When Mascots Unite <i> and </i> Divide Us

Sometimes amid the clutter of names, numbers and needs on John Orendorff’s phone machine at L.A. Unified’s American Indian Education Commission, he’ll receive an invitation.

It is always offered politely, with the best intentions: “We were wondering if you might be able to send someone out to perform. Some ritual? A ceremonial dance?”

Though that sort of outreach doesn’t fall under the list of services the commission regularly extends, Orendorff will dutifully return the call and tick off the commission’s official duties: a themed lecture, parent-teacher liaison services. But folded into the goodbye, often in postscript, as if some further test of his mettle, the caller might interject, voice tipped upward, an idea being born: “Can you come in full regalia?”

Orendorff always obliges. He will appear as he has this day at University High School in West Los Angeles--in a pressed suit, tie and black oxfords shined to approximate lacquer: “My full regalia.” He learned the quip some years ago from another Native American speaker familiar with the nasty potholes along the circuit, to nip assumptions and ignorance in the bud.

But today at Uni, it’s a dance of a different sort. Looking more like a Secret Service agent, down to the haircut of military symmetry and a dark brush of a mustache, Orendorff knows he comes off to outsiders as an unlikely grass-roots leader. Accompanied by about half a dozen Native American community activists, he follows their trail into the dimly lit classroom, its floors pocked with asbestos lesions, its walls and ceilings sagging in disrepair.

Orendorff seats himself next to student body president Tayola Andrews, who occupies a desk emblazoned with a student’s interpretation of the school mascot: an Indian rendered in shades of blue. It’s one of many “warrior”-themed icons peppered throughout the room--murals, a bust, faded reproductions; Indians festooned with headdresses, explosions of feather. Face-paint. Stoic silhouettes bent in motion.

To be sure, as far as Orendorff is concerned, the specifics and peculiarities of these images have jumbled into a blur. How they are posed, the authenticity of the feathers, the details of beadwork and face paint are inconsequential, bordering on insulting. It’s their very staying power that distresses. Especially in a city that touts itself as enlightened, a harbinger of the new, the City of the Future. Orendorff would probably file away the whole affair as curious, bordering on humorous, if it wasn’t weighted with so much sadness, so much simmering acrimony.

Three years ago, when Orendorff became director, dethroning these high school mascots topped his to-do list. As he began his rounds from campus to campus--addressing University’s Warriors, Gardena High’s Mohicans, then Birmingham’s Braves in Van Nuys--he wasn’t expecting the steadfast resistance, the overwhelming press of the populace to keep things the same.

Most times, Orendorff is met with an echoing laundry list of objections: the cost of paint to cover the murals and other signage; new uniforms. There is the issue of renaming yearbooks, newspapers. Not to mention re-flooring gymnasiums. Or the vitriol of alumni organizations--linked to tradition as to bloodline--that lend hearty monetary as well as moral support.

And all this to consider while schools sag at the seams. “How do we explain this kind of expenditure to the parents?” asks Deborah Browder, Uni’s leadership advisor. “Wouldn’t that be $100,000 to paint over a mural that was a gift from a graduating class when we don’t have the proper [classroom] supplies? To me that’s a little misguided.”

Orendorff nods soberly at the observation--familiar in its tone and reasoned logic. This day is no different. The talk winds around itself; a courtly lead, the polite follow, until teacher Ray Parker scraps formality, finger stabbing the air: “So what part of this do you have a problem with?”

The coach teeters backward on his chair, his arms loosely crossed against his chest. “Is it the mascot or the name? I’m just trying to understand . . . because I’m a black man and in African American history we were warriors and that was something to be proud of.”

One from Orendorff’s group volunteers a hand, an answer, gesturing with a jab of the thumb at a wall mural--more face paint, a feather: “This symbol is derogatory,” says Hector Pacheco. “It’s racist. It’s like we were dead. Our people and your people suffered bigotry and racism. They were treated similarly.”

