By BRIDGETTE FOX
Capitol News Illinois
bfox@capitolnewsillinois.com
SPRINGFIELD – Illinois’ legislative session concluded without passage of a Native American K-12 school mascot ban, but another issue sought by Natives will make its way to the governor.
Despite desire from Native Americans in Illinois, the ban on Native imagery for mascots in K-12 schools stalled in the Senate after it made its way out of the House.
House Bill 1237’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Suzy Glowiak Hilton, D-Western Springs, said after the bill missed a deadline earlier this session, she was still gathering a consensus from other legislators. But she said many of the concerns she heard about the measure stemmed from the costs associated with schools changing mascots.
“We will continue conversations about it and see what we can do with helping them pass it,” Glowiak Hilton said when the bill missed its mid-May deadline.
GLOWIAK HILTON PHOTO
Native American advocates told Capitol News Illinois earlier this year about the importance of improving Native imagery.
Read more: ‘Our identity has been frozen in time’: How Native American advocates are influencing Springfield
“Our identity has been frozen in time, and it’s going to stay frozen in time as long as we’re portrayed as mascots and things of the past,” said Matt Beaudet, a citizen of the Montauk Tribe of Indians who was in Springfield to advocate for the bill’s passage.
Andrew Johnson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and executive director of the Native American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois, said how natives are often portrayed as mascots in school logos has a detrimental effect of “costuming.”
“It really is not a sense of honor there,” he said. “It is not a sense of history. In fact, it’s a perversion of history to think that these mascots are maintaining any kind of that memory of Native people.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
Our initial reporting on Native American issues at the Capitol was part of the Healing Illinois 2025 Reporting Project, “Healing Through Narrative Change: Untold Stories,” made possible by a grant from Healing Illinois, an initiative of the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Field Foundation of Illinois that seeks to advance racial healing through storytelling and community collaborations.