The NCAA’s 10-year effort to stop colleges from branding their sports teams with American Indian imagery has roots in a 2001 presentation by former president Roy Saigo.
“Where pride meets prejudice” is NCAA Champion Magazine‘s in-depth examination of a movement that began in the early 1970s when schools such as Stanford University and Mankato State College dropped their Indian mascots.
Saigo, who served at St. Cloud State from 2000-07, helped take that movement to another level during a presentation to university presidents at a 2001 NCAA luncheon.
Amy Wimmer Schwarb recounts Saigo’s story in detail:
“Hey, listen up, everybody! Listen up!” he recalls saying. “I want you to hear me because I’m not going to say this twice. I’m going to tell you all a story about Little Black Sambo.”
The brazen word pierced any lunchtime ambivalence, and his friends near the front straightened in their chairs. For 100 years, Americans had been usurping pieces of Native American culture, making them their own – and the comparison of that practice with racist depictions of African-Americans shot like electricity through the crowd. With their attention in his hands, Saigo assaulted their sensibilities.
In a PowerPoint, he showed how schools’ use of these nicknames had opened the door to racist portrayals. One slide showed a drawing of a Native American, his eyes replaced with X’s as if he were drunk. In another, distributed by students at an opposing school, a Native American was depicted performing a sexual act on the other school’s animal mascot. “Is this a welcoming environment?” Saigo asked. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just asking a question.”
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Saigo’s leadership was informed by the research and activism of faculty, including Sudie Hofmann, a human relations and multicultural education professor who endured threats of personal violence campaigning against Florida State’s use of Seminole Indian imagery.
A Japanese-American, Saigo was interned with his family in an Arizona prison camp during World War II.
He told Wimmer: “I have an extreme sensitivity,” he says, “to those who have no voice.”
Saigo is president at Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon, near the border with California.
