The "Imaginary Indian" as the Natick Redmen
In 1956, Silvio I. Mandino Jr, a senior at Natick High School was tasked with selecting a new mascot for the towns football team. Reflecting on his decision in 2006, he wrote, “I was looking for a name that I felt would reflect on the dignity and character of the Native American. I chose ‘Redmen.’”
Not long after Mandino’s decision, a silhouette design of a stereotypical Plains Native American in a large ceremonial headdress became associated with the mascot. In addition to the mascot, the Natick High School yearbook, The Sassaman, named for an Indigenous figure, used images and symbols of Native Americans for decades. Fifty two years later, in 2008 the Natick School Board voted to terminate the use of Redmen and its associated logo.
What changed from 1956 to 2008? How could a term that today many consider to be the “n-word for Indigenous people” be considered a term of endearment and a form of respect? Natick and other communities' usage of Native Americans and their associated symbols are embodiments of the “Imaginary Indian,” a term first termed by historian Daniel Francis.
Natick’s arc with the Imaginary Indian is duplicated in other communities across the continent. Its context and purpose vary with its usage, giving deeper understanding about how majority white communities view and use Indigenous peoples. How did the Imaginary Indian come about in Natick and in other places? Why did a nation that despised Native peoples embrace them as symbols of pride? What led to the demise of its uses, and to what degree does it exist today?
Creating the Imaginary Indian
Native American symbolism and history runs deep in the Massachusetts suburb about 20 miles from Boston. Natick was established as a mission community in 1652 by English Minister John Eliot, who led several “Praying Towns” in the newly settled Massachusett lands. Eliot and a group of Indigenous locals, who became known as the Praying Indians following their conversion by Eliot, are frequently noted as the founders of the town. In addition to the Redmen mascot, Natick’s identity has been represented with other symbols associated with Native Americans. Until 2023, the town’s seal featured an image of Eliot preaching to a group of scantily clad Native men. “Natick” itself is an Indigenous word that has a disputed meaning among historians. The post office on the town common features a large mural depicting the brutal removal of Native inhabitants to Deer Island during King Philip's War in 1675. Despite representing centuries old history, like Manidno’s “Redmen,” the town seal and the post office mural were products of the mid-20th century, though were created in different historical contexts with different purposes.
Natick was not alone. Thousands of other communities and institutions across the United States embraced symbols believed to be of Native origins. From “Chief Illiniwek” at the University of Illinois, the mythical Saltine Warrior in Syracuse, the Fremont Indians at a Bay Area high school, to the Redmen in Natick, Indigenous mascots were a common feature across the United States. By the 1970s, Native Americans mascots and symbols were used at more than 3000 schools across the country.
Like Mandino in Natick, the communities that applied the perceived Native identity to themselves said they did so out of “respect,” and as a way to “honor” Native peoples. As early as 1884, a group of students at Syracuse University named a student publication The Onondagan after a local tribe. In an early edition, the students stated they did so in “honor of the tribe and the beautiful valley in which we dwell.”
The last student to dance as “Chief Illiniwek” at the University of Illinois said “I treat the Saltine Warrior as an honor. It’s not racism at all.” Dave Josselyn, a 1963 Natick High School graduate, said, reflecting on the Redmen mascot, “I was very proud of it.” Josselyn, who identifies as a Mi'kmaq Indian, said, “I felt like, I guess, I’m a little bit important…Not many others, if any, could say anything, that they had that blood.” At a 2008 meeting tasked with gathering community input, Redmen supporters argued that Natick teams “take pride in the Redmen name and never thought of it as disrespectful.”
The use of a mascot is inherently a point of pride. The KKK doesn’t use African symbols to represent their ideology. The Nazis would never have used the Star of David instead of the Swastika. The users of Native imagery believed they were doing so out of respect. They really did take pride in representing Native culture. Further, many Indigenous people and groups, like Dave Josselyn and the Florida Seminoles, enjoyed having their culture be used as symbols of pride. Importantly, this perception of respect of Native peoples collides with a brutal history of Native–settler relations. For the hundreds of years that Native and European settlers co-existed on the American continent, war and oppression frequently defined their relations.
