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The Washington Redskins and the Erasing of Native Americans
My grandmother was from Washington D.C., which meant she was a die-hard Washington Redskins fan. She would get excited when they were doing well. When they were doing poorly, she would call them the “Dead Skins”, which is surely an intolerable slight to zombies in 2020.
Of course, as her team’s logo has been erased, I have been thinking about my grandmother this morning, an FDR Democrat who spent her early life surviving the Depression, raising children, and then holding down the home front while her husband fought a war in the Pacific. (She was a horrible human since she also owned a Redskins blanket?)
I shared a bedroom with her until I went to college. When she was dying, I stared at her hands in the hospital because I wanted to remember them the most: those strong hands that were inked copper by years lived in the Southern sun picking cotton, those small hands that matched her short stature and petite frame, those warm hands that used to stroke my hair when I was a child, guide me across the street, wipe my tears when I fell down.
But I am also thinking about Native Americans and the Washington Redskins logo that was so familiar to me in my youth. To be honest, I don’t know the history of the actual artwork, but as far as I can remember, there has been a man in feathers who looked noble and wise painted on the football field where war was regularly simulated on Monday nights on our living room television.
Like other teams that have Indians serving as mascots, the Washington Redskins were never trying to denigrate any tribe or say that a man was “less” because he was of a different race when making an Indian the face of the organization. Rather, there was a celebration of positive attributes of Native Americans, which might have been derived from a stereotype–a positive stereotype–needed to gather people into a family of fans: courage, skill, loyalty, intelligence, pride.
That’s probably why Navajo Code Talkers defended the logo in the past, don’t cha know.
But the name and the logo are too “problematic” now, so they must go, and I wonder about this because Native Americans are not really front and center in the culture. They are trotted out whenever there’s a pipeline dispute, and the strange reservation system that helps keep Indians the poorest minority in the United States can be politically exploited. But what happens when their faces are removed from athletics? When “cowboys and Indians” are no longer played by kids? When does Turner Broadcasting stop showing “offensive” Westerns?
If we remove Elizabeth Warren from the equation, indigenous peoples make up only 1.6% of the US population. Many have assimilated to the degree that they may be proud of a tribal heritage but still interact with others as just regular American citizens. What do most people know about them at all unless regularly playing the slots on reservations? (Even gambling becomes less of a draw to Native lands because states have figured out gambling is big business.)
As the Pilgrim story becomes more and more “problematic” because Howard Zinn wanted third graders to know that Pilgrims were really genocidal maniacs, I suppose the narratives around even Thanksgiving will start to fade faster and faster as well. (Who hasn’t heard of the college student coming home from Berkeley as a woke Vegan who refuses to eat turkey or partake in any oppressor-driven celebration of murrrrr-derrrrr?)
Remove what actually were positive associations of Native Americans on the field, and we will think more and more about Indians as an “oppressed victim” only, if we think about them at all, which is another way to get us back to the “noble savage with no agency” trope, which seems to me to be a bit… regressive. Far from being honored as a people, tribes are simply being erased from popular culture.
So this brings me back to my grandmother.
If I could speak with her ghost today, I might say, “Granny, the Washington Redskins lost their battle.”
With one of those soft, capable hands, she’d move a lock of my hair behind one ear and give me the look of someone as knowing and wise as the old Indian’s face that has just been obliterated in the name of social justice.
“My dearest girl,” she’d say, “don’t be so surprised… That’s what the Dead Skins do.”
Published in General
Snyder held out for a pretty long time, but the mighty dollar prevailed.
As we know, calls to change the name from a woke minority have been going on for years–and were ignored–but the decision finally came down to economics when FedEx (as in Fed Ex Field) and the Mayor of D.C. weighed in. Snyder needs the Mayor because he wants to move the team to the District, so this ultimately seems to be about capitalist considerations. The value of the “brand” no longer exceeded the value of ditching the brand.
Yeah the ONLY reason I liked Snyder was because he was keeping the name and giving the woke crowd the what for. No more
Redskins. No moreHail to the Redskins. And the black gentleman who used to dress up as an Indian chief is gone. This is all just so wonderful – for someone.I hope they lose all their fans and go out of business. Which is possible because, unlike college football teams whose fans root for them because they are part of that college and its culture, professional teams are really nothing but a jersey logo. If a college team changes its name, you’ve still got the college to root for. But with a professional team, you’re rooting for the logo, and that’s it. And the Redskins name and logo is now gone.
I’m interested to see if the fan base gets with the program. The team’s futility on the field has eroded that base, but there is still a significantly large group of “Redskin” fans who go back generations and are not short-term DC-ites..
At the risk of stretching an analogy, the college hockey team of the University of North Dakota used to called “The Fighting Sioux,” but that wouldn’t do, so the school changed the name to “Fighting Hawks.” UND games are still heavily populated by a rabid fan based wearing “Fighting Sioux” gear. I wonder if the ‘Skins fan base will continue to wear their old gear, or just go with the flow.
I get it, and you’re absolutely right, but I think I’m right about removing all images of Native Americans presented in positive ways from popular culture equals the fading away of Native Americans from the American mind in general. The only images left are distorted in different, sadder ways related to passivity, high crime rates and addiction on reservations if looking at today or mere victims of the past per the ways in which history is so often presented now. Either way, we have a general case of out of sight, out of mind.
Of course, I am not a Native American, so I can’t really say how I would feel from that perspective about this issue. I understand the problem with the name “Redskins.” Sure. But polling about attitudes from people who are actually affiliated with tribes has long been pretty mixed.
Even so, it doesn’t take much to find a picture of a guy holding a sign saying, “There is no honor in racism” to dispute what I say here: that mascots have highlighted a positive view of Native Americans, though not a complete view at all. Of course, there is no honor in racism. But is creating a mascot from a group of people really racist?
If so, I guess I should be offended by that leprechaun looking chap who represents the “fighting Irish.” I actually do know the history of that logo, which had a bit to do with Catholics standing up to Protestants in an era of extreme anti-Catholic bigotry, but very few people know this. It’s a leprechaun, and there is a negative stereotype of the Irish as drunken brawlers akin to barbarians that goes back centuries.
I could be offended if I so chose, I guess, but I actually like the Irish being portrayed as scrappy and a force with which to be reckoned. I like them being thought of every now and again in general. I mean… I admit… I am not a hyphenated American, but I am very proud of having ancestral ties to the Emerald Isle.
I guess I’m just unenlightened?
The players and the owners are working hard to destroy the NFL itself. The NBA is enchanted with the CCP. I hope I can keep baseball and I’m sure others will still enjoy hockey. Since Patrick Mahomes has already accomplished everything in football maybe he will switch to baseball.
I think the “Fighting Sioux” would be perfectly equivalent to the “Fighting Irish.”
I guess everyone is eventually going to be an animal?
I would only add that one of the reasons the campaign against the name seemed extreme to me is that no one I know really thought about Native Americans when the team name was used. It was just a name, and the word “redskins” was just another word in the same way that Giants and Browns and all those animal names are just words representing the teams. Does anyone see large black cats when the Panthers take the field? No more than those who see images of “red-skinned” Native Americans when the DC team takes the field.
Baseball was the first professional sport, right? As America’s past-time, a truly American sport, there will be some reason to destroy it. I don’t know what. It’s too American, maybe? No. You can’t point out that it’s beloved in some other countries because everyone knows that is only true due to neocolonialism per our imperialist tendencies…..
Of course, I kid.
I really like a cold beer at a baseball stadium on a warm Georgia night.
I’m from Atlanta, you see, where we have the Braves…
Uh-oh.
I didn’t think about “redskins” as a slur. I did think about Native Americans as a kid. But I really thought about them in positive ways because of the association with something my grandmother loved. I mean… playing “cowboys and Indians” with my brother, I wanted to be the Indian.
Perhaps that’s why I’m thinking about this as a fading out of a positive image.
Well, I’m from Atlanta as well and my early baseball memories are all about the Atlanta Crackers, I was a batboy for the team back then and a fan of the Boston Braves since we had no major league teams in the South. I left Atlanta for Washington before the Braves moved there so I was a fan of 3 different baseball franchises during my time in Washington. And I was a big Redskins fan even before I left Atlanta because that was the team we in Atlanta supported.
Baseball might do better than the other sports because it is by far the most ethnically diverse not to mention being the best sport anyway.
The Chicago Blackhawks have said they will not change the name or mascot.
I think a corollary to all this is how the transgender…thing…is erasing women’s sports.
Good for them. Fortunately, they don’t run afoul of our obsession with skin color. And, for now, hockey is a bit different.
Atlanta Crackers? That a history that truly makes me laugh. I believe I must be a tiny bit younger because this is not in my memory. It peaks my interest though.
And, of course, as you show there is a constant current of name changes. I just find some of it completely baffling.
(Also, I assume “cracker” referred to the “crack of the bat” rather than the racial slur or Saltine, but one could twist it!!!!!)
:)
I think the Browns might actually be denigrating Mexicans, now. Especially since the team is so disorganized and pathetic these days.
I doubt that’s it:
“What is the etymology of the term Cracker? We all know what a Cracker was (or is). A Southern Anglo-Celt, usually of Scots-Irish origin, who lives in the backcountry. The term appears intact and in use by the mid-1700s in Colonial America. One eighteenth-century definition of what a Cracker provides a good description; in 1776 a Colonial official wrote to the earl of Dartmouth:
I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers, a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their place of abode.
They were basically a semi nomadic group who were excellent hunters, kept free range cattle and pigs, and lived in the backcountry. They were normally of Ulster ancestry, but not exclusively so.”
So, anyway, that happens to fit my origins pretty well. My colonial Thompson ancestors, after having left Ulster for the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1720’s, arrived in Georgia around 1790. Part of the background was they could not compete with the Pennsylvania farmers of German origin and that fits, but they did make great patriots.
Along with the commercial product names logos (LandOLakes butter, Aunt Jemima pancake products, Uncle Ben’s rice) it is odd that supposedly in the name of “respecting” ethnic heritage we are erasing that ethnic heritage from the cultural landscape.
Maybe the white leftists pushing this sort of thing really believe white leftists are superior to these various “ethnics” and are trying to dismiss them as lesser people.
I’m certain that has something to do with that when my white betters call me ‘a cracker’. They think they are insulting but it doesn’t take.
He has 500 million reasons to stick to football.
That would be sweet but remember DC is the center of the swamp.
I just don’t see the fan base going with it much. As you said, a LOT of support has already gone away and everyone hates Snyder. I think they’ll end up moving to another city or just getting closed down. Probably won’t happen for years but I think the NFL has peaked and is now on the way out generally.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Rush schticks where he would predict the outcomes of that weekends NFL games based on the teams’ names (Dolphins v. Steelers, etc). Those were hilarious.
Falcon vs. Cardinal? Okay.
Dolphins vs. Steelers? That’s a super hard one, actually.
You might go with “steel” per Guns, Germs, and Steel, but dolphins are the Rambos of the sea.
I couldn’t possibly predict how anyone would call that particular contest! :)
If dolphins are the Rambos of the sea, what are killer whales?
The big Russian guy?
They’re the heavies. They work for the Rambos. I mean… I can’t remember if Rambo was an officer or not, but he was clever as well as dangerous, yes? He wasn’t really good at taking orders?
I think it would be interesting if the team took up the Navajo suggestion and became the Code Talkers. These are people worth remembering, and some of them, at least, liked the team.
I don’t know if the team itself wants to wade into that… remaining affiliated with any Native American imagery at all. How would they be shown? In tribal dress? Or in suits?????
But it might be good PR, and I’d personally think it was great if young Americans learned what Code Talkers were.
Does anyone else have a thought on that suggestion?
I grew up on an Indian Reservation. The Indians I know could care less about this, or are against it. Most are Kansas City Chiefs fans and wear the Chief’s gear when the season is on. They actually laugh at us when we call them “Natives”. Their high school mascot are “The Indians”.
Black Hawk was an individual chief, not a tribe.
“Chicago” on the other hand, has to go. It is the English mangling of the French literation of the Ojibwa phrase “shika:konk” : “skunk place.” It might also be from the Fox “sheka:ko:heki” or “wild leek.” I prefer the former. It’s funnier.
Hmm … the Skunk Place Bears. That would explain the odor around Soldier Field, anyway.