The documentary film-maker Ben West hails from Washington DC, and thus grew up rooting for its football team. He wore the gear, watched the games, cheered on an organization named for a slur against Native Americans. Even as a kid, West, who is Cheyenne, felt the dissonance between the team he rooted for and the supposedly “honorific” idea it represented – that Native Americans were a symbol of war and violence, a costume to be donned in the name of gladiatorial sport. “Is that me on that helmet?” he recalled thinking. “Is that me on that jersey? And does that name have anything to do with me?”
West credits a community of Indigenous people for helping him navigate such confusion, including his father, W Richard West Jr, founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the activist Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), whose decades-long fight to change the Washington football team mascot is partially chronicled in West’s film Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. That’s no small feat – as the film, released on DVD and streaming this week in time for another Super Bowl featuring another team with a Native American logo, explains in swift and at times galling detail, the use of Native American mascots for sports teams is rooted in self-serving fictions, distorts a whitewashed history and does real psychological damage to Native American youth. “It’s a public health issue for Native people,” said West, citing the research the Dr Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip), among others, who have chronicled the quantifiable negative impact of Native American mascots and stereotypes on Native teens’ self-esteem.
