I never quite understood the white compulsion to pretend to be Indians in the first place. Kind of a weird pathology worthy of study in its own right. But aside from the argument that the names are really honoring natives, that has not been the historical legacy. The real legacy behind these names has clearly been racist mockery in many cases along the lines of the Cleveland Indians's traditional & isulting mascot.

The only downside to a ban will be the resulting rush to equal-opportunity-offendness that will see bans on "Vikings," "Highlanders," "Spartans," and other ethinically-linked names.

Jamais... Just to play devil's advocate a bit here: Why not bar the use of all ethnic names? I'm relatively sure that modern Scandinavians don't think they bear much in common with absurd caricatures of Vikings.

James Vu, your last paragraph is exactly the answer to the question in your first. It is no more a "white" pathology to want to have a mascot for your school or team be a warrior, than it is to be a trojan, a spartan, a viking, a cowboy, etc.

It is a unifying rallying image, concept... i.e. mascot which to group (school, team) can use as an identifier for themselves in the efforts, fights, etc. It isn't a "white" thing, it is a "human" thing. It is the same reason why there are native American tribes in the first place. Being a tribe, a team, a people. Even if on the more superficial or less consequential level of a sports team.

To simply label it as a white pathology or conversely white guilt is just as stupid and contrived a pigeon hole to put it into as what you claim is a pathology.

I went to Birmingham HS in Van Nuys CA, formerly the home of the Braves. From wiki: The original name of the sports teams were the Braves; this name was changed to the Patriots in the late 1990s when the LAUSD Board of Education voted to do away with team mascots depicting native Americans due to the threat of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. This was in spite of the fact the school was dedicated by Jay Silverheels (Tonto) and five gathered Native-American Chiefs from the San Fernando Valley Indian Council. For more on the lawsuit and LAUSD's decision to change the name: http://www.iwchildren.org/lacourtban.htm

I was never interested in sports when I went there (grad 1975) but I always considered myself a Brave. The term was used with dignity and reverence. The current name, Patriots, just seems so pathetic.

So we should bar the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame form playing at Autzen Stadium because it is an ethnic (some would rightly say negative stereotype one at that).

So are we Americans self-loathing to have the New England Patriots? What about the Dallas Cowboys? Will PETS be up in arms because of animal mascots?

While I think racist cartoon logos and demeaning mascots should be changed, I think we should all also not look for ways to become offended. I think our actual policies of tribal sovereignty and water rights, etc. should be what gets addressed, not the entirely superfluous ones like team mascots. But leave it to people to find the entirely wrong things to be offended about. Getting rid of some mascots will do nothing to actually address real racism, real inequality, redress real problems.

My 2/100ths of a dollar at any rate.

Ugh...

Will PETA be up in arms because of animal mascots?

It seems to me that there are decent and honorable ways to use mascots - and offensive and demeaning ways.

And it's not just about the names, though "Redskins" is about offensive as it gets. It's also about the logos. The "Chief Wahoo" character for the Cleveland Indians is what's offensive about their usage.

The absurd little drunken leprechaun that runs around at Notre Dame games seems especially offensive (though I don't blame him for being drunk these days).

But I think it's possible to do it right.

The Florida State Seminoles generally have it right. They use the name of a local tribe in an honorable way. They've got permission from that tribe. The mascot rides a horse, wears historically accurate garb, and he's honored as a warrior, not a racist caricature. Sure, it's anachronistic (Native Americans don't much ride horses into battle these days) but it's historically on point.

I don't think it makes sense to have an all-or-nothing ban. After all, should a tribal college - like Haskell Indian Nations University - be barred from calling themselves "The Fightin' Indians"?

Well Raul, I have seen duck on the menu at more than a few restaurants, so thew U of O better be getting ready to shelved Donald Duck as their mascot. Furthermore, Donald was a dunderhead and often the butt of the jokes in Disney cartoons, so not just a duck, which can on tonight's menu, but a stupid one often on the receiving end of pranks and a bit of a rascal to boot.

What about the name of the city of Seattle? Is that racist too? Tacoma? Klamath?

I agree with Kari up-thread. There are good ways to have a mascot or a name of a place which are derived from a people, and bad ways. It all depends on context, consent and execution.

I think we can agree on principle about a few points and then scratch our heads about the remedy. The issue in all of these cases is context. For the most part, native American imagery is appropriated by non-natives, and herein lies a lot of the difficulty. The Minnesota Vikings honors a local hereditary symbol, as does the leprechaun and name "Fighting Irish." (An old-school New Englander I work with says "we all rooted for Notre Dame" because of the thick Irish Catholic roots.) If you're a small community of African immigrants and you dub your local high school the Zulus, it's different than if you're a racially-insensitive lily-white school who uses a pejorative "Zulu" as your mascot. And then of course there's the tweener like the FSU Seminoles, where the school has appropriated a symbol that the school, while not natively connected, actually honors.

For me, the remedy should be social. Chief Wahoo and the accompanying mascot are no less racist than the images used to debase blacks 100 years ago (same goes for the odious "Redskins"). Legal opprobrium doesn't fix the problem, it buries it. It's really unsatisfying, but I think things like this conversation are the most effective way, long term, of addressing the underlying racist impulse.

I agree with Kari on this one. There are right ways and wrong ways of doing it.

My home school district is the Santa Fe Indians. That region of the Texas Gulf Coast used to be heavily inhabited by Native American Indians. The funny thing is that the area was actually sold as opposed to stolen. The original name of the main part of the town, Alta Loma, comes from the words the Indians used to describe the area. It had been translated into Spanish (not surprising since that happened with many names in the state) which meant "high hill."