Natick’s origin story begins, in part, with the brutal and violent removal of Natives during King Philip's War in 1675. The Native inhabitants of several Praying Towns were forcefully moved to Deer Island in Boston Harbour. Most perished due to starvation or freezing temperatures. Genocidal moments like this are frequent in the history of settler-Native relations. Two centuries later, Indigenous peoples in the south were pushed westward during the Trail of Tears, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Native Americans, along with thousands of years of Indigenous culture. As late as 1890, US soldiers brutally massacred hundreds of Lakota at the Wounded Knee Massacre. For most of American history, Indigenous peoples were not thought to be participants in the American story. It wasn't until 1924, that the United States granted Native people the right to vote through the Indian Citizenship Act. Indigenous peoples were thought of as “others” and frequently as enemies.
The motivations of first the European and later U.S.’s drive against the indigenous inhabitants of North America was a passion for settlement. Many of the battles fought between settlers and Natives were over land. The colonization of the “new continent” by Europeans put the Native people at odds with the incoming settlers. North American history expands further back than Columbus’s 1492 arrival. Indigenous peoples from across the continent have a rich and diverse history that, until recently, was left mostly out of history textbooks.
Every way in which Americans were socialized and educated to think of Native peoples has been shaped by a settler perspective. How could it not be? Nearly all of the structural frameworks that exist in North America today are a product of the settling period. The governing structures, religions, and languages of Native communities were swiftly replaced with European equivalents. The concept of an “Indian” itself was a European construct. As historian Daniel Francis writes, “When Columbus arrived in America there were a large number of different and distinct indigenous cultures, but there were no Indians.” The European encroachment of North America settled and replaced more than just land. Any indigeneity that was featured in the continent remained no longer to its new inhabitants, who as a product of removal, wars, and disease, were now the majority.
While no longer dominant, Native Americans and their cultures were not forgotten. Rather they were reclaimed and distorted. Just as the land that once belonged to the Massachuset was now controlled by the English and used for building churches and later factories, Indigenous culture transferred ownership and purpose. As historian Patrick Wolfe explains, as a frequent product of settler colonialism historically and globally, the settlers now controlled the symbols and meaning which Indigenous cultures inhabited. Native peoples lost their “cultural sovereignty” just as they lost the sovereignty of their land. This transfer from Native culture, controlled and exhibited by Native peoples, to the control by settlers created the “Imaginary Indian.”
As noted by Francis, in his book The Imaginary Indian, as Native peoples were slowly assimilated and included in the existence which settlers created, they have come to “live within a world of imagery that isn’t their own.” The Imaginary Indian associates traits of masculinity, savagery, territorialism, and animalistic tendencies with Native peoples. These themes assisted in the othering of Native Americans, in pursuit of a racist agenda that upheld white superiority.
Comparing the use of the Imaginary Indian as a mascot by non-Native communities, to the use of relevant cultural symbols by a respective cultural community, even when imagined, highlights the divide over cultural sovereignty. The University of Notre Dame proudly hails the “fighting Irish” as their mascot. Unlike teams and communities that use Native associated imagery, the university is known for its strong Irish population and history. Notre Dame and the Irish which comprise the university’s “fighting Irish” have control of their cultural sovereignty. The Minnesota Vikings football team demonstrates a community with Scandinavian heritage using Scandinavian symbols as a point of pride. Unlike the Irish at Notre Dame and the Scandinavians in Minnesota, Native people have no such control of their “culture.”
Perspectives of the Imaginary Indian
Carolyn Hasgill is a lifelong resident of Natick. She identifies with the Nipmuc Indian tribe and has roots in the Native communities that inhabited Natick during the time of John Eliot. She graduated from Natick High School in 1961.
