Posted by Eugene Volokh:
American Indians' Views of the Redskins:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_10-2009_05_16.shtml#1242423155
Since the Redskins controversy is again in the news, I thought I'd
report some data on the subject from three years ago. I realize that
different people have different views of how relevant or dispositive
such data is, but I just thought I'd note it.
1. A 2002 Sports Illustrated survey reports:
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."
2. The [1]Annenberg Public Policy Center National Annenberg Election
Survey 2004 (conducted in 2003-04), reports:
Most American Indians say that calling Washington�s professional
football team the "Redskins" does not bother them, the University
of Pennsylvania�s National Annenberg Election Survey shows.
Ninety percent of Indians took that position, while 9 percent said
they found the name "offensive." One percent had no answer. The
margin of sampling error for those findings was plus or minus two
percentage points.
Because they make up a very small proportion of the total
population, the responses of 768 people who said they were Indians
or Native Americans were collected over a very long period of
polling, from October 7, 2003 through September 20, 2004. They
included Indians from every state except Alaska and Hawaii, where
the Annenberg survey does not interview. The question that was put
to them was "The professional football team in Washington calls
itself the Washington Redskins. As a Native American, do you find
that name offensive or doesn�t it bother you?"
3. There are obvious problems with polling American Indians -- the
difficulty of getting reliable data from such a small group (which the
Annenberg pollsters solved by asking a vast number of people, and
which the Sports Illustrated pollsters solved by oversampling in
census tracts which have a high fraction of American Indians, and then
weighing the responses accordingly), the uncertainties about who
really is an American Indian, the danger of undersampling Indians who
are too poor to have telephones or alienated enough from white culture
that they want little to do with pollsters, and so on. Nonetheless,
while this may not be perfect data, it's the best data that I've seen,
and it's certainly better than people's perceptions of what Indians
think, which are of course prone to much more serious problems of
representativeness (since such perceptions may be heavily skewed by
one's own preconceptions, by one's circle of friends, or by the
tendency to hear more from activists -- in any group -- than from rank
and file members).>
4. Finally, while I'd have thought that most Indians would indeed be
offended by the term "Redskins," given that it has often been used as
a pejorative, the results that the surveys report are not at all
implausible: Given that naming a team after some person or group is
usually a sign of respect -- one would rarely name a team after
something that one thinks is weak or contemptible (the U.C. Santa Cruz
Banana Slugs are a rare and facetious exception) -- it seems quite
reasonable that many Indians would focus on that more than they would
on disrespectful uses of the same term in other contexts.
References
1.
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2004_03_redskins_09-24_pr.pdf
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