Review: Team Spirits

Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy #

By C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood, eds.

University of Nebraska Press, 2001

King, C. Richard, and Charles Fruehling Springwood, eds. Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. ISBN 9781496245250.

Twenty-five years on, the most striking thing about this book is how much of it came true. King and Springwood assemble thirteen essays by activists and academics at a moment when defenders of Native mascots could still dismiss the whole argument as a fringe grievance. The editors refuse that framing. They argue that mascots are not a matter of taste, sensitivity, or school tradition; they are a racial performance through which white institutions take possession of "Indianness" and stage it for their own pleasure, while the people being staged have no say in the production. Vine Deloria Jr.'s introduction sets the terms, and the volume follows them. In this review, I will argue that Team Spirits remains the field's founding casebook, and that its urgency now reads as history for the strongest possible reason: the organizing it documented eventually won.

The argument and its architecture #

The book moves in three parts, and the sequence carries the thesis. It begins with history and analysis, proceeds through case studies of the most heavily contested mascots, and ends on activism. In my estimation that ordering is a claim in itself: this is scholarship written to be used. The case studies cover the field's flagship fights, including the Washington football team, Cleveland's Chief Wahoo, Chief Illiniwek at Illinois, the Florida State Seminoles, and Marquette. The activism section pairs those entrenched cases with victories at Springfield College and in the Los Angeles public schools, so readers see the whole range of outcomes rather than a curated set of wins.

Suzan Shown Harjo's chapter is the volume's sharpest instrument. She traces "redskins" back to colonial bounty payments for Native scalps (which converts an alleged term of honor into a receipt for killing), and she walks through the trademark suit she and six other petitioners filed in 1992. That case is now a set piece in legal history: the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board sided with the petitioners in 1999, the district court reversed on laches, and the D.C. Circuit affirmed that reversal in 2009. Harjo's chapter is thus a primary document written from inside a fight whose outcome the author could not yet know.

The Illinois chapter takes the opposite approach, working from archival letters, university records, and postcolonial theory. Spivak, Pratt, and Rosaldo do real analytic work here, particularly Rosaldo's concept of imperialist nostalgia, which explains why an institution mourns what it helped destroy and then performs the mourning at halftime (the deflationary reading in miniature: the "honor" does not honor). Across the volume the evidence base is mixed by design, namely court filings, newspaper coverage, university archives, activist testimony, and cultural-studies theory. That mixture is a strength, since the controversy itself unfolds across law, media, campus governance, and public feeling at once.

Where it lands in the field #

Team Spirits belongs to the line of scholarship running from Robert Berkhofer's The White Man's Indian through Philip Deloria's Playing Indian, and its contribution is to move that critique out of literature and museum display and into the stadium, where the audience is largest and the defenses are most emotional. The book's second contribution is methodological. By treating activists as analysts rather than as objects of study, it models a Native studies that answers to communities instead of only to disciplines.

The weaknesses are real. Nancy Marie Mithlo's 2001 review in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal identifies the sharpest one: the volume leans on the idea that mascots produce whiteness without working out what this insight asks anyone to do on Monday morning. Several contributors call for public re-education, which quietly assigns the labor to Native communities and Native students who are already stretched thin and who came to campus for their own education, not to run a permanent seminar for everyone else. Mithlo also notes that Native representation among the contributors falls short of what the editors claim for the volume, a criticism that stings more in a book about who gets to speak.

Structural limits appear as well. The case studies concentrate on famous institutions, while the great majority of Native mascots then and now sat in high schools and small colleges with no press coverage and no scholars watching. The theoretical registers vary widely from chapter to chapter, so a reader moving from Harjo's legal history to a Spivak-inflected reading experiences a jolt. Likewise, the later experimental social-psychology research on how mascot exposure affects Native young people's self-regard arrived after this book, which means its claims about harm rest on testimony and analysis rather than measurement.

Verdict #

Read it as the founding casebook and as a period document, not as a current map. Illinois retired Chief Illiniwek in 2007 after NCAA sanctions; Cleveland pulled Chief Wahoo from its uniforms after the 2018 season and became the Guardians in 2022; Washington dropped its name in 2020 and settled on Commanders in 2022. Every one of those changes came after decades of the organizing this book documented, which is the strongest possible argument for the volume's thesis and also the reason its urgency now reads as history. What remains fully alive is the underlying analysis: the mascot is a mechanism of dispossession dressed as affection, and the "honor" defense has always been an alibi, humbuggery writ large.

I recommend it as essential reading for scholars of sport and race, for anyone teaching Indigenous representation, and for students who need to see what sustained organizing against a beloved institution actually looks like. Pair it with newer empirical work and with King's own later writing on the Washington case, and it holds up as the book that made the mascot controversy a legitimate object of study.