Contesting Constructed Indianness: The Intersection of the Frontier, Masculinity, and Whiteness in Native American Mascot Representations

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness: The Intersection of the Frontier, Masculinity, and Whiteness in Native American Mascot Representations continues all the important dialogue and analysis on Native American mascots. . . .Overall, the book contributes a critical dialogue on the issue of American mascots. Most Americans do not know the history of this issue and why it continues to be detrimental to not only Native people, but to all peoples. The book contributes to the growing scholarship and hopefully to the national dialogue on the ending the use of Native American mascots in schools, colleges, and professional organizations, and therefore is recommended for both universities and the general public.

Michael Taylor deepens our understanding of Indian mascot practices from a variety of times and spaces with this set of nuanced readings of mascots as “inventions” created within a frontier mythology of whiteness. What sets this analysis of mascots apart is Taylor’s critical unpacking of the uses and abuses of Native voices–voices which the author resolutely refuses to simplify or flatten.

Taylor clearly illuminates the moral justification of claims to land, the erasure of Native presence, and with it, any guilt over a violent conquest.

Taylor offers an important contribution to ongoing discussions of Native American mascots. At the same time, he enhances our understanding of how American society has imagined indigenous peoples and in turn how they have challenged these inventions. His fresh reading of the creation and contestation of popular renderings of Indianness brings race, gender, and place into the dialogue. Drawing on the voices and perspectives of Native Americans, he produces a counter-anthropology of sorts, unsettling taken-for-granted ideas and images. One of the most valuable elements of this counter-anthropology is the intimate reading of social practices and cultural politics.

This carefully crafted study of Indian sports team mascots breaks new ground in several critical areas. It considers the issue of mascot imagery at all levels and types of educational settings ranging from high school to college–Native to Euro-American institutions alike. It provides an inside, Native American perspective on why Native children fight to keep such mascots alive. Taylor also provides deep insights into the forces driving white males to don Indian attire and perform as mascots in attempts to resolve ongoing angst over the legacy of conquest and colonization.