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Time Warner's Sports Illustrated story and their poll showing 80% of Native
Americans are not offended by sports mascots has created a really bias
report. The story does include American Indian institutions and
professional organizations positions on this issue. That is an insult to
American Indian institutions and professional organizations who have
documented their objections to these images. Sports Illustrated has set up
their own value system. It also has created support and ammunition to
people within my organization who do not support Indigenous and anti-mascot
issues to call end to their finacial support.
I have set up a conference call for today Friday, March 1 at 1:00 est for
any organization wishing to discuss what action and statement their
organizations are preparing to make regarding Time Warner's Sport
Illustrated article. We had just completed a meeting with executives at
Time Warner on this issue and withdrew our shareholder resolution. I have
informed Time Warner how difficult it is for us to believe that they could
do an objective story on this issue.
Copyright 2002 Time Inc. Sports
Illustrated March 4, 2002
SECTION: SPECIAL REPORT; Pg. 66 LENGTH: 2568 words
HEADLINE: The Indian Wars; The campaign against Indian nicknames and
mascots presumes that they offend Native Americans--but do they? We took a
poll, and you won't believe the results
BYLINE: S.L. Price
Solve this word problem: Billy Mills, the former runner who won the gold
medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Olympics, is on a commercial
airliner hurtling somewhere over the U.S. It is August 2001. Because
Mills's father and mother were three-quarters and one-quarter Native
American, respectively, he grew up being called half-breed until that was
no longer socially acceptable. As sensibilities shifted over the years, he
heard a variety of words and phrases describing his ethnic background, from
Indian to Sioux to Native American to the one with which he is most
comfortable, the age-old name of his tribal nation: Lakota.
Mills is sitting in first class. A flight attendant--the words steward and
stewardess are frowned upon today--checks on him every so often. The man is
African-American, the preferred designation for his racial background;
before that, society called him black or colored or Negro. The man is
friendly, doing his job. Each time he addresses Mills, he calls him Chief.
Mills doesn't know if the flight attendant realizes that he is Lakota.
Maybe he calls everyone Chief. Maybe he means it as a compliment. Mills
motions him over.
"I want to tell you something," Mills says. The man leans in. "I'm Native
American, and you calling me Chief, it turns my stomach. It'd be very
similar to somebody calling you Nigger."
The flight attendant looks at Mills. He says, "Calling you Chief doesn't
bother me...Chief."
Who is right and who wrong? Whose feelings take precedence? Most important,
who gets to decide what we call one another?
If you've figured out an answer, don't celebrate yet. The above
confrontation Is only a warmup for sport's thorniest word problem: the use
of Native American names (and mascots that represent them) by high school,
college and professional teams. For more than 30 years the debate has been
raging over whether names such as Redskins, Braves, Chiefs and Indians
honor or defile Native Americans, whether clownish figures like the
Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo have any place in today's racially sensitive
climate and whether the sight of thousands of PAGE
2 Sports Illustrated, March 4, 2002
non-Native Americans doing the tomahawk chop at Atlanta's Turner Field is
mindless fun or mass bigotry. It's an argument that, because it mixes mere
sports with the sensitivities of a people who were nearly exterminated,
seems both trivial and profound--and it's further complicated by the fact
that for three out of four Native Americans, even a nickname such as
Redskins, which many whites consider racist, isn't objectionable.
Indeed, some Native Americans--even those who purportedly object to Indian
team nicknames--wear Washington Redskins paraphernalia with pride. Two such
men showed up in late January at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.Dak.,
for a conference on race relations. "They were speaking against the Indian
nicknames, but they were wearing Redskins sweatshirts, and one had on a
Redskins cap," says Betty Ann Gross, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton
Sioux tribe. "No one asked them about it. They looked pretty militant."
Gross's own case illustrates how slippery the issue can be. She grew up on
a reservation in South Dakota and went to Sisseton High, a public school on
the reservation whose teams are called the Redmen. Gross, 49, can't recall
a time when people on the reservation weren't arguing about the team name,
evenly divided between those who were proud of it and those who were
ashamed. Gross recently completed a study that led the South Dakota state
government to change the names of 38 places and landmarks around the state,
yet she has mixed feelings on the sports issue. She wants Indian mascots
and the tomahawk chop discarded, but she has no problem with team names
like the Fighting Sioux (University of North Dakota) or even the Redskins.
"There's a lot of division," Gross says. "We're confused, and if we're
confused, you guys should be really confused."
Indeed, a recent SI poll (charts, above) suggests that although Native
American activists are virtually united in opposition to the use of Indian
nicknames and mascots, the Native American population sees the issue far
differently. Asked if high school and college teams should stop using
Indian nicknames, 81% of Native American respondents said no. As for pro
sports, 83% of Native American respondents said teams should not stop using
Indian nicknames, mascots, characters and symbols. Opinion is far more
divided on reservations, yet a majority (67%) there said the usage by pro
teams should not cease, while 32% said it should.
