Name-a-Day Calendar, August 3: Southeast Missouri Redhawks

Page 270 of 365

Chosen in: 2004 (took effect in 2005)

Chosen by: The booster club

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The Southeast Missouri State Normal School was established in 1873. Their football team first took the field in 1904, originally known as the Normals because of the school's focus.

When they switched their name to Southeast Missouri State Teachers College in 1919,¹ they abandoned the "Normals" nickname. There was no immediate replacement, but Native American imagery was already prominent in the Sagamore yearbook, so it gradually seeped into the school’s sporting identity, and the teams became known as the Indians within a half-decade or so. This eventually spawned a human-depicted Native American mascot, Big Chief Sagamore.

When women’s sports gained a foothold at the school in the early 1970s, they debuted a woman mascot to match, naming her Princess Otahki in remembrance of a real-life Cherokee woman who died on the Trail of Tears just a few miles north of the school’s Cape Girardeau campus. They evidently believed this woman to have been a real Cherokee princess, but such a title never existed in Cherokee culture. In fact, the woman wasn’t even named Otahki; her actual name was Nancy Bushyhead Walker Hildebrand and local white people just nicknamed her Otahki. Southeast Missouri, either oblivious that Otahki’s story was fabricated or completely disinterested in that fact, went as far as officially nicknaming their women’s teams the Otahkians.

About a decade later, local Native Americans began to seriously push Southeast Missouri to stop using their likeness as a mascot. In response, the university disallowed Big Chief Sagamore and Princess Otahki from representing them at sporting events, but still allowed them to exist and kept the “Indians” and “Otahkians” nicknames for their teams. The bar was on the floor.

The school would test run a couple other mascots to no avail. 1986 saw the arrival of SEMO Red, who was just some dude in a costume with red hair; he lasted about two years. In 1989, they tried a costumed thunderbird; it didn’t even survive the season. After that, they decided that they’d just go without a mascot for the time being.

Eventually, though, that wasn’t enough. The “Indians” and “Otahkians” nicknames would have to go. The university wanted to do this—they had for a while—but they were facing threats from prominent boosters to withdraw monetary support if the nickname was changed. So Southeast Missouri came up with a compromise: they’d change the nickname, but they’d allow the booster club to take the lead in picking what the new identity would be.

This process began in 2002, but it didn’t fully get underway until July 2003, when the school’s National Alumni Council passed a motion in support of dropping the “Indians” and “Otahkians” nicknames. After this, the boosters shuffled through several proposals for new nicknames, including Red Birds, Red Wolves, and Sentinels, but they couldn’t really get behind any of them. Then someone suggested “Redhawks” and it all clicked.

The school’s Board of Regents voted to officially retire the Native American nicknames and imagery on July 1, 2004, but they’d wait to announce the school’s new identity until a mascot was ready to debut. That mascot was costumed redbird Rowdy the Redhawk, who first flapped his wings on January 22, 2005. Good thing, too; the NCAA would officially ban Native American nicknames and imagery about six months later.

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1. Became Southeast Missouri State College in 1946 and Southeast Missouri State University in 1973