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IUP keeps 'Indians' name, switches mascot
Friday, March 05, 1999 By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
INDIANA, Pa. - Indiana University of Pennsylvania will retain Indians as the name of its athletic teams, but change its mascot to a black bear.
Trustees of IUP will authorize the bear mascot today when they meet in Punxsutawney.
A three-member committee of the trustees unanimously endorsed the plan yesterday after it was recommended by university President Lawrence Pettit.
Pettit said the union of Indians and black bears will maintain a campus and town tradition for the school's name without demeaning Native American people by having mascots portray them.
He met with representatives of the Three Rivers Council of Native Peoples before deciding on his course. "I am convinced that they can tolerate, though not celebrate, the name," he said.
IUP's anthropology professors told Pettit that he was wrong. Department member Sarah Neusius said IUP should not keep a team name that is inherently offensive to ethnic groups. "We ought to discard it," she said, adding that the department of seven full-time and three part-time faculty all felt that way.
Both the National Congress of American Indians and the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media had urged IUP to drop Indians as its team name. The second group is affiliated with the American Indian Movement.
Pettit said he resisted them on good grounds. With IUP located in Indiana Borough and Indiana County, he said, the name Indians makes sense. "We can justify retaining it more so than Hanover, N.H., and Palo Alto, Calif., could," he said, referring to the locations of Dartmouth and Stanford, which both dropped Indian team names years ago.
Trustee David Osikowicz called Pettit's idea of using Indians with a black bear mascot "a good middle ground."
Pettit said he found it odd that the mascot issue had assumed so much importance at a university whose main job was to educate its 13,700 students.
Yet, he said, he appreciated "the intensity of emotion" stirred by the debate.
He also said he had ample precedent for the seemingly odd marriage of Indians and black bears. Pettit pointed to the University of Alabama and U.S. Naval Academy as examples of schools that blend nicknames with unrelated mascots.
Alabama calls its teams the Crimson Tide but uses an elephant as its mascot. Navy players are Midshipmen, but their mascot is a goat.
Pettit said Native Americans he spoke with liked eagles or bears as team mascots. Pettit settled on black bears because they are indigenous to the Indiana, Pa., area.
He also said black bears are a worthy symbol for IUP because they are "strong, intelligent, independent, monogamous and given to caring for the young."
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