Redskins?

Sport Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism

James V Fenelon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781612057392
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315520674
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This book assesses the controversies over the Washington NFL team name as a window into other recent debates about the use of Native American mascots for professional and college sports teams. Fenelon explores the origin of team names in institutional racism and mainstream society's denial of the impact of four centuries of colonial conquest. Fenelon's analysis is supported by his surveys and interviews about the "Redskins" name and Cleveland "Indians" mascot "Chief Wahoo." A majority of Native peoples see these mascots as racist, including the National Congress of American Indians—even though mainstream media and public opinion claim otherwise. Historical analysis divulges these terms as outgrowths of "savage" and "enemy icon" racist depictions of Native nations. The book ties the history of conquest to idealized claims of democracy, freedom, and "honoring" sports teams.

1
Introduction

Redskins, Wahoos and Racism through the Ages

[T]he term REDSK*NS is not and has never been one of honor or respect, but instead, it has always been and continues to be a pejorative, derogatory, denigrating, offensive, scandalous, contemptuous, disreputable, disparaging, and racist designation for Native Americans.

National Congress of American Indians (NCAI, 2013, from 1993 Resolutions)¹

“[R]edskin” is inextricably linked to a history of suffering and dispossession…. Indigenous peoples have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories and aspirations which shall be appropriately reflected in education and public information.

James Anaya, United Nations Special Rapporteur (quoted in Geneva, 2014, speaking on United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)

This they (the old ones, the spirits) asked me: How can we count the tears? How can we enumerate the losses? How can we measure the grief still undone, tabled while running from guns, muffled by hands over mouths of babes and selves unable to speak or cry the grief; grief choked while rebuilding lives and communities, stuffed on demand of churches, schools, and governments?

How do we count the never-felt embrace of grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins buried in pits of many or in lonely boarding school graves thousands of miles away? How do we count the steps of the thousands of Trails of Tears on this land? …

How do we count the broken treaties, broken promises? How do we measure the betrayals of our good will and good word? … How do we count the open wounds on our Mother, the Earth, and the disease and death still being wrought from the tailings you spread on our yards?

What we do know how to count, my child, are the Elders who, thank the Creator, have never quit struggling … to retain and teach our ways.

Mary Clearing-Sky is Odawa Mother, Grandmother and Psychologist and Past President of the Society of Indian Psychologists²

Mary Clearing-Sky (Ph.D.), on Reparations (and Stereotypes): “I thank my Elders for the lessons and the words to say to you.”

On any October of any year over the past seven decades in the United States of America, two great racist events have occurred—the football team with the most racist term imaginable for Native peoples has played to cheering crowds in our nation’s capital city, and most other cities in our great country celebrate the first noted European to unleash the most destructive genocides in world history. In the year the author of this work formally began these studies—1995—in Cleveland, Ohio, the most racist imagery that exists for any people in the world, was enlarged on billboards and media outlets in the World Series of our national pastime—baseball—unambiguously called the dehumanizing name devised some five centuries ago by religious-political leaders of western civilization who would overtake and name the continental Americas, and later use dehumanized terms for much of the rest of the indigenous world. That is the story and the title of this book.

On a crisp October day of 1995, outside Jacob’s field where Cleveland’s historically losing baseball team called Indians were in a World Series with Atlanta’s team called the Braves, I watched red-faced sports fans with plastic feathers and tomahawks taunting a small group of Wahoo protesters, saying “We’re the Indians now” and “We conquered you” and then to war-whoops “Redskins, heya, heya, heya” as they made fake little dances outside the line of peace-keepers (Fenelon, 1999). Fellow protestors, including Charlene Teters of PBS’s film In Whose Honor and Vernon Bellecourt from the American Indian Movement and National Coalition Against Racism in Sports, assured us fans outside Minnesota Metrodome and Washington, D.C.’s national stadium were just as hostile, often yelling “Kill the Redskins” or “Redskins will scalp you,” depending on which team they supported. Cleveland’s Indigenous-led Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance, the protest sponsor, presents this social problem in “Where is the Honor?” posters contrasting a dignified, honorable Native presentation versus a disgraceful, racist Wahoo imagery.

