Taking Action to Abandon Offensive American Indian Mascots Often Mired in Controversy: For eight decades, students at Southeast Missouri State University, a mid-sized college located on the banks of the Mississippi River in rural, conservative Cape Girardeau, had proudly rooted for its sports teams, the Indians. The old-timers said the name was adopted in the mid-1920s to honor the legacy of American Indians and their warrior traditions. The teams had an Indian mascot. There was an Indian logo. And the entrance to Houck Stadium, the university’s football arena on the edge of campus, was dominated by an imposing, 30-foot-tall statue of an American Indian man.
Then as the new millennium dawned, the university’s administration decided that maybe the use of an American Indian symbol wasn’t so cool any more. In 2003 the university set up a committee to study the possibility of a name change. The committee was short-lived.
