CHAPTER 1
Commodifying Indian Students and Sport Mascots
The Lake Matchimanitou Warriors
Parker saw the black van drive by on Lake Matchimanitou Road while she ate lunch with her mother, Emma. The blazing markings on the side of the van said, âScalp the Cowboys! Go Warriors!â1 Parker recognized the van as belonging to Dave and Sandi Thompson. She had seen it parked outside of the high school during school board meetings at Lake Matchimanitou High many times. Parker attended school board meetings on a regular basis to contest many of the decisions made by Dave Thompson, Robin Jeffries, and Jefferson Madison, the long-standing members of the school board. Her voice, as a member of the Lake Matchimanitou Band of Ottawa Indians, was in the minority more often than not and she tended to resent people like the Thompson family.
âGo Warriors,â she muttered under her breath, tossing down a used fork onto the table. âWhat a load of crap.â
Parker Roberts was in her early twenties and taking classes at the Michigan State University extension at Northwestern Michigan College. She had long, straight black hair that she wore in a long braid down the center of her back. She had intense dark eyes, what her grandmother called a moon face, and ran four miles every other day. She considered herself an activist, but she was frustrated by the difficulties in getting her ideas heard by the townâs great white fathers. The large majority of the population of the village of Lake Matchimanitou was non-Indian. That made it very easy for the village council, the school board, and all the other governmental or legal entities to ignore Ottawas like Parker.
Emma and Parker ate lunch together every chance they could get. During the summer and fall, they would meet at Kejaraâs Bridge, the only restaurant in Matchimanitou County that served a tasty breakfast and lunch menu that involved no deep-frying. In fact, much of the food served at the restaurant was grown using organic methods in a garden on the side of the building. The founders of Kejaraâs were sisters just older than Parker who graduated, like Parker, from Lake Matchimanitou High. And the Lake Matchimanitou Band had just purchased the restaurant from the sisters. A two-lane highway snaked through the village, which rested on the lake narrows, and linked the ten miles of road between Madison Bay and Collier. From the four tables on the patio in the front of the restaurant, one could see the traffic go by. In the summer time, when the tourists from downstate flocked to the area to visit the sand dunes and vineyards, to sample the carnival atmosphere of the cherry festival, and to get away from their busy Detroit, Chicago, and Grand Rapids lives, the traffic was constant and brutal. But after the tourist season melted away with the last of the summer after Labor Day, the traffic was all local and relaxed. The small village of Lake Matchimanitou didnât have much more than a gas station, a bar, a small grocery, and a few antique shops in addition to Kejaraâs.
Emma was reading an old copy of The Sun from the collection of magazines that patrons of Kejaraâs Bridge would share with the restaurant. She didnât look up from the article, but said, âParker, whatâs the trouble, dear?â She knew her daughter would complain every now and again about the name, logo, and mascot of the high schoolâs sports teams. She knew her daughter would get around to doing something about it one of these days. It was late summer and the school year had begun. There were school board meetings to attend.
Emma Roberts was the Vice-Chair of the Lake Matchimanitou Band tribal council. She had been a council member since 1983, the year the federal government extended federal recognition to the Band for the first time since treaty times. The Bandâs electorate sent her back to the council every four years for reasons she didnât really understand. Emma had been instrumental in petitioning and lobbying and cajoling federal officials and Congressmen to recognize the Bandâs government, working for a decade behind the scenes, sometimes alone. She wasnât a firebrand leader or great public speaker at the council meetings; she didnât believe herself to be well-suited to the task of wading through the legalese and technical writing of the business of the council every week; she didnât consider herself too wise or stoic, especially in comparison to her own mother, Louise; and the Roberts family wasnât very numerous, not a helpful demographic attribute when it came to tribal electionsâbut they kept sending her back to the council every four years.
Parker and Emma could have been sisters, people often said. Emma had the same long, straight hair and moon face. And they said Emma looked like her own mother, Louise.
âWhat a load of crap,â Niko said without looking up, copycatting his mother while working on his coloring book. He was coloring a cat purple and wasnât staying in the lines.
Emma and Parker looked up at each other. âSee how you are,â Emma said. âIf that boy comes over to my house with a potty mouth, Iâll wash your mouth out with soap.â The women laughed.
Since Parker set her class schedule for the afternoon, Emma watched Niko in the afternoons during the summers. Being Vice-Chair for LMB wasnât all that lucrative. She received a monthly stipend that covered her property taxes for her house on the reservation, but not much else. Parker could have lived with her mother, but she was an independent type and opted for renting a small house in Suttonâs Bay. Parkerâs husband, Strickland, had been called to active duty in Afghanistan. Other than the occasional vague email from Strick mentioning the bad food and crabby co-workers, they were out of contact.
