The leader of a national American Indian activist organization said Friday his group would lobby Ottawa University officials to stop using the Braves mascot.

Vernon Bellecourt, president of the Minnesota-based American Indian Movement, said Ottawa’s use of the mascot was insensitive.

“Ottawa University’s going to be a huge focus,” he said. “We’re going to ask the faculty to host a national forum on the use of Indians in sports and the media.”

Bellecourt was among the activists in Lawrence Friday to speak to a national Campus Greens convention. Tom Hayden, who gained fame for his arrest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, also spoke.

Bellecourt said about half of the 15,000 high schools and colleges with American Indian mascots in the late 1960s have changed. He said the Kansas City Chiefs, Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians also continue to be major focuses for his organization, which oversees the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media.

“We’re a beautiful people,” he said. “We have wonderful culture. We have beautiful music. We see that reduced to America’s fun and games.”

Ottawa University officials could not be reached for comment Friday night. Their university’s property was obtained through a land trade with the Ottawa Indians near the end of the Civil War.

Bellecourt said his organization also is keeping track of developments in the debate over the South Lawrence Trafficway. He said Haskell students  through their Wetlands Preservation Organization  have been an effective voice on the issue.

“We fully support their efforts,” he said. “We’d fully respond to their requests, if they’d ask us. We’d help them.”

Hayden, a former California legislator and founder of Students for a Democratic Society, said sweatshops and gangs would be the focuses of his activism in upcoming years. He has worked on the environment and anti-Vietnam War movements.

Hayden said he felt “sweet relief” at seeing protesters at the World Trade Organization conference in November 1999 in Seattle.

“I never expected to see something of a parallel with the ’60s again,” he said. “There is a youth, student movement. It’s not about the ’60s or the ’90s. The ’60s were an extension of an earlier generation. We’re a continuation of John Brown, Sojourner Truth and Tom Paine and others.”

About 250 students from across the country are in Lawrence for the Campus Greens convention, which continues through Sunday at the Kansas Union. The Greens, an outgrowth of the Green Party, have 150 chapters nationwide.

Workshop topics include corporate influences in education, campus politics, sustainable agriculture and the fair trade movement. Participants also attended a rally Friday night at the Lied Center.

Ylda Kopk, a recent graduate of Chicago University, is among the convention attendees.

She expects Campus Greens to become less affiliated with the Green Party in the next few years.

“I realize it’s more of a movement,” she said. “(Winning office) is one road to change. This is an all-encompassing movement, and gaining office is just part of it.”