Charlene Teters =link= May 2026

Her scholarship, often delivered through fierce public lectures, dismantles the liberal myth of "honoring" through appropriation. She draws a sharp line between appreciation (which requires consent, context, and relationship) and appropriation (which takes without asking, deadening the living symbol into a logo). She has argued persuasively that the mascot issue is not a "free speech" issue but a civil rights issue—one that inflicts measurable psychological harm on Indigenous youth, contributing to depression and suicide rates that are tragically elevated in Native communities. Her voice has been a constant thorn in the side of the NFL and major universities, and the slow, ongoing retirement of Native mascots (from the University of Illinois’s Chief Illiniwek to the Washington Commanders) owes an incalculable debt to her early, lonely witness. To write of Charlene Teters is to write of an artist who understands that memory is not passive. For Native America, forgetting was a colonial weapon; the boarding school sought to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Teters’ life work is an act of unforgetting —a deliberate, painful, and beautiful excavation of what was meant to be buried. She does not offer nostalgia for a pristine pre-contact past, nor does she offer easy reconciliation. Instead, she offers the spiral: a path that revisits the wound but each time with greater wisdom, more allies, and sharper tools.

In the lexicon of Native American resistance, the name Charlene Teters does not simply signify an artist or an academic. It signifies a stance —a fierce, unyielding posture of witness against the erasure of Indigenous identity. Rising to national prominence in the early 1990s, Teters became the face of the fight against the appropriation of Native American imagery, most famously in her lonely, then escalating, protests against the Washington football team’s racist logo and name. Yet to confine Teters to the role of a single-issue activist is to miss the profound depth of her life’s work. As a painter, sculptor, installation artist, and educator, Teters has spent four decades unraveling a central paradox of American life: how a nation that systematically sought to destroy Native cultures simultaneously consumes and commodifies their symbols. Her career is not a linear narrative of protest, but a spiral—a returning and deepening meditation on trauma, survival, and the radical act of "unforgetting." The Pedagogy of Pain: The 1989 Turning Point Every origin story for Teters’ activism returns to a mundane, horrifying moment in 1989. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, she brought her young children to a basketball game. What she saw was not entertainment but a ritualized exorcism: a white man in buckskin and feathered headdress, dancing with a tomahawk chop as 15,000 fans roared. For Teters, a member of the Spokane Nation, this was not a tribute. It was a living reenactment of the boarding school era, where her grandmother was stripped of her hair and language. “My children looked at me,” she later recounted, “and asked, ‘Mommy, why are they making fun of us?’” charlene teters

In her seventies now, Teters continues to paint, teach, and speak. Her recent works have turned toward environmental justice, connecting the desecration of Native land to the desecration of Native bodies and symbols. The through-line remains clear: all extraction—of oil, of images, of identity—is one act. And standing against it, in silent witness or in vibrant paint, is the artist’s highest calling. Charlene Teters did not set out to be a symbol. She set out to be a mother protecting her children’s reflection in the world. In doing so, she became a mirror for America—one that reflects not what we want to see, but what we must, at last, acknowledge. Her voice has been a constant thorn in