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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
Lovely story with your grandmother. I’m saddened by this. That is a noble emblem. I find nothing derogatory about the term redskin. If anything we are honoring the native Americans. From now on I will call them the Washington Wussies. It also apropos for the city of politics.
LOL, it was hilarious. He should do that again.
Somebody remind me, I must have missed the new stories: Which of the companies pressuring the Redskins for a name change has announced plans to put a factory, warehouse, customer service operation, or other facility on a Native American reservation that badly needs the jobs?
When this was first instigated, The Washington Post expected to lead the PC charge. They paid for a national poll of Native Americans who turned out to be overwhelmingly indifferent and of those who actually cared more favored the name than opposed it. That kinda took the wind outta the Post’s sails and Snyder then told everybody to buzz off. A professional Indian/casino executive had tried to make the case that he spoke for all Native Americans and the poll ended that.
This was and still is solely a matter of concern for woke white liberals.
Apparently FedEx (who bought the naming rights to the stadium) demanded a name change which baffles me. If FedEx lost all of their Antifa/BLM customers would that even be measurable? Who you gonna call if you don’t use FedEx–it has an overwhelmingly dominant market position. The extent to which corporate types are bending over and taking it from Twitter mobs is amazing to me.
The next phase will be whether the NFL forbids Skins gear at games and enforces it at the gate like they do with non-authentic NFL gear. That will be fun.
The stadium location makes it tough for woke mobs to stand outside to try to harass residual racists wearing racist pre-woke fan attire. And a significant percentage of the unwoke Skins fans are African-American so that could be bad optics for the Resistance/Revolution/Moron Festival. And enough fans are deeply upset about this so there could be some serious violence.
I am so old I can remember when the Redskins bandmembers all wore feathered headdresses and the cheerleaders dressed like the Land O Lakes Indian woman but with shorter skirts. Maybe Dan Snyder could sell to a bona fide Native American ownership group (with vastly better personnel/draft/talent-spotting skills) that will bring all that old stuff back and tell the white eyes to stuff it when they get their panties in a bunch about it.
I’d love to hear about what that was like. Have you written about your childhood on Ricochet?
How is “cracker” a racial slur? I believe it only refers to white people, so it cannot by definition be a racial slur.
The way I heard it, the term “cracker” comes from the Florida cattle ranches of old and refers to the crack of the bullwhip the cowboys used when moving the herd. Hence the term ‘Florida cracker’.
Native Americans who aren’t offended by sports logos don’t get a say in this debate for the same reason that Native Americans in general don’t really get much of a say in any other debate: They aren’t a big enough market segment for their collective opinion to matter. They aren’t going to swing any elections or reduce FedEx’s revenue, so it doesn’t matter what they think.
You haven’t studied your Wokespeak dictionary enough. By definition it cannot be racist, but it can still be racial.
I only briefly lived in Florida as a child (mid-1960s). But during my time there I was told that “cracker” or “Florida cracker” was a reference to an ignorant or stupid, and bigoted, rural white man, and was generally considered an insult, often intended to imply mental retardation.
According to Wikipedia, it was originally an 18th century term for very poor white immigrants.
Another possible etmology is that it was an Elizabethan-era word for a loudmouth or braggart. It is used this way by Shakespeare in King John:
And also in a letter to the Eart of Dartmouth:
This use of the word cracker survives in modern English in the phrase “to crack a joke”.
This etymology also makes cracker a literal synonym for fool, since fool comes from the Latin follis which means bellows. i.e. a windbag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(term)
I love that this has moved towards the etymology of “cracker”!
I think the term ‘cracker’ is an ethnic slur that originated to describe ‘border Scots’ many of whom tried to make a living in the hills and lowlands of Scotland. I suspect they exhibited much mobility required by this endeavor thus meeting new people and making up stories. Then many of them were induced to go to Ulster in the 17th century as tenant farmers under English landlords. In the 18th century with those English landlords raising rents, many of these Crackers, now known as Ulster-Scots went to the English colonies in America. A good number of those Crackers, now frequently termed Scots-Irish, settled on the frontiers and in the Appalachians, facing the French colonists and the Native American Indians. They proved themselves good hunters , fighters, and patriots in all American conflicts. They have frequently been called Crackers even to this day.
@ Lois Lane asks about an image to go along with the Code Talkers name. Here’s one image they themselves have raised:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roadsideamerica.com%2Ftip%2F30647&psig=AOvVaw0dbi1UJ1hEVQfYxIet6PQw&ust=1594838583463000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCPiAju6yzeoCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
Some of my ancestors were “cattle reallocation specialists.”
And this required frequent ancestor relocation.
There’s a small movement afoot to change the name of the Ottawa River to the Kitchissippi River, because very few members of the Odawa people actually resided in the Ottawa Valley, which was actually dominated by the Algonquins and they called the river Kichi Sipi (“great river”). So, one group of indigenous people is to be cancelled in favour of a different group of indigenous people. Genius!
Big companies are more afraid of revolts by their employees than they are afraid of consumer boycotts.
https://www.marketingbs.com/post/advertising-boycotts-and-mascots
Or maybe forbid naming of rivers and other natural landmarks as impermissible forms of species supremacism. Do trout or beavers use names for rivers?
Yes, but it would violate the CoC to repeat them.
Eventually, they relocated all the way over here.
Bought their own cattle, though.
Ooh ooh ooh, I got another one!
The Washington Conspiracy
(Technically, every sports team meets the dictionary definition of a conspiracy.)
Stick with me kid. I got a million of ’em.
Yes disappointed w/ Fred Smith.
Read Albion’s Seed for great information on the various groups that settled the Eastern US including these border people.
The model for the Redskin’s logo was a Blackfoot Chief from Montana
That is really great to know!