For eight decades, students at Southeast Missouri State University, a mid-sized college located on the banks of the Mississippi River in rural, conservative Cape Girardeau, had proudly rooted for its sports teams, the Indians. The old-timers said the name was adopted in the mid-1920s to honor the legacy of American Indians and their warrior traditions. The teams had an Indian mascot. There was an Indian logo. And the entrance to Houck Stadium, the university’s football arena on the edge of campus, was dominated by an imposing, 30-foot-tall statue of an American Indian man.
Then as the new millennium dawned, the university’s administration decided that maybe the use of an American Indian symbol wasn’t so cool any more. In 2003 the university set up a committee to study the possibility of a name change. The committee was short-lived.
“They were run out of town because of opposition,” says Dr. Edward Leoni, a professor of health and human performance at the university. “People were in great opposition to the change.”
Undaunted, the university decided to try again two years later. University President Kenneth Dobbins asked Leoni, the faculty representative to the NCAA, to head a committee of faculty, students, alumni and boosters. Mindful of what happened in 2003, Leoni carefully planned his approach.
“I held public forums that allowed people to vent and to hear ideas,” says the 31-year veteran educator. “I would listen to them say how proud they were to be Indians. Things started to change when I showed conceptual renderings of any of the (proposed) mascots. We did a survey of alumni and students and discovered that there was more support for change than we realized. We needed to allow people to express their feelings and to see a possibility.”
In the end, the university community came around and overwhelmingly voted in favor of a new mascot, the Redhawk. Judging by the number of students who don Redhawk apparel on campus, says Leoni, the new mascot has been a huge success.
Though not as well known as some of the other controversies that erupted around plans to change American Indian mascots, the events at Southeast Missouri State show how, when handled carefully, discarding offensive American Indian imagery can actually become a tool for bringing the university community together.
