The following is the transcript of a Foellinger balcony narrative from April 14, 2000. It is an unedited excerpt from the original Chief dialogue document.

This is my own personal statement about the issue of Chief Illiniwek. I was born in Washington, DC, I am a native of Washington in other words, as was my mother and her mother. And that means that I grew up with the Washington Redskins. My first employment was at Dartmouth College which had until the late 1970s or early 1980s an Indian symbol. The Dartmouth Indians, which was much more problematic than the Illinois version. It was controversial at the time and the college eventually did decide to eliminate the Indian symbol. It was a very difficult process, but they did confront it and did release that image as a representative of Dartmouth College.

When I was coming to Illinois, one of the faculty members there in government who had been on the faculty at Illinois some years before pointed out that the Illinois symbol, Chief Illiniwek was considerably more respectful and was not, was a dignified Indian symbol, as I recall Dennis Sullivan said.

When I arrived, I found that it was certainly more attractive than the Dartmouth Indians. And in some ways probably more so than the Redskins, just based on the name, the fact that the Redskins are called the Redskins is in itself problematic.

But as I began to teach here, I frankly after the controversies associated with those issues and after a variety of other things at Dartmouth, I decided to put my head down and to focus on my career and work.

As Charlene Teters and others began to raise these issues and "In Whose Honor" showed I think very clearly you can have a variety of ways of looking at symbols. You can have the most profound base form as I think could be argued was the case with the Dartmouth symbol. You could have a somewhat more profound one in Washington, DC, even though that symbol of the team of the Washington Redskins actually unites that city across racial, ethnic and class lines in ways that nothing else in Washington, DC, does. Chief Illiniwek however is a more complex issue and is problematic in the sense that he does not manifest the common forms of stereotyping of Indians. Native Americans.

What he does do and what he does symbolize and the reason that Charlene Teters and other Native Americans have challenged his continued presence is that he represents a use of a symbol that does not allow those individuals who themselves are Native Americans to say what is valuable to them. And Chief Illiniwek they are saying is problematic.

Having grown up in Washington and having dismissed the problems associated with this in terms of the Redskins, in other words, not being willing to challenge that in the past I came to understand how problematic and how devastating these symbols can be and to realize that I owned some of that responsibility myself.

I think it's not a simple problem, it's not a simple solution, but it's one that requires careful thought and I urge you to consider eliminating Chief Illiniwek. Thank you.

See the U.I. Dialogue on Chief Illiniwek page for more transcripts and information.