Administrators, students, athletes, newspaper sportswriters, and band directors, among many others, embraced and disseminated ideas about community identities created through Indian mascotry. The headdressed Plains Indian became the preferred image for mascots as far away as Stanford. Progressive Era reformers like those with the Boy Scouts of America, often with connections to Dakota and Lakota people, trained early (white) Indian mascots in dance and costuming. The University of Illinois was historical ground zero, but the university’s influences were in the Great Plains. The remaining chapters pan the scope of complicity in the Indian mascot’s invention and spread. The first chapter chronicles the rapid rise in profitability of college football, showing how university identity became tied to the sport and its spectacle.

The work is organized chronologically in six chapters, each having a thematic emphasis. The mascots sanitized narratives of colonial expansion in the face of anxieties about industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and wartime fitness for service. From the late nineteenth century to the early Cold War, the mascots’ establishment reinforced the modern university’s mission to develop white male middle-class athletic bodies in the service of community and country. Relying on archival sources from five universities formerly or currently using American Indian mascots, Guiliano argues that the creation of American Indian mascots and halftime spectacles was bound to the larger project of higher education.

Her impressive contextualization of the rise of Indian imagery in college athletic mascots and halftime shows, though, fulfills it well. At a glance, Jennifer Guiliano’s subtitle seems ambitious for such a concise book.

Indian Spectacle by Jennifer Guiliano