Stanford Indian at 735 Emerson St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.
Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.
Vine Deloria Jr.
The Indian. Stanford’s mascot from 1930 to 1970. Forty years of putting a race on a jersey, on a banner, on the field for entertainment.
1972: fifty five Native American students and staff at Stanford had enough. They put forward a petition. Not just asking, demanding. The University had made promises about its Native American Program. Improve it. Support it. Make Native American education a reality instead of a PR footnote.
And while you’re at it, stop using the name of a race as mascot for your football team.
The petition didn’t mince words. The Stanford community was “insensitive to the humanity of Native Americans.” By removing the Indian as a symbol, the “University would be renouncing a grotesque ignorance that it has previously condoned.”
Grotesque ignorance. They said it.
Stanford listened. The mascot went away.
But this sidewalk on Emerson Street? Laid in the early 1950s. The Indian is still there, pressed into the concrete. There’s something righteously fucked and pathetically American about stumbling onto this concrete fossil today. It’s the kind of banal, stubborn artifact that screams the quiet part loud: we’ll retire the mascot when the protests get too noisy, sure, but we’ll leave its ghost embedded in the infrastructure, stepped on daily by tech bros power walking to their next pivot meeting, utterly oblivious or (worse) nostalgic for a time when casual racism was just team spirit. This isn’t heritage, it’s laziness and cowardice calcified, a totem to the Ivy adjacent smugness that lets a place pat itself on the back for “evolving” while refusing to actually sandblast away the evidence of what it celebrated. Vine Deloria Jr.’s quote sits there like a knowing rebuke: wisdom means confronting this crap, not walking over it pretending it’s invisible.
But Palo Alto gonna Palo Alto, disrupting everything except its own embedded mythology, one footstep at a time.