The Mascot Is Fiction. The War Is Real.

It’s been a disappointing season for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign men’s basketball team, but that doesn’t make the last home game of the season any less of an event. Fans stream into the university’s State Farm Center, their traffic-cone-orange shirts and jackets the only splash of color under a slate-gray February sky.

The glum weather and a tough matchup against Purdue University haven’t dampened their spirits. As they walk into the arena, they flash their shirts beneath their coats and point to their hats. Much of their gear is decorated with an insignia: a circle with the face of a man within in a circle of feathers. It’s Chief Illiniwek, which was, for the better part of a century, the official face of the university.

The chief, one of dozens of Native American characters that once served as college mascots, came into the world as a performer during a halftime show at a 1926 football game. The insignia, which became ubiquitous on the campus, followed. For decades it aroused little controversy, but in 2007 — after a sea change in national attitudes toward American Indian mascots, a wave of student activism, and pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association — the university finally decided it was time to end Illiniwek’s reign. No longer would a human chief perform at games. No longer would an iconic one act as the university logo.

When Illinois’s trustees retired Illiniwek, they hoped they were closing a chapter of university history that, in the eyes of many, had aged poorly. Retiring a mascot is easy enough. But eradicating one is much more difficult.

The chief, it turns out, is on the minds of many fans tonight. A group that has continued to praise the mascot has organized an effort to get Illini fans to wear their old Chief Illiniwek gear to the game. Word has it that someone dressed up as the chief might even make an appearance. In response, counterprotesters have gathered outside the stadium, decrying the chief as an example of cultural appropriation and of racism directed at Native Americans.

Tonight’s game is the latest skirmish in a war that has flared repeatedly on campus, even since the retirement. “It still persists,” says Robert Jones, chancellor since 2016. “Really, perhaps more so than any other time in the last 10 years, it has become a divisive issue that has in many ways pulled this otherwise outstanding, vital academic community apart.”

It’s not just about the mascot, of course; it’s about what people want the university to represent. Institutions like Illinois are bound together by a heady mix of loyalty, pride, and nostalgia, which draws in students and keeps alumni coming back. It’s part of what keeps the lights on. To many, Illiniwek was a relic; to many others, it was the symbol that evoked much of that passion.

But Illiniwek’s detractors and supporters alike will tell you that there’s another story, one that goes beyond just the strength of a symbol. They’re irritated, they say, with a university that wanted a problem to go away but spent more than a decade hoping half-measures would solve it. Now, it seems, nearly everyone has dug in. And with college campuses now the staging grounds for broader cultural battles over history, inclusion, and social justice, the issue may be harder than ever for Illinois to resolve.

About an hour before tipoff, the protest outside the arena has swelled to dozens of chanting students and staff members. Many bear signs: New Mascot Now. Beware of Racism. Reporters and photographers circle the group.

“I wonder if Jay Rosenstein is going to show up,” one passer-by muses.

As it turns out, Rosenstein is standing just a few feet away, doing what he always does: documenting the scene.

For more than two decades, Rosenstein, a professor of media and cinema studies, has been leading the charge against Chief Illiniwek, usually with a camera in hand. When he arrived on campus as an undergraduate, in 1978, he wasn’t primed for activism. He held season tickets for Illinois basketball and football, and it didn’t strike him as unusual to see a “dancing Indian” at halftime. Opposition to Illiniwek barely existed, and professional sports teams, like the Washington Redskins and the nearby Chicago Blackhawks, used Native American mascots.

But some years later, Rosenstein, who was taking a nondegree course in film, found himself watching a lecture at the local YMCA. Native American faculty and staff members and students were explaining why they found the image of Chief Illiniwek offensive. Among them was Charlene Teters.

Teters, a member of the Spokane tribe, in Washington State, was a painter working toward an M.F.A. at the university. She had taken to standing outside Illini games in an act of lonely protest.

She wasn’t bombastic, Rosenstein remembers. She spoke honestly about what it meant to her to see the chief, day in and day out. Rosenstein said his own Jewish background made it easy for him to understand how negative stereotypes can affect a culture. If only more people could hear her story, he thought, they would change their minds.

So Rosenstein took it upon himself to tell that story. In 1997 he released a documentary called In Whose Honor? In an opening scene, a student stands on the arena floor, dressed as Chief Illiniwek, in a buckskin suit and a near-body-length headdress adorned with feathers. He jumps suddenly in the air and dances along the court as the crowd screams.

