Indians as Mascots

In the decades after the US Civil War, a combination of US Army troops, state paramilitaries (such as the Texas Rangers), and groups of Euro-Americans “pacified” the Native American peoples west of the Mississippi River until they all lived in federally-sanctioned tribal reservations by the 1890s.14 Tribes like the Sioux (Dakota, Lakota), Comanche, Apache, and others resisted and fought for their territories.  Both sides committed what we would consider atrocities to differing degrees, depending upon the context and situation, but in the end the separate tribes could not overcome the military might of the federal government.

In order to assimilate the next generation of what Euro-Americans considered “savage” Indians into American “civilization,” from the late 1870s groups of Native American young people were sent, when necessary through coercion, to federally-run boarding schools off the reservations to, in the words of one of the policy’s founders, “kill the Indian… and save the man.”15  In their attempt to erase Indian culture, these schools forced students to speak English, dress and style (cut) their hair in the “American” manner, and serve as child laborers on campus, while providing them with rudimentary academic and vocational educations.  While the policy's coercive nature lessened in the 1930s and yet again in the 1960s, until the 1990s tens of thousands of young Native Americans attended these schools.16  That some parents welcomed the schools as an opportunity for advancement, despite the policy’s goal of cultural eradication, shows the poverty, a result of federal legislation, actions, and neglect, of the reservations in those decades.17

In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century the new amateur and professional team sports such as baseball, football, and basketball started to use mascots as a way to differentiate one club from another.  While teams picked mascots (or nicknames) for a number of reasons, one common thread was that one’s mascot - creatures like lions, bears, and giants - should strike fear into one’s opponents.  Thereby Indians and Indian-related representations - Indians, Braves, Warriors, Chiefs, (Red) Raiders, Redskins, individual tribal names, and, in the northeastern US, Sachems - became used as mascots.  Not only were those mascots fierce, they were imaginary, as these stereotypical visions of “Indians” in headdresses, war paint, and tomahawks lived someplace else, mainly in some fictionalized version of the past. 

Boston’s National League baseball team changed their name from the Rustlers to the Braves in 1912.20  With the Braves going from worst to first in 1914 and winning the World Series, in addition to the success of the Carlisle Indians, “Indians” as mascots became more popular, with the Cleveland Spiders changing their name to the Indians in 1915.21  Boston’s professional football team, established as the Boston Braves in 1932, changed to the Redskins in 1933, before their move to Washington for the 1937 season.22 And from at least the 1920s Winchester sports teams, whether school-based or adult amateurs, associated themselves with Indians, as well as other names such as “the Red and Black.”23  Even if the high school sports teams did not have a consistent mascot, Native American symbols appear in The Aberjona - Winchester High School’s yearbook - from the 1920s on.24  

Unfortunately no direct evidence exists that explains why Winchester High School teams started to use Native American symbols and names.  But having local professional examples, alongside the town's historic connection to the Squa Sachem and the Pawtuckets, must have helped.