      Even though Chief Illiniwek will not be seen, his name might be heard often during a month when national exposure for a university and every aspect of its basketball program figures to heighten.

      "Like when we went [to the Final Four in '89], the interest has a snowballing effect," Livingston said. "The further you go, the more people you can bring into the discussion and you can answer questions they have about Native-Americans or tribal cultures. It can be a good opportunity to educate."

      That may be the only thing on which both sides of the contentious Chief issue agree.

      "It's a time to remind people of the downsides of the costs to the community and the university because more people will be paying attention than ever," said Brian Jewett, a University of Illinois science professor who started an anti-Chief Web site in 2002, www.retirethechief.org.

Pro and con

      The famous Chief Illiniwek dance that still brings some grown men to tears dates to the 19th century, has been a school tradition for 79 years and lasts about four minutes.

      And they will be arguing over its interpretation longer than any clock or calendar can measure.

      "Even though they don't intend to do harm by using this mascot, they are," said Charlene Teters, who earned a master's degree in fine arts from Illinois and now teaches at the Institute of American Art in Santa Fe, N.M.

      Teters is a member of the Spokane Nation Indian tribe who grew up in Spokane, Wash. Occasionally at her home in New Mexico, Teters will watch one of Illinois' nationally televised games until she hears the school band. Before it stops playing, Teters usually turns the channel.

      "It's so annoying to hear this Hollywood version of Indian music and see this Indian portrayal of this sort of John Wayne version of the Wild West played out on prime-time, national TV," she said.

      Teters decided to attend graduate school at Illinois after the university aggressively recruited her. Shortly after enrolling in 1988, Teters questioned her decision.

      "I never asked when I was being recruited, `What is your mascot?'" she said. "And then after a couple weeks when I saw so many derivatives of the [Chief Illiniwek] mascot on campus, I wondered what the heck that was. It made me and my two other [American Indian] friends who were recruited with me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome."

      When the omnipresent image of the Chief around Champaign and Urbana began to "erode the self-esteem" of Teters' two teenage children, she said, she began her career as an activist. She started by standing outside Memorial Stadium on Saturday afternoons holding signs of protest. Eventually she became a founding board member for the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media.

      "You cannot look at the image [of Chief Illiniwek] and confuse it with any other race of people, so it's race-based in that way," Teters said.

      The issue has become so polarizing on campus that Jewett regularly speaks to Native-American students who complain about the Chief even though Illiniwek's image has become less conspicuous in recent years. It no longer can be found on university stationery, for example, or the school's home page on its Web site.

      "[Native-American] students say the first thing someone says to them when they meet them is, `What do you think about the Chief?'" Jewett said. "It's just hard to imagine that this university has so many great things going for it that its prestige has to be brought down by a white guy putting on face paint and dancing around."

      Such sweeping characterizations of Chief Illiniwek annoy pro-Chief supporters such as Lisa Feriozzi.

      Feriozzi's grandfather, Webber Borchers, was the first Chief Illiniwek to perform in authentic American Indian garb back on Nov. 8, 1930, at Yankee Stadium in New York when Illinois played Army in football.

      Student Lester Leutwiler made the first appearance as Chief Illiniwek at halftime of the Illinois-Pennsylvania football game in 1926 in a homemade costume, but Borchers and his interest in Native-American culture took the tribute to a new level.

      Borchers hitchhiked to a reservation in South Dakota to have the suit designed and made. He took a Boy Scout troop studying Indian lifestyles to London. He lived briefly on the Illinois campus in a teepee. To Borchers and many like him still alive, the presence of the Chief celebrates a proud history more than mocks it.

      Feriozzi, of Zion, remembers attending an Illinois football game with her grandfather, a colorful former state representative from Decatur who died in 1989, and seeing his eyes moisten when Chief Illiniwek came onto the field.

      "He cared, and what's being done today is what my grandfather started and the Indians knew exactly what he was doing and approved," Feriozzi said. "It wasn't, and isn't, done to humiliate them, it's to honor them. People trying to make this a negative don't make sense because [the Indians'] forefathers approved of it. It shouldn't even be an issue."

      But it rages on, loudly enough to earn the attention of Illinois lawmakers.

Political fodder

      Illinois Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago), a longtime critic who threatened to scrutinize the university budget more than usual unless the Chief were retired, incensed supporters of the mascot last month when he made a joking reference to "scalping him."

      Jones did not respond to interview requests.

      "That was a totally inappropriate comment and I personally have a problem with some of the muscling going on in Springfield over this," Sen. Frank Watson (R-Greenville) said. "This is not the arena for that. It's a university issue."

      University President B. Joseph White, who took office on Jan. 31, has indicated he plans to place Chief Illiniwek's future in the hands of the 10-member board of trustees. In its most recent action on the issue last fall, the board unanimously adopted a vague "consensus resolution" that says, "The state's heritage and its American Indian culture and traditions shall be preserved, affirmed and publicly celebrated."

      Board members have not discussed publicly a specific timetable for taking a definitive stance.

      "It seemed apparent that the approach taken until then wasn't conducive to any progress except in creating losers, and it also emboldened the positions on both sides," board chairman Lawrence Eppley said. "It's probably the board members who have the greatest understanding of the differing viewpoints, not the people expressing those viewpoints."

      While the board mulls its next move, pressure mounts on campus and beyond that keeps the issue nearer the front burner than the back.

      Last week, five American Indians filed a federal lawsuit seeking $2.5 million in damages against the Honor the Chief Society, alleging their civil rights were violated when they were kept out of a party for the outgoing Chief Illiniwek at a Champaign restaurant in February 2004.

      Though 69 percent of 13,000 Illinois students who voted in a campus referendum last year wanted to keep the Chief, the Illinois Faculty Senate has recommended more than once that the university retire the mascot, a position shared by other special-interest faculty groups such ActNow and the Black Faculty and Academic Professionals Alliance.

      The North Central Association, which accredits universities and colleges, warned Illinois in regard to the Chief Illiniwek issue, in a report issued last fall, that "the rate and amount of damage to the institution will continue to accelerate if the issue is not addressed decisively and soon."

      Last month the NCAA asked Illinois and 30 other schools to conduct a self-evaluation as part of the NCAA's review of the use of American Indian mascots, nicknames and logos and respond by May.

      Nationally, a nonprofit American Indian civil rights organization called the Morning Star Institute reports that the number of schools using Indian mascots or nicknames has dropped from 3,000 to 1,000 in the past three decades. Locally, the number of Illinois high schools who still use Indian nicknames has dwindled to 27.

      At Illinois, nobody can be sure when the last dance for Chief Illiniwek will come, or if it will come at all. They only know that when and if he does stop, the debate will not.

      "There really are gray areas in terms of the debate," said Livingston, the pro-Chief former Chief. "And part of the problem is that people look at it in black-and-white terms. That's not likely to change."