Name-a-Day Calendar, January 8: Dartmouth Big Green
Page 63 of 365
Chosen in: 1974
Chosen by: No one, officially
Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 with the stated goal of educating Native Americans on how English colonials lived their lives. This became important about 150 years later; in the 1920s, sportswriters began referring to Dartmouth’s teams — which had gone without a consistent nickname for over half a century — as the Indians, paying homage to the college’s roots.
This nickname gained popular acceptance, but Dartmouth never officially adopted it; the school’s teams were also sometimes known as the “Green” or “Big Green” owing to the school’s primary color, or the “Hanoverians” on account of the school being located in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In 1971, after about 50 years of “Indians” being Dartmouth’s most prominent athletic nickname, a contingent of the school’s Native American students officially declared that “various traditions and symbols used by the Dartmouth Community are based upon insensitivity to the culture of Native American Peoples”, largely referring to usage of the nickname and the culture surrounding it. Over the next few years, Dartmouth slowly phased Native American imagery and traditions out of use, and in 1974, the Board of Trustees officially kiboshed them.
The next most common athletic nickname at the time, and the one that took over by default, was “Big Green”, which of course is still in use today. Dartmouth insists they’ve never officially adopted this nickname either. You can say that, but when all of your official releases refer to the team as the Big Green, your Twitter hashtag is #GoBigGreen, and the header of your athletics website looks like this…
…it’s safe to say you endorse it to a pretty big degree.
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