That shot is interspersed with a filmed interview with Teters. On the verge of tears, she explains her children’s reaction when they first saw Chief Illiniwek perform at a game. “I saw my daughter try to become invisible,” she says. “And my son tried to laugh. And with me, it’s a sadness that still won’t leave me.”

At the time, that was an argument rarely heard on campus. The war over Illiniwek hadn’t reached the current level, but Rosenstein still felt that he’d created something that was going to push the community’s buttons. In an essay last year for Huffington Post, he recalls that on the day the documentary was set to air on public television, he took his wife and dog to a hotel a few block away from their home, just in case an Illiniwek supporter might seek him out.

The documentary went on to turn Teters into a minor star and galvanize an already-growing movement against Native American mascots. The movement had scored victories starting in the early 1970s, when Stanford University and Dartmouth College eliminated their mascots. Soon more and more mascots were dropping. In 2005 the NCAA set an ultimatum: Colleges that refused to abandon “hostile and abusive” symbols would be prohibited from postseason play.

That tipped the scales. Nearly two years later, when Illinois bent to the association’s will, Rosenstein called it “a great day.” Activists cited In Whose Honor? as a watershed for the movement.

“I look at it now and think, I would never do anything like that now, so I am glad I was young and naïve,” Rosenstein says. “It’s still the most significant thing I have ever done in my life, and, quite frankly, I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll ever top that.”

But these days, when the talk in and around Urbana-Champaign is about Rosenstein, it isn’t about the film he considers his legacy. It’s about what the professor did — or didn’t do — in a State Farm Center bathroom in January.

Rosenstein was sitting at home when a friend gave him a tip: There was talk that Omar Cruz, a student known to show up to basketball games dressed in Chief Illiniwek garb, might be making an appearance at the arena that night.

Rosenstein had his antennae up. Supporters of Illiniwek periodically made game-day appearances as the chief, and the professor had long harbored suspicions that some arena staff members were abetting them. He rushed to the scene with his phone. If he could capture an act of collusion on the record, he thought, it would show that the university had violated its agreement with the NCAA to drop its official use of the symbol. (The university denies any allegations of collusion.)

At the arena, he says, he overheard someone he took to be a staff member talking about the chief. The staff member walked into the men’s room.

Rosenstein rushed in behind. That’s where he encountered Ivan Dozier. The 27-year-old alumnus is a board member of the Honor the Chief Society, which is described as “the leading organization in preserving the Chief tradition.” It’s one of a number of overlapping groups — there’s also the Council of Chiefs, Students for Chief Illiniwek, and Facebook groups like Bring Back Chief Illiniwek — dedicated to restoring or celebrating the longtime mascot.

What happened in the men’s room is the source of messy debate. Rosenstein says that he was acting as a journalist, and that he never filmed anyone who was undressed. Dozier initially wrote on Facebook that Rosenstein had pointed the camera at him after he had finished using the urinal and that the professor was “literally trying to catch me with my pants down.” He later told The News-Gazette, in Champaign, that he had spotted Rosenstein at the sink and wasn’t sure how long he had been filming.

The campus police detained Rosenstein. Recording in a public bathroom was unlawful, they told him. The professor spent a night in jail, but no charges were filed, and he was released the next day.

Rosenstein still lives in the shadow of the arrest. His mug shot appeared in the local paper. The university suspended him for nearly a month, reinstating him shortly before the Purdue game. It’s not clear when he’ll return to the classroom. For the time being, he’s doing administrative work.

The bathroom saga was picked up by Campus Reform, a national conservative website. Rosenstein’s inbox filled up with hate mail: Jay, guessing you molest little boys too, are you registered as a sex offender?? Creepy dude.

The university, meanwhile, found itself slammed on all sides. One supporter of Chief Illiniwek started a petition that criticized the university for placing Rosenstein on paid leave and demanded that he be fired. The American Association of University Professors told the university that it may have “violated Rosenstein’s right to academic due process.” People called anew on the institution to do something — anything — about a symbol that seemed to inspire and infuriate.

By the time of the NCAA’s ultimatum, University of Illinois trustees were well aware of the community’s attachment to the fictional Indian. Many probably felt it themselves.

Illiniwek’s beginnings were humble: In 1926, Lester Leutwiler, a local high-school student, dressed up as a Native American for a halftime performance in a game against the University of Pennsylvania. Leutwiler and another Illinois student — dressed as Benjamin Franklin, a founding father of Penn — shared a peace pipe, according to Jennifer Guiliano’s book Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America. It was an instant hit.

