An online White House petition to bring back Chief Illiniwek collected more than 3,000 signatures before moderators took it down Wednesday.
The petition, started by Matthew Wilkins, junior in LAS, was originally posted Tuesday.
“When we lost the Chief, we lost a part of us,” he said.
Wilkins said he had wanted “to make a petition that’s kind of outlandish and worthwhile.”
The next day, however, Wilkins received an email from the moderator of the website stating that the petition had been taken down.
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“The email wasn’t very descriptive. (It said) the petition didn’t really meet the goals of the website,” Wilkins said.
According to the email, the petition was “outside the scope of the We the People” project, a website that hosts petitions to the White House.
Robert Warrior, director of American Indian studies, did not comment but referred The Daily Illini to the department’s statement online.
The site makes clear that the department and the Native American Cultural House “support the March 2007 decision by the University of Illinois board of trustees to retire the University’s former mascot in name, performance, and symbol.”
The statement goes on to highlight the need to “critique and set aside images that confine the perception of an entire people to a limited and narrow existence.”
Ilya can be reached at [email protected].
