Chief Illiniwek danced his last dance on Feb. 21 but that doesn’t mean his image will be completely erased from campus by the time classes resume this fall.

The Chief logo – a round image of an American Indian wearing face paint, a bone breastplate and a feather headdress – will likely remain on the walls of local bars and restaurants, T-shirts worn by students and fans at sporting events and as decals in the rear windows of cars around Champaign. So too, will the anti-Chief logo that reads “Racist stereotypes dehumanize” and bumper stickers declaring “anti-Chief, anti-racism.”

For 80 years, Illinois fans watched the Chief dance at home football, basketball and volleyball games. But after a year-long war of words with the NCAA, the 2007-08 academic year will mark the first time since 1926 that Illiniwek will not provide fans with halftime entertainment.

“This step is in the best interest of the University and is consistent with the Board’s previously stated goal of concluding this year its consensus process regarding Chief Illiniwek,” Board of Trustees Chairman Lawrence Eppley said the day he announced the Chief’s retirement.

Illiniwek was the brainchild of a band director and an engineering student who had studied American Indian traditions via the Boy Scouts of America. Lester Leutwiler, the first student to perform as the Chief, applied knowledge he had learned as an Eagle Scout when crafting the Chief’s signature steps and outfit.

Leutwiler’s initial appearance came at halftime of a football game against the University of Pennsylvania, where the “Chief” met “William Penn” at the 50-yard line to smoke a symbolic peace pipe. The show was well received, and over the next several years Leutwiler and his successors developed a three-to-four minute dance routine featuring Chief Illiniwek.

“It’s a really moving experience to be able lead so many people in singing the Alma Mater,” former Chief Kyle Cline said in 2005, “which is a total celebration of their connection to the University of Illinois and the state of Illinois and their heritage here.”

Illiniwek continued to dance with little opposition for the next 60 years, but in the late 1980s a graduate student named Charlene Teters, a member of the Spokane Tribe, began protesting outside Illinois basketball games at the Assembly Hall. Teters’ complaints sparked a surge in anti-Chief activity, and by the mid-1990s activists as well as some students and community members were calling for the end of the Chief tradition. To many of these people, the performance perpetuated a stereotype of American Indian cultures as warlike and single-faceted. To encourage a more realistic understanding of American Indian tribes and their traditions, Chief opponents said, performances like Illiniwek’s needed to end.

“(Illiniwek) is very offensive to me and to other Native Americans,” Teters said in 1989, “which you and the University continue to disregard.”

Throughout the 1990s the University heard concerns from both pro-Chief and anti-Chief people, and by 2004 the Board of Trustees established a “consensus resolution,” which it said meant University officials would consider both sides when deciding what to do about the Chief.

But in 2005, the NCAA stepped in. The NCAA oversees intercollegiate athletics, and after repeated complaints about the American Indian imagery at several schools, the body decided that member institutions with American Indian-based mascots, logos or nicknames it considered “hostile and abusive” would not be allowed to host postseason competitions. Those schools would also not be allowed to display their American Indian imagery when competing at postseason events at other sites.

This decision had immediate negative ramifications for Illinois athletic programs, which regularly benefited from the home-field advantage of hosting postseason games and meets. The University spent nearly a year appealing the NCAA policy, but ultimately lost all petitions.

“The NCAA has not mandated that any university change its mascots or nicknames,” NCAA spokesman Bob Williams told the Daily Illini in February. “But we do feel that we have a right and a responsibility to ensure that our championships occur in an environment that is free of racial stereotyping and where all our fans and student-athletes feel safe.”

On Feb. 16, Board of Trustees President Larry Eppley announced that the Chief would be done dancing after the last home men’s basketball game of the season. Chief Illiniwek merchandise will still be sold through the end of 2007, although the University stopped licensing the Chief logo in the spring. Once the stuff on the shelves is gone, it will be gone for good.

But after 80 years as an Illini tradition, it is highly likely that the Chief image and debate will remain on campus long after the last dance.

“The Chief Illiniwek tradition inspired and thrilled members of the University of Illinois community for 80 years,” Eppley said in a press release announcing the Chief’s retirement. “It was created, carried on, and enjoyed by people with great respect for tradition, and we appreciate their dedication and commitment. It will be important now to ensure the accurate recounting and safekeeping of the tradition as an integral part of the history of the University.”