That performance developed into a character that was a historical mishmash. Illiniwek’s appearance, costume, and dance combined the histories and cultural practices of several tribes, including the Lakota and the Sioux, but not the woodland Indians who had lived in Illinois.

In a state that was only dimly aware of its own displaced Native American roots, the symbol gained resonance over the years as a way of honoring Illinois’s lost confederation of tribes. (The word “Illiniwek” was derived from a phrase meaning “complete human being” in Algonquin, a dialect of Illinois’s Native Americans.) “The chief keeps the memory of the people of a great Native American tribe alive for thousands of Illinoisans who otherwise would know little or nothing of them,” said one trustee in 1990, when the board passed a resolution that recognized but dismissed complaints about Illiniwek.

Maybe that’s why the trustees appeared conflicted, even grudging, about replacing Illiniwek. From the get-go, the university tried to push back against the NCAA’s mandate. It successfully argued that its nickname, the Fighting Illini, was not hostile. (The nickname remains in use.) It made the same argument in an attempt to keep Illiniwek alive, but in that case the association rejected the university’s appeal. In 2006 the men’s tennis team and women’s soccer team were deemed ineligible to host tournaments because of the mascot.

Being locked out of postseason play is a significant penalty, and the pressure built. In its March 2007 resolution sealing the retirement, the board noted that many opponents of Illiniwek, including Native Americans, found the symbol “disrespectful of their heritage.” But it avoided the appearance of endorsing that view. In its next paragraph, the resolution added that many others believed the symbol was an “honorable representation of the State’s Native American heritage and virtues they respect.”

In an FAQ guide to the decision, the university appeared to speak directly to the concerns of those believers. “Did the university cave to the NCAA?” read one question. No, the guide said. The university had made an “exhaustive appeal” to keep Illiniwek.

Like other institutions that tried to arrange a graceful exit for their mascots, Illinois arranged a “last dance” — a ritual at a men’s basketball game to mark the end of the Illiniwek era. Some institutions used those ceremonies as branding exercises to introduce new icons: The University of Louisiana at Monroe, for example, sent off its Indian mascot and brought in the Warhawk. At Illinois, though, there was no new mascot, no new nickname for the teams. The Illiniwek insignia was replaced with a large, orange letter “I.”

Carol Spindel, a lecturer in the English department who wrote a book on the history of Illiniwek, Dancing at Halftime, points to that moment as a missed opportunity. Why, she asks, didn’t the university take the chance to make Illiniwek “uncool”? Why not create an orientation video explaining that the university no longer used Native imagery, or that tribes at the local and national level had asked people to stop buying clothes adorned with it?

“When you just don’t deal with something, it just periodically bubbles back up,” says Spindel. “When you push it under the carpet, it makes this hump, and it festers.”

The institution’s next decision on Illiniwek sent an even muddier message. In October 2007, just a day before the homecoming parade, then-chancellor Richard Herman reversed an earlier decision and allowed floats in the parade to feature the image of Illiniwek. In doing so, he cited the university’s commitment to “free speech and free expression.” On parade day, thousands of people, many wearing Illiniwek gear, showed up. No one protested.

In fact, the retirement of Chief Illiniwek seemed to do little to change the way the public perceived the mascot. In 2004, before Chief Illiniwek’s last dance, the student government held a nonbinding referendum to gauge interest in replacing Illiniwek. Sixty-nine percent of the voters wanted to keep the chief. In 2008, after his retirement, another referendum was held. Eighty percent of voters wanted to bring the chief back.

Ivan Dozier first felt the mascot’s magnetism when he was in grade school and his father, an Illinois alumnus, took him to his first Illini football game. He recalls Chief Illiniwek making his triumphant entrance, the audience clapping and cheering.

“There was no one laughing at it, there was no one mocking it,” he says. “The reaction was 100 percent positive. These people loved that. And that was just something I realized had a lot of potential to make people happy and to make a positive impact in that stadium.”

Dozier never forgot the buzz that the mascot had generated. At a women’s volleyball game about three years after the chief’s retirement, Dozier, then an undergraduate, first appeared in buckskin, headdress, and face paint. The university might have been done with the mascot, but he didn’t have to be. For the next five years, defying the university’s attempt to move on, he played the role of Illiniwek at football and basketball games.

If In Whose Honor? was an act of protest against the university’s tolerance of Illiniwek, Dozier’s years in costume were an outcry against the institution’s reversal of course. Wearing Illiniwek gear, for many, now came with an element of protest: You may have forgotten the chief, they told the university, but don’t try to make us forget, too.

