Indians question Indian sports logos

Tuesday, December 26th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ When Oklahoma plays Florida State in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 3, the Sooners will be playing some Indians _ not necessarily real ones but the mascot kind that many sports fans love and many real Indians don't.

When it comes to sports, Indians are popular _ at least what many of us think of as Indians.

Joe Quetone sees both sides of this Indian/sports thing. He's a sports fan. He's also a fan of Florida State, a team known as the Seminoles. He's also a real Indian _ Kiowa, born in Meers. And he's director of the Florida Governor's Council on Indian Affairs.

Some Indian things in sports bother Quetone. ``Chief Wahoo,'' the mascot of the Cleveland Indians, for one. Then there's Indian nicknames like Redskins and Savages. And the ``tomahawk chop'' that thousands of fans of FSU, the Atlanta Braves and other Indian-name sports teams do endlessly while singing a Hollywood-inspired ``war chant.''

Other Indian things in sports don't bother Quetone, though. For instance, the ``Indian'' in war paint who rides a horse to mid-field before Florida State home games and stabs a flaming spear into the ground. Chief Osceola he's called, named for a real chief whose tribe hid in the swamp while the government spent $100 million failing to get them out.

Osceola means defiant, competitive, proud _ all the things you want a sports team to be. ``Using the name could be a positive thing if they don't cross the line,'' said Ted Underwood, cultural consultant for Oklahoma's Seminole Tribe.

FSU's version of hero Osceola is OK because the Florida Seminole tribe says it is, Quetone said. FSU worked with the tribe when it created Osceola. The tribe even donated the outfit Osceola wears. The tribe's chief _ folk-singing, alligator-wrestling James Billie, the guy who pioneered Indian gambling operations _ is one of modern Osceola's biggest supporters.

It's like when the military named a new combat helicopter the Kiowa Warrior, Quetone said. Army pilots flew the chopper to Anadarko and met with a Kiowa veterans society to ask permission to use the name.

``It wasn't something somebody decided on their own, and that you Indians are going to like it no matter what,'' Quetone said. Just because he shows up at games and on T-shirts, don't mistake Chief Osceola for a mere mascot. He's a ``heroic symbol,'' Florida State supporters say.

Chief Illiniwek is a symbol too, and pretty heroic too, even if he is fictional. At the University of Illinois, people have been arguing for years about the character who represents that school's teams. Even college accreditors and the state Legislature have leaped in.

``It's really a sort of obsession here in Illinois. You're either pro- or anti-chief,'' said Carol Spindel, adjunct writing professor who wrote ``Dancing at Halftime'' about the controversy.

Most Indian characters chosen for sports teams are nothing like real Indians, Spindel said. The colorful outfits, headdresses and images of wild behavior come from Wild West shows of the 1920s, she said. ``We think that's what Indians look like,'' she said.

Wherever they come from, many sports fans love to attach these ideas to teams. In recent, presumably more enlightened times, many teams _ from Southern Nazarene University and Oklahoma City University to St. John's University and Stanford University _ dropped their Indian nicknames.

The University of Oklahoma dropped in 1970 its Little Red mascot who danced in a war bonnet. Indians objected to the portrayal.

But many other schools hang on to their mascots.

``It's one of those issues,'' Quetone said. ``There are people on both sides that have just incredibly strong feelings.''