2 | College of Arts and Sciences Newsletter Feature HOMECOMING AND HISTORY: THE COMPLICATED LEGACY OF ‘GYPSY DAYS’ AT NORTHERN STATE UNIVERSITY Northern State University’s homecoming celebration, known since 1916 as “Gypsy Days,” began eight years before Northern athletes were named the Wolves in 1923, when student newspaper editor Charles Fleischman anonymously proposed a fall festival modeled loosely on South Dakota State College’s Hobo Day and suggested the “Gypsy Day” name for Northern Normal and Industrial School. As former history professor Mark Bartusis recounts in Northern State University: The First Century, 1901–2000, Fleischman renewed the idea in early 1916 after it initially drew little notice and by November faculty approved the plan, tying the first celebration to a football game against Madison Normal. That inaugural day featured the crowning of a “Gypsy Queen,” a parade that wound through downtown Aberdeen and around Aldrich Park, a 26–12 Northern victory and a large barbecue that fed hundreds. Over time the event expanded into a weeklong homecoming with coronation, pep rallies, bonfires, athletic contests and a regional parade, while the Royal Order of the Gyps, founded in 1941, became a prominent alumni and athletic support organization. National figures such as Duke Ellington in 1948 and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife in 1954 lent extraordinary visibility to the festivities. For many alumni, the name signifies continuity and community pride; for many current students, it functions simply as homecoming week. The Roma are a very diverse transnational people whose ancestors migrated from the Indian subcontinent to Europe roughly a millennium ago. Linguistic, historical and genetic evidence traces the Romani language to Indo-Aryan roots, even as centuries of movement across the Balkans, Central Europe and beyond (including to North America) produced numerous regional communities with distinct dialects, occupations and religious affiliations. Today Roma live throughout Europe and the Americas and in many countries they constitute one of the largest minority populations. Despite this long presence, they have frequently been marginalized, subjected to enslavement in parts of Eastern Europe, restrictive settlement laws, forced assimilation policies and, during World War II, mass murder at the hands of Nazi and allied regimes. The term Roma, derived from the Romani word for “people,” is the accepted designation in scholarly and official usage, reflecting selfidentification rather than labels imposed from outside. Yet the language at its center carries a longer, contested, history. Roma is the accepted term used by scholars and most public institutions (such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) to refer to the diverse Romani people, whereas “Gypsy” originated in a mistaken identification and accumulated centuries of associations with exoticism, deception and marginality. As Bartusis and former history student Lauren Paatela have each shown in their careful studies of the celebration’s origins and evolution, the Aberdeen tradition drew on popular, often highly racialized, imagery rather than real lived local encounters. What began as pageantry rooted in borrowed symbols, eventually became embedded in institutional memory, leaving the university with a custom that reflects both enduring school spirit and the complicated legacy of the term it continues to use. The controversy that followed former NSU President Timothy Downs’s 2020 effort to discontinue the name underscored how deeply tradition and terminology are intertwined and how difficult it can be for institutions to disentangle affection for ritual from the historical weight carried by now-unacceptable words.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzkyNTY=