One week ago, Dan Maloney was an anonymous name, but not face, in Champaign’s sea of students. He went to class, worked out, grabbed lunch with his girlfriend, and no one seemed to notice. His full color photograph appeared in print across the front of the News-Gazette, video of him aired on Champaign and Chicago newscasts, but never was his image accompanied by his name – only his notorious pseudonym.

That all changed in less than 48 hours last week, as the graduate student who had hid his other identity for half his college life suddenly became the name known across Illinois. For three years Maloney had already been Chief Illiniwek. But now, as word came Friday that the Board of Trustees would suspend the Chief performance, the world wanted to hear from the student charged with maintaining the tradition.

Tonight Maloney will don the Chief’s beaded buckskin and burst onto the Assembly Hall court for what is nearly certain to be the final performance by Illinois’ 80-year-old symbol.

Ever since the Illini gridders played Penn in 1926, a student dressed in American Indian-style garb has taken the field with the purpose of portraying the Chief. And since the Civil Rights Era began, a growing chorus has cried for Illiniwek’s end.

“Going into this last performance knowing an announcement has been made makes it that much more important,” Maloney said. “It makes it that much more meaningful.”

Countless activists on both sides of the table spent eight decades working toward this point.

For some, nearly a century was dedicated to creating, molding and defending a great symbol of University pride and Illinois heritage. For others, removing that icon seemed a challenge that, if successful, would strike a veritable blow for racial equality. Tonight Maloney becomes the embodiment of all for which they strove.

Crafting Illiniwek’s image

When he was promoted from assistant Chief in April 2006, Maloney took on the title of Chief Illiniwek XXXVI.

Illiniwek was the brainchild of an Eagle Scout from Urbana and his band director, who hoped to bring some pizzazz to the Marching Illini’s halftime show.

He was intended as a one-time act that would highlight Illinois athletics’ growing association with American Indians.

What they created instead would become an institution.

“It’s so much bigger, it’s so much more important,” Maloney said. “It’s such a part of the experience of going not only to a University of Illinois sporting event, but of going to the Unviersity of Illinois.”

The Chief got such a reaction at the first performance that within a few years he had become a staple of Illini gameday.

Over the next several seasons, the Chief would develop into a full-fledged traveling show, making appearances in polio wards and presidential inaugurations. Chief Illiniwek went to the Rose Bowl, the Grand Canyon and the nation’s capitol, never drawing a word of protest as he appeared, in full Sioux-style regalia, across campus and across the country.

“I represented Illinois on several very important occasions,” Ben Forsyth said in 2005. He portrayed Illiniwek in 1960-63, meeting Dwight Eisenhower and performing at the opening of Assembly Hall. “When you think of a scared little kid from Southern Illinois, it’s kind of funny.”

The steps Maloney will dance today are not the ones original Chief Lester Leutwiler first performed. Illiniwek started as a simple show of unity between the Illinois and Penn fan bases, meeting at the 50 yard line to smoke a peace pipe with a student dressed as William Penn.

The dance was incorporated over the next several seasons, as subsequent Chief portrayers attempted to recreate American Indian-style steps they had learned through a Boy Scout program. Later performers exaggerated those movements to increase visibility, but the dance went largely unchanged after the 1970s.

Illiniwek’s outfit originated at the same Boy Scout camp that spawned his dance, a product of Leutwiler’s imagination and training in Sioux regalia. When Leutwiler graduated and took his uniform with him, successor Weber Borchers worked to acquire a replacement piece.

Maloney’s feathered bonnet, adorned tunic and bone accessories are a hodge-podge of authentic Sioux regalia and intricate reproductions.

He wears turkey feathers in a headdress crafted by a Tolono man and laces a breastplate handmade by a former Chief over a tunic purchased from Sioux elder Frank Fools Crow.

When the last dance is done, the University may return the Fools Crow pieces to the late medicine man’s family, as has recently been requested.

“The request has been taken under advisement,” states the University’s Web site. “No decision has yet been made.”

Protesting the Chief

Rumblings that the Chief should be banned began halfway through his history. The Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, most noted for its work advancing rights of women and black Americans, also gave rise to an increased national awareness of the country’s indigenous communities.

History professor and anti-Chief activist Fred Hoxie said the growth of popular culture, a rise in vocal, well-educated American Indian activists and the country’s own increasing diversity combined to bring the mascot issue to the forefront.

Across America, colleges and high schools began shedding American Indian imagery in subsequent years. Stanford dropped its “Indians” nickname, Marquette discontinued its “Willie Wampum” mascot, Oklahoma’s “Little Red” was put in the past. But little rumble was raised over Chief Illiniwek, largely because his regalia seemed so authentic and his performance so un-mascot like that he had little in common with the other images.

When Frank Fools Crow came to campus to present the regalia he sold Illinois in 1983, he told the school it was not quite authentic for the Chief to dance in a headdress. But it was a rare comment concerning Illiniwek’s inauthenticity.

“To wear a headdress you have to be humble, straight,” Joe America Horse, who traveled to Champaign with Fools Crow, said in 2004. “I do admit that it’s out of the ordinary. It’s novelty, comical.”

By 1989 the time was ripe for a full-out fight against Illiniwek. Tom Livingston, the Chief portrayer at the time, was giving a presentation about the symbol when one woman stepped forward to question his claims of authenticity and honor.

“It was very hard for the Chief person to say he represents ‘Indianness’ when he was speaking to (an American Indian),” Hoxie said.

Charlene Teters was a graduate student in the art department in the late 1980s, but since then her name has become synonymous with the founding of anti-Chief activity. Teters was a member of the Spokane tribe, and began protesting solo outside Assembly Hall and Memorial Stadium.

“I think it was very important over the history of this controversy that the concerns were raised and articulated by Native American people,” Hoxie said, “by people who were part of a distinct community that could not be ignored. She did that.”

Teters’ tenure at Illinois ended, but the battle she started continued to blaze. Groups like I-Resist and the Progressive Resource/Action Cooperative began actively campaigning against the Chief. Around them, Chief support organizations like Student for Chief Illiniwek and the Honor the Chief Society formed to counter claims of racism with insistence that the Chief’s purpose was education and encouragement.

Campus seemed set for a final Chief decision in 2000, when the Board of Trustees called for a hearing now known as the Chief Illiniwek Dialogue.

Some in Champaign became hopeful that a middle ground could be reached. But in March 2002, following a lengthy discourse, trustee Roger Plummer issued that long awaited announcement: no compromise was likely.

“I spoke at the Dialogue in 2000, and even then I said I didn’t think we could find a compromise,” said Mike Mondelli, who was the assistant Chief in 1999-2001. “I still believe now if we were to come up with some compromise you couldn’t get both pro- and anti-Chief groups happy.”

In spite of Plummer’s misgivings, the Board would later settle on a set of guidelines for reaching what it called the “Consensus Resolution” by which all parties would be pacified. When the NCAA weighed in on Aug. 5, 2005, Chief Illiniwek’s retirement seemed imminent.

“Personally I’d been feeling it was just a matter of time,” Mondelli said.

Looking forward

Maloney says he plans to be at Assembly Hall early tonight. He wants enough time to run through his regular routine, to greet everyone from security guards to season ticket holders who have always supported the tradition, to soak in what is probably his, and Illiniwek’s, final dance.

He and assistant Chief Logan Ponce say they will both be at Thursday’s women’s basketball game, the first without Chief Illiniwek. Basketball Band members do not know if they will perform the Three-In-One, the soundtrack to each Illiniwek dance, without the Chief on the floor. And the University says it has not yet discussed replacing Illiniwek or selecting a mascot.

Maloney hesitates to say this will be the Chief’s last hurrah; he told a rally of supporters Monday that “this isn’t over until the first football game in September.” He says he and Ponce will likely pursue their pending lawsuit against the University and NCAA, they will continue to fight for the tradition in which they have invested so much of themselves.

“It feels like a huge chunk of my past, of my experience on this earth, is disappearing. It’s very disheartening,” Maloney said. “It’s such a humbling experience. It reminds you that no matter what you can achieve on this earth, there are things that exist that are above you. They transcend age. They transcend the brief time we spend on this earth.”