Every ten years or so, Dartmouth students, running out of more important things to worry about, set out to find a new school mascot. It happened in 1973 and 1984. So, since there are clearly no major social issues out there about which we should be concerned right now, here we go again in '96. Whee! Go, team.
That was my initial take on the latest symbol search. Not that I had a problem with an attempt to bring a little fun and maybe even a little more unity to Dartmouth ... I just thought it was, well, utterly trivial. The other day, however, I spent a couple of hours poking about in Baker's Special Collections to see what tales of blood and squalor I might dredge up about timber wolves and Indians, Dartmouth mascots and the like. Besides picking up lots of new trivia, like the fact that the Aires were once the "Injunaires" and that "wah-hoo-wah" is a gross obscenity in the Sioux language, I discovered that our school's symbol may not be quite as trivial as it seems.
Last week, as if you didn't know, the Conservative Union at Dartmouth passed a resolution backing the Indian as Dartmouth's symbol. Being a political dork myself, I was a little disappointed in them. I might actually attend their meetings if I thought they sat about rationally discussing, say, the role of affirmative action and minority recruitment programs at Dartmouth. But to waste their time passing resolutions on an arrogant, insensitive and tired symbol that I think most of us were hoping our school had left far behind? Blech. I'd think we could expect more of them.
Perhaps CUaD was echoing the sentiments of the "Committee for the Preservation of Dartmouth Traditions," which in 1972 reacted to the collective decision to phase out the Indian with appeals to the "sportsmanship, fair play, woodsmoke and autumn foliage" the symbol was supposed to represent. Maybe they too are distressed that Dartmouth is being "pushed around" by self-pitying, immature, and mean-spirited minorities. Or maybe they don't realize that the Indian doesn't just represent a glorious tradition of football and "hoary nights and lonely men" (that's um, a quote from the back of a bottle of Yukon Jack).
Some people point to Dartmouth's heritage as a "school for Indians" to justify their choice of a mascot. But Professor Jere Daniell's research indicates the "Indian school" was perhaps more a public relations and fund-raising gimmick than a real commitment to Native American education. Until the 1960s, only a handful of Indians had actually graduated from Dartmouth. The use of the Indian symbol ironically represented an unfulfilled commitment on Dartmouth's part.
In 1968, Dartmouth finally began to make good on that commitment to Native Americans by recruiting and assisting "disadvantaged groups." In 1970, emphasizing the schools commitment to enroll more Native Americans students, newly inaugurated President John Kemeny emphasized that "unless we can find the means to make these students feel a part of the Dartmouth family, we should not admit them in the first place."
Native American recruiters, while promising the development of a new Native American Program (approved in 1972), found they had to make excuses for the Indian symbol. As the school took steps to make Native Americans feel welcome, the Dartmouth community realized the inappropriateness of the Indian and began to phase it out. Because it was never an official symbol, there was no need to officially abolish it. Rather, as sensitivity to Native American issues grew, the media, athletic department, and merchants of Hanover decided to discontinue its use.
The Indian symbol was perhaps appropriate for a bunch of upper middle class men who knew nothing about Indians and only saw "squaws" on the weekends. But that piece of Dartmouth's history is long gone. I'm more concerned about creating new traditions. I'd like to think that Dartmouth today shows even more concern about members of its community than it did in 1972.
A symbol's purpose is to unite, not to divide us. But real unity comes from inclusion, from sharing values like respect and civility. For 25 years, we've been facing John Kemeny's challenge to "find the means whereby every student, no matter what social background he comes from, once he is a student at Dartmouth, feels he is a full member of the entire community." That, I think, is a goal we can all rally behind.
