BOOK REVIEWS: Team Spirits

I am writing to announce the release of a new book critiquing Native
American athletic mascots. The editors of Team Spirits are Ph.D. graduates
of UIUC, and two of the contributors to the collection, Jay Rosenstein and
David Prochaska are UIUC faculty. The epigraph to the volume is a poem
titled Minstrel Show, written by one-time UIUC Dean of Students faculty,
Dennis Tibbetts. The description from the jacket is appended below, and the
book is now available ($24.95) through the University of Nebraska Press and
other book dealers.
 

For more information, consult:
http://unp.unl.edu/scripts/Cart/smart.pl?command=listitems&ID=3958&tmp=1
 
 
 

"Every time I watch the Washington Redskins or the Cleveland Indians (with
their grotesque Chief Wahoo) I wonder what it must feel like to be a Native
American sports fan and see oneself depicted this way. It just plain gives
me the willies. Team Spirits shows me why."-Rick Telander, sports
columnist, Chicago Sun-Times.

A growing controversy in recent years has arisen around the use and abuse
of Native American team mascots.The Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves,
Washington Redskins, Kansas City Chiefs, Florida State Seminoles, and so
forth-these are just a few of the images and names popularly associated
with Native Americans that are still used as mascots by professional sports
teams, dozens of universities, and countless high schools. This practice, a
troubling legacy of Native-Euro-American relations in the United States,
has sparked heated debates and intense protests that continue to escalate.
Team Spirits is the first comprehensive look at the Native American mascots
controversy.

In this work activists and academics explore the origins of Native American
mascots, the messages they convey, and the reasons for their persistence
into the twenty-first century. The essays examine hotly contested uses of
mascots, including the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians, and the
University of Illinois's Chief Illiniwek, as well as equally problematic
but more complicated examples such as the Florida State Seminoles and the
multitude of Native mascots at Marquette University. Also showcased are
examples of successful opposition, including an end to Native American
mascots at Springfield College and in Los Angeles public schools. C.
Richard King is an assistant professor of anthropology at Drake University,
and Charles Fruehling Springwood is an assistant professor of anthropology
at Illinois Wesleyan University. King and Springwood are coauthors of the
forthcoming book Beyond the Cheers: Race As Spectacle in College Sport.
 

Charles Fruehling Springwood
Asst. Professor of Anthropology
Director of IWU Anthropology Program
Illinois Wesleyan University
P.O. Box 2900
Bloomington, IL 61702-2900
(309)556-3180/fax (309)556-3719
 
 
 

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