Reflecting on the history she learned during her upbringing, Hasgill said, “You're taught something, you think, okay, that's all right. But none of that history was taught when I was coming up…I felt that my history was forgotten. I was taught what they wanted me to know, and I had to go out and seek the true history of my tribe.”
Answering why she thought people in Natick decided to exhibit Indigenous symbols like the Redmen, Hasgill said, “I don't think they knew the truth.” Dave Josselyn, attended Eliot Elementary School in South Natick in the 1950s. He also doesn't remember learning much about Indigenous history at the school named for the town's settler. While Josselyn remembers learning only a little about Native histories, he does remember his Native roots being a point of conversation. Josselyn said, “Well, growing up, all I heard was I’m an Indian. ‘You’re an Indian.’ And that's all. I went with [it] because it didn’t bother me. I didn't know anything different. I probably heard somewhere you shouldn’t be called a “Redmen” or an Indian, but, hey, at least you know me.”
Both Hasgill and Josselyn’s accounts emphasize the dominant settler power structure which gave way for the Imaginary Indian to become mainstream. Hasgill is right, they did not know the truth, and had no way to access it.
The young boys that called Dave Joesselyn an Indian or “redman” were socialized within a culture that put the Imaginary Indian on display and treated it as reality. From movies that placed Natives in stereotypical plot positions, to cartoons, ads, books, and stories that further embed the imaginary Indian into the culture. Take the 1943 Boy Scout Cubbook featuring a page titled “Let’s Play Indian” teaching children how to dress and act like “self-controlled, quiet, loyal” Indian men. A 1959 column written in the Natick Bulletin by a local school principal was called “The Natick Indian” and intended to give eight to ten year olds the opportunity to “live with the Indians in the days of John Eliot.” The author wrote that readers “will sense some of the conflict with the white men, and will learn much of the Red Man’s ways and customs.” This column, which, according to the paper, received high readership among Naticks young population, re-enforced the imaginary creation of Native Americans and their culture. The increase in Saturday morning children's programming contributed to new iterations of the Imaginary Indian. Dave Josselyn recalls, “I think it was a cartoon that came out, and it was ‘Pow Wow, The Indian Boy.’ Well, didn't people nickname me Pow Wow. And that lived with me for a while growing up.” The Adventures of Pow Wow aired in 1956, the same year as the Redmen mascot's introduction in Natick. Josselyn says he took honor in being called Pow Wow, adding, “But it bothered me for a little bit in the beginning.” Throughout Josselyn’s account of his experience growing up in Natick, he continually asserts that he was proud of the town's Native associations and the nicknames he was given, though his first impressions are often revealed to be negative. With Pow Wow for example, Josselyn was “bothered in the beginning,” but then reasoned that he should be proud. In a similar way with the Redmen mascot, Josselyn says, “When I first saw it, I’d go, that's awful. That's ugly. Oh my goodness.” After talking with other people he reasoned, “Well, that's a very realistic picture for what they usually show for Native Americans or Indians.” As a living Indigenous person, Josselyn seemed to recognize the myth of these creations, though living in a society constructed by their creators, he was unable, consciously or not, to fully realize their myth.
Why did Natick embrace the “Redmen” as their mascot in 1956? Because Mandino and all the others in the town were socialized and educated in such a way that contributed to the only Indian they knew being the imaginary one, constructed for racist intentions by white settlers. In claiming Redmen as the mascot, and applying a figment of what a Native person looked like as its symbol, proved the exploitation of the perceived Indigenous culture. Natick was not using Native culture, they were using white perceptions of Native Americans—an aspect of settler culture. No Indigenous person looked like the Redmen mascot. No tribe or Indigenous person was known as “Redmen.” Both were adaptations of the Imaginary Indian. The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Redmen mascot did not describe Native people. It described the imagination of a Native person. Chief Wahoo of the formerly named Cleveland Indians baseball team, with a cartoonishly large nose and grin, and a single feather arising from his head, was just that, a cartoon. The “Saltine Warrior” of Syracuse University derived from a myth that Native remains were discovered on the campus in the early 1910s, was yet another creation from the Imaginary Indian.