Figure 1.1 Protest at Jacob’s Field, Cleveland (courtesy James Fenelon)

Indigenous leaders, students and citizens from many Native Nations protested outside Arizona’s football stadium in 2014 against the team name Redskins, supported by American Indian organizations and United States Congressional leadership and the president in opposition to the name’s usage, even as the team’s owner formed a charitable organization to provide cover for the racialized name and paid for Indian youth from nearby reservations to attend the game for free as long as they sported the racist logos. This occurred on October 12, 2014, a day often used to exalt Columbus’s “discovery” of America, in a state that refused to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday.

Figure 1.2 Protest poster, Honor versus Shame, Cleveland, OH³

The World Series also typically takes place in October, when the national holiday called “Columbus Day” is celebrated, much to the dismay of serious Native scholars who identify Columbus’s second trip as a continental invasion that launched plunder of the land’s riches and enslavement of indigenous families to the point of genocide, done in the name of bringing religion to the “savages” he called “los Indios” or Indians. A “sauvage,” whether noble in French philosophical circles or “hostile” in Spanish and English military tomes, was the “uncivilized” precursor to the Red Man as a “race” of people, or the Redskin as a “racist” moniker. Thus the non-Indian world celebrates its baseball and football teams, even in the country’s capital, with race-based names and racist symbols that were integral to the destruction of Native Nations and peoples across the Americas.

On another cold October day (28th) of 1890, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran headlines concerning the Ghost Dances adopted by some Lakota in the newly stated Dakotas:

• FEARS OF AN OUTBREAK
• Old Sitting Bull Stirring Up the Excited Redskins

Although there was not a single violent incident over the peaceful religious revitalization movement that accepted the Messiah in peace and prosperity for starving, dominated peoples, military and media forces were using the most charged terms available to whip up civilian and popular support for attacks upon the Lakota Sioux (Fenelon, 1998: 207).

By November 20, 1890, the Bismarck Tribune, along with other newspapers of the day, running all the way to East Coast cities, ran these headlines as prelude to the cavalry and militia attacks on the Lakota people in their region:

Figure 1.3 Redskins logo timeline⁴

• THE REDS ARE HERE.

The next day, November 21, 1890, the headlines were:

• BAD, BAD INDIANS
• Some Bad Redskins

Then, playing upon fears of the White population, the paper wrongfully said they were: “Notorious Cut Throats Who Were in the Custer and Minnesota Massacres,” which were battles some fifteen to twenty-eight years earlier and in entirely different regions (Fenelon, 1998: 189).

The United States Commission of Indian Affairs (the C.I.A.) then worked in cooperation with the United States Army operating out of General Sheridan’s headquarters in Chicago, to get the U.S. president to order arrests of the religious leaders, to once again eliminate treaty rations, causing starvation in the coming winter, and to transfer responsibility for handling Ghost Dance matters to the military, who quickly moved to arrest and then kill Sitting Bull on Standing Rock, and relentlessly pursued the fleeing families from Cheyenne River to Pine Ridge, where Lakota leaders surrendered their arms and were subsequently “massacred” by military and militia forces. Women, children and some older men numbered among the more than 300 killed at Wounded Knee in the infamous and last slaughter of Indigenous Peoples, calling them Redskins all the while. 1890 was also the first year that the term “Redskins” appeared in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

In the opening passages of a brilliant book by Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian, a Curious Account of Native People in North America, members of his drum group struggle over what to call themselves, with one respected singer coming up with the “pesky redskins” for a name. Although he doesn’t report exactly what they said, I imagine the drummers getting a good laugh at such a sociolinguistic turnaround, by solid American Indian peoples who have learned to see humor in the dark veins of the long history of taking lands and lives of their people, in order to build this great nation that we are finally “citizens” of, some as late as 1924. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, as the bible reminds us.

Figure 1.4 Mass burial at Wounded Knee massacre, 1890⁵

When briefly running Indian Education in North Dakota, I heard many Native people ask, “Is he a skin?” meaning is one truly Native, and to be trusted in that light, in much the same way that Black Americans have reappropriated the “N” word with informal discourse, now famously so in rap and hip-hop. These practices soften the racist blade of such supremacist and demeaning language and allow a certain dignity in what is otherwise Hate language. They are only used by Native peoples themselves, and this irks the dominant society to no end, as we shall see with nearly all the words, terms, names and symbols of, for and by Native Americans.

Mary Louise Defender Wilson, respected traditionalist of the Dakota and Hidatsa people, appointed as the North Dakota Native American Centennial Chairperson in 1989, gave lectures and talks to my classes here as the twenty-first century started, and in the sociology of race and racism course she was asked what the Sioux word for “White man” was, so she responded by saying that Dakota people did not associate colors with people, but traits or experiences. (Some say a Sioux word for incoming Europeans was “wasicu,” which jokingly means “men who keep the best for themselves” or the greedy ones). That is why they did not use the word for white, a color, nor did they think of people as Black, Yellow or Red. The people had heard of wasicu for some time before they actually arrived, but did not accept being called Red, or Redskin, or for that matter “savage” since that meant without sovereignty, another European word. In fact, this is why the Tetonwan Sioux (Lakota) rejected Lewis and Clark’s 1804 declaration of “Great White Father,” causing Clark to call them most “vile miscreants of the savage race” of Indians (Ronda, 1984).

Chauncy Dupree, said to be one of the last “heyoka” medicine leaders of the Lakota, also explained the philosophy of the people to be one that turned on an orientation to the land, four directions, each with its own creation story, and interconnected in a circle with a medicine wheel that has a center, “hocoka,” that represents where the people should be. Chauncy said that many stories associate colors with the directions, evidenced in medicine ties and flags in the SunDance, with black to the west (sometimes dark blue to circumvent death), red to the north, yellow to the east and white to the south. He remarked that it was strange, as the Lakota sought meaning from the natural world that made up a totality of the environment on the land, “maka” seen as mother or grandmother unci in spirituality (sometimes “mother earth”). The wasicu saw these colors as representing man, the races of man, with some above others, praising their creation direction as “west” being above, or superior, to others. He seemed to think this terrible, misplaced arrogance.

How does America reconcile these Native stories, the four observations of the term Redskin and its close associate “savage” with people racialized as Indians, or as Red Man? As important, how do these observations relate to a public letter by the Washington Redskins team “owner,” Dan Snyder, who claims they will never change the name, that it “honors” Native Americans, that the team Redskins has to defend their “traditions” and “their pride” and that the team was originally founded by Native Americans (falsely stated). In fact, what is clear here is that every one of these remarks is founded in racist rhetoric and discourse, past and present.

Another common response is for dominant groups at universities to say their particular image or name does not have racist origins, or has some level of respect and acceptance among the Native peoples noted in the name. One predominantly in the news was UND’s “Fighting Sioux,” with some tolerance by a few Native peoples, which refers to a name used by historians (although a misnomer itself) and even presidential policy makers. However, when signs were put up at UND in Grand Forks, students wrote on them stereotypical, highly negative phrases—“Drink ’em Lots O’ Fire Water”—“Pay Taxes”—“You Lost the War, Sorry”—“Free Schooling”—and (with clear racist intent) “Go back to the Res, or work @ the Casino, Prarie Nigga” (Chapter 4 has photos of these posters and further analysis).

We will use these incidents and observations to demonstrate how deeply embedded in racist culture these responses, and their origins from racialized team names’ “mascot”-related symbols really are, in contemporary and historical usage. We will have to debunk claims that most Native Americans approve of the team name and associated mascots; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Opening Statement (Preface)
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Redskins, Wahoos and Racism through the Ages
• Chapter 2 Racist Formulation and the Indian as Red Man
• Chapter 3 Redskin: Race and Systemic Racism in Sociolinguistic Analysis
• Chapter 4 Surveying the Landscape of Racist America
• Chapter 5 Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins Surveys
• Chapter 6 Legal Histrionics and the Legacy of Racism
• Chapter 7 The Red Man plays on
• Bibliography
• Index