Name-a-Day Calendar, May 24: North Dakota Fighting Hawks

Page 199 of 365

Chosen in: 2015

Chosen by: A community-wide vote

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The University of North Dakota was established in 1883 and began playing football in 1894. The team was originally nicknamed the Flickertails, another name for the Richardson’s ground squirrels found all over the state.

By the late 1920s, this nickname had gained notoriety in the community for being too tame. Like, imagine going to a school whose mascot is a ground squirrel. Yikes!

In 1930, a student wrote a letter to the editor of the Dakota Student newspaper suggesting that the team instead be nicknamed the Fighting Sioux (or perhaps just the Sioux). It’s worth noting that this student’s original rationale was not racist; it was just a case of good old-fashioned rivalry. By this time, the nearby North Dakota Agricultural College (which we know today as North Dakota State University) had already adopted “Bison” as their sporting nickname. The Sioux Native Americans conquered the bison, so the student thought this would be a good way to establish dominance.

This letter sparked a ton of debate on whether the Sioux Native American was a suitable mascot, but the supporters won out. In fall 1930, the Athletic Board officially nicknamed the school’s sports teams the Fighting Sioux.

Originally, this went over without issue, even with the state’s two Sioux tribes: the Spirit Lake Tribe and the Standing Rock Tribe. In fact, in 1969, elders of the Standing Rock Tribe and at least one delegate from the Spirit Lake tribe convened on the University of North Dakota campus for a pipe ceremony that essentially gave the school their blessing to continue using the nickname in perpetuity.

However, racist intentions or not, the eventual result of this nickname was—you guessed it—racism. Most of it was by the university’s own Greek life communities. The worst offense came at Homecoming 1972, when a fraternity crafted an ice sculpture of a topless Native American woman and added a sign that pointed to her breast and said “Lick em Sioux”. One Native American student had enough and began chopping the sculpture with an ax, which led to a brawl between the fraternity and a group of Native American students. Just one person—the ax-wielder—was arrested in this kerfuffle, though university president Thomas J. Clifford would later drop the charges and end the practice of crafting ice sculptures for Homecoming.

Just three years after local Native Americans gave the school their blessing to use the Fighting Sioux nickname, their trust was betrayed rather badly. The Standing Rock Tribe especially disliked this, and many of its members began to lead efforts to change the nickname. This movement grew as racist incidents continued to pile up, but despite the clamors growing louder and louder, the nickname persisted into the 21st century. A 1999 North Dakota House of Representatives bill that would have forced the university to change the nickname died in committee, and in 2000, several Native American organizations at the university put out a statement opposing the nickname but nothing came of it.

Of course, nothing was ever going to last beyond 2005, when the NCAA ruled that schools using unsanctioned Native American nicknames and imagery would not be allowed to host postseason championships or use their nicknames/imagery in any postseason play at any location. Except it did last beyond 2005. Because the University of North Dakota sued the NCAA.

This lawsuit was settled out of court in 2007 in an agreement that gave the university three years to get official support from the state’s two Sioux tribes—the Spirit Lake Tribe and the Standing Rock Tribe—to keep the nickname. After all, sanctioned Native American nicknames and imagery were (and are) allowed.

On May 14, 2009, the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education gave the university until October 1 of that year to gain the required approval, otherwise the Fighting Sioux nickname and logo would be retired. The Spirit Lake Tribe voted nearly two-to-one in favor of keeping the nickname, but the Standing Rock Tribe was always considered the harder of the two to convince, as they had led the movement to change the nickname for decades. And convinced they were not: their tribal council didn’t even put it to a vote, making an executive decision that the nickname had to go. To drive the point home even further, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, another North Dakota tribe unaffiliated with the Sioux, also publicly voiced their opposition to the nickname.

On April 8, 2010, the Board announced that the nickname and logo would be retired at the end of the 2010-11 school year, but then, on March 11, 2011, the North Dakota Senate bafflingly voted almost two-to-one to retain the nickname and Governor Jack Dalrymple signed the bill. The NCAA basically said, “no, you can’t do that”, and a special session of North Dakota’s legislature in November 2011 repealed the law.

On November 1, 2011, the Spirit Lake Tribe went to bat for the university and sued the NCAA, stating (among other things) that the sanctions against the University of North Dakota would violate the sanctity of the pipe ceremony the two tribes held on campus in 1969. They also asked for $10 million, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide where their hearts really were. A federal judge threw out this lawsuit in May 2012 because the ceremony’s terms were vague and not legally binding to begin with.

Down to the last card in their deck, the nickname’s supporters started a petition to put the continued usage of the nickname up to a statewide vote. This petition got 17,213 signatures, which is a decent amount if you account for North Dakota’s low population. The university announced on February 8, 2012, that a vote would come that June. The NCAA warned voters of the negative consequences of retaining the nickname in March and University of North Dakota president Robert Kelley did the same in April.

Then came the vote, in which…we didn’t actually find out how many people truly wanted the nickname to stay. I can report the result: 67% of voters voted against keeping it. But the ballot itself was confusing: a “yes” vote was a vote against keeping the nickname (and in favor of upholding the original November 2011 special session repeal), while a “no” vote was a vote in favor of retaining it. Regardless of how many people actually wanted the nickname to stay, the result of the vote was that it didn’t.

After the vote, the Board of Higher Education decided that the search for a new nickname would be a long and thoughtful process, and that the decision would come no sooner than 2015. This process resulted in five names being sent to a vote of 82,000 community members in October 2015: Fighting Hawks, Nodaks, North Stars, Roughriders, and Sundogs. The vote required a majority winner, so runoffs would be held if no one name earned 50+% of the vote. That’s exactly what happened, as the first vote resulted in a runoff between Nodaks, Roughriders, and Fighting Hawks, then a second runoff between Roughriders and Fighting Hawks.

On November 18, 2015, Robert Kelley announced that “Fighting Hawks” won the second runoff with 57% of the vote and that it would be the university’s new nickname, effective immediately. And nobody ever called North Dakota’s teams the Fighting Sioux again.

If you’d like to learn more about the complicated history of the Fighting Sioux nickname and read about more of the racist incidents that spawned the movement to change it, I highly recommend this piece by North Dakota alumnus Michael Saunders, written before the “Fighting Hawks” were a twinkle in anybody’s eye.

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