The individuals who selected these mascots genuinely thought they were respecting Native people. There was no way for them to understand what a Native American was. They existed in the settler construct, which was established by people whose explicit intent and effect was to displace and racistly oppress Native peoples. Therefore these symbols and mascots are a product of a past that placed white settlers as superior to Indigenous peoples.
Dismantling the Imaginary Indian
How do we get to 2008, the year when the Redmen was removed? A slow but steady process of alerting Americans to the white settler structures which falsely created the Imaginary Indian began as a product of the racially aware culture of the 1970s. As activism by Native Americans increased and a more accurate history of settler-Native relations were taught, the colonial structures which upheld the Imaginary Indian began to crumble. In the late 1960s the National American Indian Congress (NAIC) led a movement to eradicate the use Indigenous mascots. Accompanied by an increase in media displaying counter stereotypical depictions of Native peoples, like the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), the defining decade of reconsidering the Imaginary Indian began.
Slowly but surely colleges and universities across the country began to withdraw their Native mascots. In 1970, the president of Oklahoma University suspended the use of their “Little Red” mascot. In 1972 alone, UMass Amherst stopped using Redmen, Stanford stopped using their “Indian” mascot, and the first civil rights complaint was filed at the Central University of Michigan for their use of “Chippewas.” A brief article in a 1974 issue of the Natick Bulletin made reference to a mascot controversy in Natick for the first time, noting, “The criticism of the team mascot, Jack O’Leary, by some of the fans who thought his displays were degrading to the American Indian are completely uncalled for. He was very colorful and certainly added spirit to the team and he was warmly applauded.” In 1975, critical reviews of the University of Illinois’s “Chief Illiniwek” were becoming more frequent. In 1978, Syracuse discontinued their use of the “Saltine Warrior.”
The increased education, cultural awareness, and Native activism during the 1970s resulted in the removal of Native mascots, further proving that the use of these symbols in the first place was caused by a lack of education and cultural awareness, supporting the long established culture of unchallenged racism of white America. When asked why she thought Natick residents chose the Redmen, Carolyn Hasgill answered, “I don't really think they were thinking about the Native Americans, per se…But I think if they had stopped and thought it might not have happened.” Had the implementers of these mascots realized that their characters were not representative or respectful of Native peoples they would not have used them. Later in life Josselyn learned more about Native Americans and the history of settler relations which changed his perspectives. He said, “Somewhere further in education of history it might have been pointed out a bit that things weren't right for them or that they were mistreated…I guess as I got older and started hearing more history… It kind of hurt.” Hasgill had a similar experience. “Now that I'm older, I understand that, but coming up, when I was in grade school, none of that was said.”
Contrasting Uses of the Imaginary Indian
There has always been a passion to learn about Native peoples, in fact this passion suggests additional reasons as to why communities embraced symbols of Indigenous Americans. Since the Boston Tea Party, when colonial patriots dressed to resemble Native Americans to send a message to the English that they now, symbolically, embodied a different national identity, Americans have sought to use Native culture as a stand in for their own. At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that sought to display and define the essence of American identity, a display of Native teepees filled one of the main exhibits. At the same time as white-Americans embraced “Indianness” as an identity, the United States and Canadian governments enforced laws prohibiting Native peoples from practicing their cultural and religious practices, while embarking on a campaign of cultural cleansing, leaving only the Imaginary Indian to remain. By the 1950s there was a desire within both white and Native communities to seek historical knowledge and obtain or provide recognition.