Spend enough time with Dozier, and he’ll make sure you understand the case for Illiniwek, the case he wishes the university would make. First: The chief is not a mascot but a symbol. A mascot, he says, is a larger-than-life presence, often meant to inspire laughs. A symbol is something — or someone — a community honors. Like Chief Illiniwek.

Second: Not all imagery featuring Native Americans is created equal. “A Chief Illiniwek does not equal a Chief Osceola does not equal a Chief Wahoo,” Dozier says, citing the mascots of Florida State University and the Cleveland Indians. Florida State uses its mascot, and the Seminoles nickname, with the blessing of a local tribe. Cleveland announced this year that it would retire Chief Wahoo, a generic logo widely seen as a racist caricature.

Chief Illiniwek might not represent Illinois tribes, Dozier says, but it gets people “wanting to learn more.”

In 2009 the Honor the Chief Society, the group to which Dozier now belongs, tried to seize control of Illiniwek. The society filed a claim with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, arguing that the university wasn’t using the image anymore and so had no right to it.

Illinois retains the trademark on Illiniwek so it can clamp down on unauthorized use of the name and the symbol. The university and the society settled their fight in 2013. Their agreement barred the group from calling anyone “Chief Illiniwek” or from using the name in performances. But it permitted the group to host some Illiniwek-related performances and to talk of “honoring the Chief,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

For opponents of Illiniwek, there was a grim irony in the university’s strategy. To keep the trademark active, the institution must allow the sale of some images of Illiniwek. Illinois partners with a company known as College Vault to sell a few T-shirts with the logo, which it has branded as “retro.”

Robin Kaler, a university spokeswoman, said Illinois generally earns less than $10,000 annually on such sales and makes a point to sell the shirts only online. Still, critics of Illiniwek say they’re upset to see the institution profiting from a logo it has disavowed.

That’s the paradox of Illiniwek. Officially the chief is nowhere. In reality he is still everywhere.

Take a walk down to a local bar, Legends Bar and Grill, and you’ll find a replica of his costume encased in a glass display. Next to it is a list of all the people who have donned the regalia officially. A five-minute walk away at another bar, Kam’s, a portrait of Chief Illiniwek graces a wall in a patio area. Tipsy students take photos next to it. Inside hangs a photo of someone dressed as Illiniwek, a cartoonish penis scrawled on it. In a campus cemetery, you’ll find the chief engraved on a stone.

Outside the Purdue game, as tipoff approaches, a fine mist of rain has thickened. Raneem Shamseldin, the student-government president, is among the protesters. A fellow protester hands out small cards outlining the arguments against Chief Illiniwek. Few people take them.

Shamseldin’s Illiniwek awakening is a 21st-century echo of Rosenstein’s. She arrived at the university without strong feelings about the symbol. But when she started spending time at the campus’s Native American cultural center — it was the free printing that drew her in — she heard the criticisms of Illiniwek: that the mascot dehumanizes Native Americans.

Like Rosenstein, Shamseldin felt she understood. Her family came to the United States from Sudan when she was 2 years old. In high school, she first encountered the racism she said she would experience again and again as a black woman who once wore a headscarf.

So last fall when heard complaints about the homecoming parade — the one that, since the chancellor’s 2007 decision, had allowed Illiniwek iconography — she pressed the student government into action. First it voted to boycott the event, she said; then it arranged a protest. At the parade, protesters briefly stopped a car carrying Chancellor Jones and his wife. No charges were filed, but supporters and critics of Illiniwek say the protest catalyzed the current wave of acrimony.

Since the parade, Shamseldin and the student government have kept the heat on the university. In late January, they raised a new issue: More than a decade after Illiniwek was said to have been retired as the face of the institution, many campus buildings were still adorned with posters and signs featuring the logo. The government passed a resolution calling on the university to take down any such imagery,

Such motions are often ignored after they’re passed. But this one caught administrators’ eyes. They told departments to remove the insignia from university facilities. Several posters came down. At the same time, Jones explained in a memo that the university has no control over employees’ own property or their personal space.

As Shamseldin tells it, the student government’s activism is intended to force a reckoning the university was never entirely willing to undertake of its own accord. “I think, 10 years in the past, they thought, ‘Oh, finally, we’re done with this, let’s move on and be jolly,’ " she says. “That wasn’t the case.”

Her own evolution on the issue, she says, is evidence that simply explaining the objections to Illiniwek — something the university has rarely done — still has the power to reshape the debate. “I just had never learned it before,” she says of the case against the mascot. “I think that’s where 99 percent of our student body is right now. If they wear it, it’s not because they’re huge fans. It’s because they don’t know necessarily that it’s incorrect.”