âYour cousin Frank is coaching the peewee football or whatever it is,â Emma said. âI think itâs good for him to be doing something. He loved to play so much.â
âOh, the Bears?â Parker asked. âThatâs great. I know how awful it was for him when they told him he couldnât play anymore after he hurt his knee.â
* * *
No one expected the Matchimanitou Bears to compete in the Matchimanitou County 78âer Football League. They never did. Maybe theyâd win a couple games a year but they never qualified for the playoffs, where the top four teams advanced, in the ten years the eight-team league had existed. Maybe it was because the team consisted of Indiansâcitizens of the Lake Matchimanitou Band of Ottawa Indians. It was well documented that few of the LMB members had any money. The Band contributed a few hundred bucks a year to the team, but the tribe had no money to pay for new helmets and shoulder pads, or uniforms.
In fact, only a handful of the Matchimanitou Bears had anything that resembled uniforms. The helmets and equipment, much of it 1970s vintage, had been handed down from generation to generation of Matchimanitou teams. When the team hit the fieldâmany of them wearing their grandfathersâ old sweatshirts over their cracked shoulder padsâthey all looked like they played for separate teams. Because few of the Bearsâ parents could afford to take time from work to coach the team, the Bears didnât know who would show up at games and practices to run them through their drills or to call their plays. Every game played by the Bears was an away game; they had no field to call their own.
In contrast, the other teams of the Matchimanitou County league had new uniforms every couple of years, stark and blazing reds and blues and violets, matched by clever decals on their state-of-the-art helmets. The parents that organized these players into football teams lived on Lake Matchimanitou, the forty-mile-long body of water that dominated the county, and on the Great Lake that bordered the western edge of the county. Property values on both lakefronts were extravagant and it was not unheard of for a summer cottage to sell for seven figures. Each team was organized through a parentsâ booster group, funded through private donations, and coached by a former high school or college football standout.
Few of the residents of the area knew that Matchimanitou County exactly matched the borders of the reservation created by the Treaty of Lake Matchimanitou, signed in 1855 by the Lake Matchimanitou Band ogemuk (tribal leaders, or headmen) and the Michigan Indian agent. Shortly after the ogemuk signed the treaty, non-Indian speculators rushed in to stake out the best lands on the lakeshore, believing that the treaty signing meant that the land in Matchimanitou County was open for public sale. By the time the Matchimanitou Band relocated from their homelands a few hundred miles away in southwestern lower Michigan, all the best land in their reservation had been taken by non-Indians. For the next 150 years, LMB members lived in the stony, sandy, and almost worthless land between the Great Lake and Lake Matchimanitou, away from the lakefront homes and off the main roads, virtually forgotten by the non-Indians living in the Bandâs own reservation. By the time of the Indian New Deal in 1934,2 even the Bandâs trusteeâthe federal governmentâhad forgotten them. Their lawyers named that pitiful state of existence âadministrative termination.â
In 1983, the federal government re-affirmed its recognition of the Lake Matchimanitou Band and began to fund some of the tribeâs government programs.3 However, the influx of government funds was never enough and most of the Bandâs members remained in poverty. Gaming was not an option for the Band, with the membership voting it down year after year. But something was better than nothing. In 1990, LMB families got together and petitioned the Matchimanitou County 78âer League for a football franchise to call their own.
Parkerâs cousin, Frank, a Lake Matchimanitou High honors student, had been the back-up quarterback with the varsity team until he had been injured in a pick-up game in the spring. Heâd never play competitive football again, the doctors said. So in the fall he directed his attention to the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in the dirty gray pajamas. Frank had been obsessed with football since he was five and, as a former high school quarterback, knew enough about offensive and defensive schemes to put amateur coaches, such as those heâd be opposing in the 78âer league, to shame. In his time, he had played two seasons at quarterback and safety for the Bears team; his teams won a total of five games in two years but were still considered to be the best Bears teams ever fielded. In the three weeks of practice before the season started in September, he realized his three best players were the girls on the team. In a decision that surprised even himself, he informed the team that the three young women would start at quarterback and both running back positions on offense and would be his three linebackers on defense.
At the pre-season league meeting in August, Frank attended on behalf of the Bears. The league drew up a schedule and went over rules changes. Several of the other representatives knew Frank from his days as back-up quarterback of the varsity and some even remembered him from the 78âer games years earlier.
The Bears played the Wayland Razorbacks in their first game. Wayland was located at the southern tip of Lake Matchimanitou, and the Razorbacks were the defending league champions. The book on them was that all their best players had moved on to high school, so they would be weaker that year. The Bearsâ quarterback, Leelu Smallings, scored on the Bears first play from scrimmage. On the Razorbacksâ first play, the Bearsâ middle line-backer, Tina Wilson, knocked the quarterback on his duff before he could hand the ball off to his halfback. On second down, Leelu stripped the ball from the halfback, Tina recovered the fumble, and Reggie Manitou, the Bearsâ undersized nose tackle, picked it up and rumbled in for the score. During the course of the game, the third Indian girl, Mary LaPorte, scored three times on fullback dives. The Bears won 56â0, by far their biggest win in the fifteen years theyâd played in the league.
By the end of September, the Bears were 5â0 and had given up only one touchdown, winning each game by an average of forty points. It was clear from even the casua...