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Purpose – This chapter examines how and why the continued use of Indianness in sport makes many American Indians uneasy and then turns to consider the manner in which Native Americans have assisted with and even endorsed such monikers and mascots.

Design/methodology/approach – The current study employs interpretive approaches common in cultural studies (broadly defined). It offers textual readings of historical incidences as well as ethnographic readings of current events.

Findings – The key findings of the study offer new insights into the multiple and often competing ways in which indigenous athletes, fans, and communities interpret Native American mascots, stressing the overlooked role of American Indians who enact and endorse them.

Research limitations/implications – The focus on the use of indigeneity in the United States is the key limitation of the current research.

Originality/value – The central contribution of this work lies in its attention to the social significance and cultural politics of indigenous interpretations of American Indian mascots. In particular, it explores the complexities and contradictions central to such interpretations, stressing the unappreciated role of expectations and the pronounced uneasiness at their core.

Since its inception in 1926, the tradition of playing Indian at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) has fostered powerful devotion and deep affection, creating powerful spaces of identification and narration for thousands of (largely EuroAmerican) students, fans, and community members. Embodied by Chief Illiniwek, this tradition had proven popular and pleasurable for more than 60 years when a small, but persistent, collection of students and faculty began challenging the prevailing uses and understandings of Indianness at UIUC. At first, these interventions appeared awkward and idiosyncratic as they worked to unsettle established interpretations and preferred practices. Over time, a vital and creative counter-hegemonic movement crystallized, fostering protest, internal efforts at reform, and critical scholarship. In conjunction with a broader, national movement (see King, 2010), these local initiatives culminated in a policy change by the National Collegiate Athletic Association that would eventually prompt UIUC, after initial resistance, to retire Chief Illiniwek. Nevertheless, alumni, fans, and several media outlets not only continued to defend the schools mascot, but went so far as to celebrate it as well. Indeed, almost immediately after Chief Illiniwek performed for the last time, the local paper in Champaign-Urbana released a volume commemorating the mascot and its import (Foreman, 2007). As much of the media and public has mourned for their “Indian” and longed for their lost traditions, they have silenced and marginalized local and national network of resistance intent to re/claim dignity, humanity, and community.

The fundamental issue of this thematic section, as phrased in abstract terms by hooks (1992, p. 23), is that the consumption of racial difference, or as she puts it, “eating the other,” and its profound effects: “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races…affirm their power-over.” Though this nicely encapsulates the subject at hand and associated consequences, it does little to contextualize or account for changes over time – both of which are crucial if are engage commodity racism now.

Commodity racism, as conceived by Anne McClintock (1995), describes a novel cultural formation, binding difference, power, and consumption to one another, a creation at the interface of imperialism and industrialism in the late 19th century that offered an emergent language to simultaneously make sense of difference, fashion identity, cultivate desire, and sell stuff. Importantly, as it remapped the world, placing peoples and cultures in ranked social locations, it also reconfigured gender, the body, and taste as it rerouted the flows between public and private spheres. At its core, as expressed quite clearly in the soap advertisements McClintock analyzes, commodity racism stated the (then) accepted facts of white supremacy, underscoring the propriety of imperial expansion and settling, in many ways, for consumers hailed through it the racial question of the day.

This chapter argues that in 2000 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne (UIUC), retained Judge Louis B. Garippo to moderate information gathering and to prepare a three-part report to legitimize findings that would deliberately result in no substantive action. The framework of a legal proceeding – whereby Garippo served as judge and the Board of Trustees as jury in absentia – provided the necessary “nonfictions and metaphors of traditional jurisprudence” (Cohen, 1935, p. 812) to construct vehicles of communication in which the dialogue and subsequent report on Chief Illiniwek would be seen as impartial and objective. That framework resulted in “The Chief Illiniwek Dialogue Report (CIDR),” authored by Judge Garippo and presented to the UIUC Board of Trustees on November 8, 2000.

This interpretive biography of Norman K. Denzin traces some of the important turns and moments of his intellectual development and prodigious publication. One focus includes his editorial role for the first 52 volumes of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (1978–2020), and how his vision for an inclusive community of qualitative researchers and interpretive scholars emerged and changed.