"I take the middle ground," says Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, 51, director of the
Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykotsmovi, Ariz., and an avid devotee
of the Atlanta Braves. "I don't see anything wrong with Indian nicknames as
long as they're not meant to be derogatory. Some tribal schools on Arizona
reservations use Indians as a nickname themselves. The Phoenix Indian High
School's newspaper is The Redskin. I don't mind the tomahawk chop. It's all
in good fun. This is sports, after all. In my living room, I'll be watching
a Braves game and occasionally do the chop."
Native American activists dismiss such opinion as misguided ("There are
happy campers on every plantation," says Suzan Harjo, president of the
Morning Star Institute, an Indian-rights organization based in Washington,
D.C.) or as evidence that Native Americans' self-esteem has fallen so low
that they don't even know when they're being insulted. American
Indians--unlike, say, the Irish Catholics who founded Notre Dame and named
its teams the Fighting Irish--had no hand in creating most of the teams
that use their names; their identities were plucked from them wholesale and
used for frivolous purposes, like firing up
fans
PAGE 3 Sports Illustrated, March 4, 2002
at ball games.
"This is no honor," says Michael Yellow Bird, an associate professor of
social work at Arizona State. "We lost our land, we lost our languages, we
lost our children. Proportionately speaking, indigenous peoples [in the
U.S.] are incarcerated more than any other group, we have more racial
violence perpetrated upon us, and we are forgotten. If people think this is
how to honor us, then colonization has really taken hold."
Regardless, the campaign to erase Indian team names and symbols nationwide
has been a success. Though Native American activists have made little
progress at the highest level of pro sports--officials of the Atlanta
Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins, for
example, say they have no intention of changing their teams' names or
mascots--their single-minded pursuit of the issue has literally changed the
face of sports in the U.S. Since 1969, when Oklahoma disavowed its mascot
Little Red (a student wearing an Indian war bonnet, buckskin costume and
moccasins), more than 600 school teams and minor league professional clubs
have dropped nicknames deemed offensive by Native American groups.
What's more, the movement continues. On Jan. 9 the Metropolitan Washington
Council of Governments, which represents 17 local governments in D.C.,
southern Maryland and northern Virginia, voted 11-2 to adopt a resolution
calling the Redskins name "demeaning and dehumanizing" and asking team
owner Dan Snyder to change it by next season. A week earlier former
Redskins fullback Dale Atkeson had been told by the California Department
of Motor Vehicles to remove his vanity plates reading 1 REDSKN. The word
Redskin was banned on plates by the DMV in 1999.
"We consider ourselves racially sensitive," says D.C. council member Carol
Schwartz, who introduced the resolution against the Redskins, "yet in this
one area we are so hypocritical. Since when is a sports team's name more
important than the sensitivities of our fellow human beings? For decades we
had the Washington Bullets, and [owner] Abe Pollin on his own changed the
name [in 1997, because of the high murder rate in D.C.]. Guess what? The
world did not stop spinning. Why we would keep this racist term is beyond
me."
While those who support names such as Seminoles (Florida State) and Braves
can argue that the words celebrate Native American traditions, applying
that claim to the Redskins is absurd. Nevertheless, Redskins vice president
Karl Swanson says the name "symbolizes courage, dignity and leadership and
has always been employed in that manner"--conveniently ignoring the fact
that in popular usage dating back four centuries, the word has been a slur
based on skin color. Swanson trots out research that traces the term
redskin to Native Americans' custom of daubing on red paint before battle.
Many experts on Native American history point out that the red paint was
used not for war but for burial, and that the word redskin was first used
by whites who paid and received bounties for dead Indians. "If you research
the origin of redskin, no one would want that associated with his team,"
says pro golfer Notah Begay III, who is half Navajo and half Pueblo.
"Trading-post owners used to offer rewards for Indian scalps. Signs would
say something like, 'Redskin scalps, worth so much.'"
However, what's most important, Swanson counters, is intent: Because the
Redskins and their fans mean nothing racist by using the nickname, it isn't
racist or offensive. "This has been the name of our organization for 70
years,"
PAGE 4 Sports Illustrated, March 4, 2002
Swanson says. "We believe it has taken on a meaning independent of the word
itself--and it's positive."
Not so, says Harjo: "There's no more derogatory word that's used against
us, about us, in the English language. Even if it didn't have such heinous
origins, everyone knows that it has never been an honorific. It's a
terrible insult."