Parker, his face held in a half-smile, still doesn’t quite see the corollary: “I’ve been playing and coaching sports for years. I’ve been a Trojan, a Dolphin, a Pirate, a Don and a Warrior. To me, ‘warrior’ shows a certain kind of bravery. The picture,” says Parker, his head listing toward the image on the desk, “I hate it. I understand why you’d be upset. I hate westerns. . . . But for me the name ‘Warriors’ stands strong. To me. So what can I use for my team? I’ve got to buy uniforms. What would be an example?”

Pacheco snaps, pops to his feet, the bridge between them now gone from fragile to ruin: “If your memory of us is a mascot, we’d rather not be remembered. I am flesh. I take offense at these symbols. If your people aren’t willing to stand up and help native people, you’re all talk. This isn’t going anywhere.”

Words now superfluous, Pacheco, too, resorts to symbols. He unbands his ponytail, the blue-black locks fall well past his shoulders--a flowing exclamation point. He glares and then is gone out the door into the heat. Best intentions, careful wording, Orendorff knows, go down that path after him.

“Since I was 16, I’ve been pissing principals off,” cracks Orendorff with a shrug, patiently working his way through a rubbery cheese enchilada at a kitschy, overdrawn Silver Lake Mexican cantina midway between two locales--Echo Park and Los Feliz--that more than shaped and still inhabit him.

A roustabout, he cut a well-worn path along this stretch of Sunset Boulevard that links his disparate worlds: “I lived in Echo Park and Marshall High School is in Los Feliz. I had a group of really international friends--Palestinians, Armenians, Russians, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Costa Ricans.

“I had the kind of growing up where we would go to parties in the Hollywood Hills or parties in South-Central Los Angeles and people would look and say: What are you guys doing here? And we’d say: We’re here to party. And we did. There wasn’t the violence and the fear that there is now.”

That was L.A. in the full flush of its city-as-melting-pot phase, Orendorff acknowledges. But that civil rights glow of the ‘70s has long faded and now the issues prove different or, at the very least, impossibly tangled as borders swiftly redraw themselves.

That’s why Orendorff knows to read between arbitrary lines, the tricks of language and meaning. Said simply: When is a mascot not a mascot? Answer: When the symbol is a symbol for something else.

Orendorff is learning that dug-in-heels resistance and raw emotion are the jagged byproduct of change, one that seems too abstract to quickly process and too close to the bone to articulate. It’s about eking out space in already cramped quarters; about diminishing numbers; about the quality of hurt, the measure of pain: Whose is greater? Yours? Or mine?

Though the mascot drama is far from the only issue that crosses Orendorff’s desk, it is the symbolic centerpiece, the core from which other infractions of race radiate. As one of seven directors of special interest educational commissions addressing the Los Angeles Unified School District’s increasingly diversifying classrooms, Orendorff sees himself occupying an odd middle ground--part mediator, part squeaky wheel.

At times, the most difficult part of this political dance is currying trust in a population that has quietly shouldered a fair amount of pain and disappointment. “We don’t have an NAACP, a MALDEF, a Danny Bakewell,” he says of Native Americans. “It’s easy to have things fall through the cracks, to be invisible and ignored.”

Orendorff mulls over his community’s ocean of worry--from advising the school board on textbook content and general curriculum to “My kid was placed in special ed when he shouldn’t be.”

There are parents worried about their kids attending school around Thanksgiving and Columbus Day. Kids coming in from Oklahoma who don’t have money for uniforms, get sent home and don’t come back. There are others who come with long hair and their grandfather’s knife: So how do you explain zero-tolerance when these are important things to your culture but interfere with school gang and violence policies?

Untended misunderstanding creates distrust; distrust breeds disconnectedness.

The sum of this equation that most worries Orendorff are the numbers of Native Americans who opt out of the school system, choosing independent study. That probably hurts the most, he says, since it means further isolation. With only about 1,600 officially counted, “we need to be part of the mix,” he says. “But a lot of parents are choosing this route--it’s easier, less confrontational. So I try and get them out. Schools are glad to see them go. . . .”

For Orendorff, there’s a sickly smack of the familiar to all this. A product of the L.A. public school system, his past didn’t always engender pride. A loosely bound household, parents circumspect about their son’s Cherokee heritage, coupled with run-of-the-mill growing pangs, made for a potent at-risk adolescent profile.

“In junior high school, I just wanted to get as far away as possible from Chief Itchy-Foot [the statue of Chief Itchytoe that stood out on the quad of Thomas Starr King Junior High], and not deal with being Indian or mascots or chiefs that didn’t look like me.”

Traditionally in matters of race and difference, the path of least resistance is the one most overrun. So, Orendorff says, “Teachers love us as long as we’re doing crafts or dancing. But mascots or land issues? Violation of civil rights? It makes them very uncomfortable.”

Yet, especially with the fervidness of the mascot issue, he’s been surprised that the schools have largely been recalcitrant. He thought that cultural diversity and political correctness might buoy his efforts. Instead, it appears they’ve worked only to dilute them.

“Martin Luther King died so that all of our lives would be better,” says Fern Mathias, a executive director of the American Indian Movement of Southern California. “So why [some of] these black students, faculty and administration don’t understand, I don’t get it. Especially when it comes from black people it’s shocking. I thought that they would understand.”

Birmingham High School Principal Gerald D. Kleinman, who’s been sorting through alumni outcry and the commission’s pleas, says an empathetic process has to be considered: “Are we demeaning Native Americans . . . when you take a school name, you call yourself something that shows character, trustworthiness--a code you’re proud of. That’s why the Braves.”

Their reactions, many students and faculty contend, are not of ill will. And most of all, it is not for lack of trying: “When I first got to Uni,” says Tayola Andrews, “knowing that we were on an Indian burial ground represented something powerful to me.”

Where it gets most sticky, acknowledges alumnus and longtime Uni faculty member Tom Anderson, is the sweep of interpretations and the act of honoring: “I’m aware of the varying connotations of the term ‘warrior.’ But I believe in the peaceful warrior and that’s what we can play up--primarily because of the pairing of University High School and its Indian heritage--the campus’ springs, the burial grounds of Gabrielenos. It has stood for something since the school has been here.”

Therein lies the interpretational logjam, the slippery definitions of “tradition” and “honor” that wreak the most havoc on open dialogue.

“They’re culture vultures,” Vernon Bellecourt bluntly puts it. President of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media, he has beaten a well-worn path on this issue on the professional sports level. “We don’t want them to tell us how they’re honoring us with mascots, when they’ve taken our land and our resources. We don’t want them to tell us that they are showing us respect and honor. Those are hollow words.”

A segment of the school district, however, wants to make better on those words, says board President Jeff Horton. “We generally have a strong policy on not discriminating, not disparaging groups of peoples. As one board member, I am very supportive of the commission’s position and I’m interested in seeing us move away from mascots that use or reference racial groups.”

No matter the encouraging words, Orendorff worries that the wheels are turning far too slowly: “There are radicals in my community who are very impatient with me, thinking that I’m part of the stall practice. But I hope that it’s not mandated. I hope that it is not shoved down their throats.” He knows what kind of scar it could leave on race relations. “I would like it to be something that the schools vote on democratically. So that they understand why it is the right thing to do.”

Why “fixing it” isn’t settling upon a broader interpretation of “brave,” or a more pacifist vision of “warrior.” Why those compromises won’t make things square.

“Native Americans have lost a great deal,” he explains. “They’ve lost their land base. They’ve watched their numbers diminish through violence. They’ve seen so much of their culture stripped away.

“And that’s why something as silly as a mascot, something as silly as calling yourself a warrior is important. Somebody just needs to stand up and say: ‘No! Stop!’ ”