In 1937, Natick artist Hollis Howard Holbrook was commissioned to paint a mural for the town’s main post office. Holbrook’s mural, completed in 1938, shows the moment when Natick’s Native residents were chained and forcibly relocated to Deer Island in 1675. The piece shows John Eliot pleading with the imprisoners to free the Natick Indians. While the mural places Eliot in a position of authority, opposed to the chained Natives, creating a “white savior” image, he is noted to have been an outspoken advocate against the relocation of the Native peoples. Eliot attempted to bring supplies to Deer Island in an effort to save the starving Indigenous prisoners during their exile. The mural, which was commissioned as a Work Progress Administration (WPA) Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), explicitly challenges the Imaginary Indian narrative. The native people are shown as victims, left helpless by the gun carrying white settlers. The mission of PWA projects was to ingrain a new sense of identity in the depressed nation through portraying uniquely American scenes. Projects often took an activist tone. Even if unexplicit, many PWA art pieces were often grand displays showing people of color alongside white people. Despite the embellished scene of Eliot attempting to free the Natives and the historically inaccurate depictions of the Native peoples, the mural represents a historically significant and real moment.
Both David Josseyln and Caryolyn Hasgill felt differently about the mural than they do the mascot and town seal. Josselyn, who briefly served on a committee tasked with reviewing the seal, said, “I kind of gave up because it is part of the history, and I almost think they should have left it the way it was.” Hasgill said of the Redmen mascot, “I wasn’t opposed to it. It could go either or. I could see both sides and it wasn't offensive to me, but some people felt it was.” Their indifference contrasts to the passion both had in favor of retaining the mural in the post office. Hasgill said, “The post office mural, to me, is spectacular, and it does mean something to me…My theory is, it should be there because that’s what was done to us. And hopefully it will never be done again.”
Josselyn remembers his first time seeing the mural as a child, “I think I was four or five or six the first time I went to the post office with my mother. And when I walked in, I looked around, almost fell over and I almost started crying. And my mother looked at me, and didn't say anything. And I said, ‘Mommy, awful, bad,’ or whatever I said. And she looked at me and she said, ‘We'll talk afterwards. Don't worry about it…’ So when we got outside, she goes, ‘That's showing how bad the white men were to our tribe here, and it should stay there.’ So then I started thinking that way, but it originally really hurt when I saw that.” When asked whether he felt the post office mural was different from the mascot or town seal, Josselyn said, “Yes. In that it’s more in your face. This is what you did to us. Whereas the mascot and the seal are very subtle or not as harsh.”
People desired to learn about Indigenous history but the only provided material was that of imagined Indianness. Native peoples were and are forced to decide whether they want to be represented by the Imaginary Indian, or often receive no representation at all. Legal scholar Christine Rose writes, “It seems Native people would be happy to have recognition; recognition of the suffering of their ancestors, recognition of their right to honor their customs and religion, recognition of their role in the development of this country's true history.” The mural does that. It recognizes and shows history. The thing everyone, especially Indigenous peoples desire. Hasgill does advocate for the mural to be relocated. Not so it will be less in peoples face, rather, she said, “I would like it to be more, maybe in the library so more people would see it, because how many people use the post office now?”
The communities and individuals that created and embraced Native symbols and characters as their mascots argued they did so out of respect, but the only Native American they knew was an imaginary one. They had no other concept of how to treat or respect Native culture. As accurate telling of history became mainstream and activism increased, the shadow of settler colonialism began to diminish and Native mascots began to recede. In 2008, to the outrage of many, Natick discontinued its use of the Redmen, and in 2023 replaced its town seal depicting Native Americans and John Eliot. As Richard King writes of Native mascot usage, “This kind of racism is buried so deeply in the American psyche that it may be impossible to resolve. No one seriously holds these views as a conscious part of their understanding of the word.” Our culture must learn from the past, and examine what histories are imagined and challenge them through histories that are accurate.
The "Imaginary Indian" as the Natick Redmen with footnotes and citations.