Harjo is not alone in her thinking. A slew of dictionaries agree that
redskin is contemptuous, and so do Native American academics, nearly every
Native American organization and three judges on the U.S. Trademark Trial
and Appeal Board. In April 1999, responding to a lawsuit brought by Harjo
and six other Indian leaders, the board stripped the Washington Redskins of
federal protection on their seven trademarks. If the decision stands up
under appeal, the team and the NFL could lose an estimated $ 5 million
annually on sales of licensed merchandise.
Even though no team name is under more sustained attack, there's evidence
that for the Redskins, a name change would be good for business. In 1996,
after much pressure from alumni threatening to withdraw their financial
support, Miami (Ohio) University acceded to the Miami tribe's request that
it change its team names from Redskins to Redhawks. The following year
alumni gave a record $ 25 million to the school. "Someday it will change,"
Miami spokesman Richard Little says of the Washington Redskins name. "And
you know what? There'll still be a football team there, and there'll still
be those ugly fat guys in dresses cheering for it."
Swanson says the vast majority of Redskins fans like the name, and indeed,
beyond the protests of politicians, there's no groundswell of outrage
against it in D.C. In a city so racially sensitive that an aide to mayor
Anthony Williams was forced to resign in 1999 for correctly using the
nonracial term niggardly, there's nothing hotter than the mass pilgrimage
of 80,000 fans to Landover, Md., on Sundays in autumn to sing Hail to the
Redskins at FedEx Field. Williams mentioned changing the name at a press
conference once, but "no one really paid attention," says his aide Tony
Bullock. "It's not something that anyone is really talking about."
Nevertheless, Bullock says, "the mayor believes it is time to change the
name."
That the name is offensive to Native Americans is easy for non-Natives to
presume. It resonates when an Olympic hero and former Marine Corps captain
such as Mills, who speaks out against Indian names and mascots at schools
around the country, insists that a team named Redskins in the capital of
the nation that committed genocide against Native Americans is the
equivalent of a soccer team in Germany being called the Berlin Kikes. Says
Mills, "Our truth is, redskin is tied to the murder of indigenous people."
Somehow that message is lost on most of Mills's fellow Native Americans.
Asked if they were offended by the name Redskins, 75% of Native American
respondents in SI's poll said they were not, and even on reservations,
where Native American culture and influence are perhaps felt most
intensely, 62% said they weren't offended. Overall, 69% of Native American
respondents--and 57% of those living on reservations--feel it's O.K. for
the Washington Redskins to continue using the name. "I like the name
Redskins," says Mark Timentwa, 50, a member of the Colville Confederated
Tribes in Washington State who lives on the tribes' reservation. "A few
elders find it offensive, but my mother loves the
Redskins."
PAGE 5 Sports Illustrated, March 4, 2002
Only 29% of Native Americans, and 40% living on reservations, thought
Snyder should change his team's name. Such indifference implies a near
total disconnect between Native American activists and the general Native
American population on this issue. "To a lot of the younger folks the name
Redskins is tied to the football team, and it doesn't represent anything
more than the team," says Roland McCook, a member of the tribal council of
the Ute tribe in Fort Duchesne, Utah.
The Utes' experience with the University of Utah might serve as a model for
successful resolution of conflicts over Indian nicknames. Four years ago
the council met with university officials, who made it clear that they
would change their teams' name, the Running Utes, if the tribe found it
objectionable. (The university had retired its cartoonish Indian mascot
years before.) The council was perfectly happy to have the Ute name
continue to circulate in the nations' sports pages, but council members
said they intended to keep a close eye on its use. "We came away with an
understanding that as long as the university used the Ute name in a
positive manner that preserved the integrity of the Ute tribe, we would
allow the use of the name and the Ute logo [two eagle feathers and a
drum]," says McCook. Florida State, likewise, uses the name Seminoles for
its teams with the express approval of the Seminole nation.
Like the Ute tribe, most Native Americans have no problem with teams using
names like Indians and Fighting Illini--or even imposed names like Sioux.
"People get upset about the Fighting Sioux, but why?" Gross says. "We're
not Sioux people, anyway. The French and the Ojibway tribe gave us that
name, and they're our hereditary enemies. We're not braves, and we're not
really Indians. I know the history. For me those names are not a problem."
Many Native Americans are offended, however, by mascots such as Illinois's
Chief Illiniwek and others that dress up in feathers and so-called war
paint. "Just do away with the imagery--the dancing, the pageantry," says
Gross.
Which brings us to the point at which the word problem becomes a number
problem. Say you are a team owner. You kiss Chief Wahoo goodbye. Stop the
chop. Dump the fake Indian garb, the turkey feathers and the war paint.
Get rid of, say, the Redskins name because it's got a sullied history and
just sounds wrong. Rename the team the Washington Warriors--without the
Indian-head logo--and watch the new team hats and jackets hit the stores.
Money is going to pour in, you see, and someone will have to count it.
--
André Cramblit: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council
NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development
needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of
California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com)
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