The student government’s latest tactic is a T-shirt exchange program: Bring in your old, fading Illiniwek gear and get a fresh — in all likelihood, orange — university shirt to replace it. In the program’s first week, 35 T-shirts were exchanged. The Illiniwek garb, Shamseldin said, may soon become blankets for the homeless.

In Robert Jones, Illiniwek’s opponents may have found a chancellor who is finally willing to say what they have been arguing for years: Illiniwek is offensive to Native American students and many others.

“You make sure your readers understand this,” he tells The Chronicle. “Put it in bold or italics if you want. Absolutely not: The chief is not coming back.”

A mascot is supposed to represent and unify an institution, Jones says, and the image of Illiniwek is doing the opposite. What’s more, he dismisses Illiniwek’s claims to represent the state’s Native American roots. “If it’s culturally inaccurate and the regalia is inaccurate and the dance is inaccurate, and if students tell you that it offends them, then how are you honoring their heritage and legacy?”

That talk, and some of Jones’s recent decisions — he recently discontinued the use of a drumbeat known as the “war chant” played by the band at football games — has convinced Illiniwek supporters like Dozier that the chancellor has picked a side, and that he’s trying to eliminate the use of Native American symbolism on campus.

But picking a side and setting a path forward are different matters, and the campus community remains torn on how to proceed.

Since the retirement of Illiniwek, student activists have demanded: Name a new mascot, something for people at the university to bond over. In 2016 the interim chancellor, Barbara Wilson, told the Tribune that she was poised to start the selection process. But she soon left to take on a role with the university system’s central administration, and a prolonged battle over higher-education funding became the top priority of the state’s public institutions. The mascot plan was put on hold.

Jones is the university’s fifth chancellor since Illiniwek’s retirement. Each turnover, Rosenstein says, essentially resets the process of grappling with the chief. For veterans of the Illiniwek wars, he says, the stop-and-starts are “exhausting.”

The chancellor says he understands the desire for a new symbol, but he warns that it won’t be a “simple panacea for this complex issue.” To start a campus reckoning that never truly happened, he has proposed a series of conversations in April meant to help the two factions reconcile. The first will be led by Kevin Gover, director of the National Museum of the American Indian. The second will be hosted by two law professors known for their studies of free speech on campus — Erwin Chemerinsky, of the University of California at Berkeley, and Geoffrey Stone, of the University of Chicago. More conversations are in the works, according to Illinois’s spokeswoman.

It might take a lot of talking. What had already been a thorny issue for the past decade has become even more tangled over the past two years: The homecoming-parade protest, the halted start of a mascot search, the incident at State Farm Center. Dozier says the campus is as divided as he’s ever seen it.

The rough politics of 2018 has only hardened the battle lines. Campus Reform is paying close attention, and Shamseldin says the Trump-era campus climate has put many of her minority peers on the defensive. Questions of identity seen through the prism of politics may become intractable.

When the university did away with Illiniwek, it wanted to send him out in style. At the final home game of the 2006-7 basketball season, Illiniwek was brought out for a Last Dance — one final halftime show before a packed house.

The ceremony was broadcast on ESPN U. Video shows the student who portrayed Illiniwek standing in a shadowy tunnel as the drums play a simple march. Fans clap along. Then the horns break in, and Illiniwek bounds onto the court between lines of cheerleaders. His strides are long, his arms tucked behind his back, his head bowed. As he nears the word “Illinois” at center court, he raises his head and begins high-stepping, spinning, and jumping to every corner.

The ceremony climaxes as the band plays the university’s fight song. The chief stands at center court, his hands raised as if to signal a touchdown. The tempo picks up, and Illiniwek spins quickly, jabbing his foot sideways.

The dance is over. Cries of “Chief!” echo through the arena as Illiniwek walks off the court, arms crossed.

The camera cuts to the crowd. Many people are smiling. Some are transfixed. Others are crying. Illiniwek exited the stage as he had entered, beloved. Now the process of moving on could begin.

But it didn’t. The very next year, the Students for Chief Illiniwek group sought to put on an event called “The Next Dance,” another chance for the mascot to parade through the arena before a cheering crowd. This time the university had no interest in any such event. We’d have to charge you $4,500 to rent out the arena, campus officials told the group, and anyway, we’ve locked up the chief’s regalia.

That was no problem. The students raised money. They paid the fee for the space. As for the costume: They paid to have a replica made. On the day of the dance, orange-clad fans packed the stands.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.