It was actually their joke on the "white man" since the area is mostly under sea level and is filled with bayous and swamps (my family home abuts a bayou) and alligators in the area isn't abnormal (there's Alligator Bay and Alligator Bayou nearby).

Our mascot was of an Indian male's head with a headdress. When a full body image was used, they were usually standing alone or with a spear in a relaxed stance. They never looked violent. They were never made to look ridiculous.

There were even rules against doing this in anything made for the school, like banners for football games. No talk of scalping the other team or anything like that.

I think instead of fighting against all uses, we should first look for inappropriate uses. That school should then be educated as how to use the images properly. Then we should look at using the pride that goes along with having an ethnic based mascot to give the students (and the community!) a greater appreciation and knowledge about the culture their mascot comes from.

Instead of making this a negative, how about we make it a learning experience?

Posted by: Jeff Alworth | Oct 23, 2007 4:12:05 PM The Minnesota Vikings honors a local hereditary symbol

And PSUs Vikings? (there re numerious schools and teams that have no connection to Minesota which use VIkings as there mascot.

But I agree with your larger point in your post. Same with Jenni's post. I think we are all basically saying the same thing, that context and usage are the important thing, and blanket bans do not really solve anything.

The absurd little drunken leprechaun that runs around at Notre Dame games seems especially offensive (though I don't blame him for being drunk these days).

Yet another example of Kari's blatant USC bias underlying his rhetoric. Time and time again BlueOregon has slandered USC opponents with the facade of being neutral, when in reality BlueO is the Death Star of the USC Empire. I wouldn't be surprised to see Kari as rogue of the week again.

My question to Kari is this: USC or Oregon this weekend?

If we are going to delve into the naming of things after native american tribes, what about the long running tradition of naming weapon systems after native American tribes or tribal weapons?

Iroquois scout helicopter Blackhawk helicopter Apache attack helicopter Tomahawk cruise missile Comanche attack helicopter (program now cancelled) Chinook cargo helicopter Shawnee multi-use helicopter (now retired) Choctaw multi-use helicopter (now retired) Chickasaw multi-use helicopter (now retired) Cayuse multi-use helicopter Sioux multi-use helicopter (the ones used in MAS*H) Longbow Hellfire missile system on the Apache helicopter

I'm relatively sure that modern Scandinavians don't think they bear much in common with absurd caricatures of Vikings.

Actually Kari they tend to love it. I took Minnesota Vikings jerseys as presents when I visited frineds in Norway & they were fought over. But no one thinks of modern Norweigians as savage slave-trading pirates. I doubt Notre Dame's drunken leprechaun would be acceptable today if Irish in American felt as discriminated against as as they once were. Indians (a term I use because I've heard an Indian utter the term "Native American") still face severe image problems, and they have a legitimate beef with being parodied.

And PSUs Vikings? (there re numerious schools and teams that have no connection to Minesota which use VIkings as there mascot

I don't know the history of the PSU mascot name. It's worth noting that Viking is both a non-specific reference (Scandanavian plus--not just Norweigans, say) and no longer extant. It's more akin to the Aztecs in that latter way.

Hey Nick! Quit stealing my material!

And PSUs Vikings? (there re numerious schools and teams that have no connection to Minesota which use VIkings as there mascot.

Actually, for what it's worth, Oregon has the largest concentration of Scandinavians outside of Minnesota and Wisconsin. There's an annual Scandinavian festival (Scanfair, I think?) that's held at PSU. There are churches, and festivals, and fraternal organizations, and Saturday language academies all over this town.

PSU also has a Scandinavian Languages department. Last I checked, Portland State and the University of Minnesota are the only two universities in America that teach Finnish. I got a B+, even though I'm a native speaker. It did get me out of my foreign language requirement at USC.

Full disclosure: My mom was named Scandinavian of the Year by the heritage foundation this year. She's pretty cool.

Spartans ... don't exist any more

Don't tell my maternal cousins that, pal.

So that's where Kari comes from.

When I studied U.S. labor & working class history in grad school it came up somewhere along the line that Astoria may be the only city in the U.S. where the major lines of ethnic conflict were among different groups of Scandinavian immigrants. It got worse after the Russian Revolution when the Communists split from Debs' Socialist Party. Nearly all the Finns became Communists (Gus Hall was/is? of Finnish origin) while the Norwegians & Swedes mostly stayed Socialist.

Don't forget the Boston Celtics' name and dapper leprauchan "mascot", who is kind an Irish reappropriation of racist nativist cartoons from the 19th c. -- but that "pride" also has its associations with Boston's racisms, Red Auerbach's calculated policy of keeping a high proportion of white players on the team, Tom Yawkey's Red Sox' nearly last place finish in baseball integration & racist fan self-destruction in treatment of black players (Reggie Smith's always stellar batting average rose 20 points a year after he moved to St. Louis) -- curse of the Bambino or curse of the bigots?

I'm not sure I buy Jeff's "social remedy" argument. It's a bit too close to the common argument against civil rights laws in the 1950s & 1960s that "you can't legislate morality" and that the laws wouldn't change anything unless long as peoples hearts and minds changed. That actually proved to be quite wrong. Turns out you can make people adapt and pretty soon it's normal.

Actually having these debates about such names is exactly part of a social remedy.

I'm all for stopping naming weapons after Indian peoples. Also automobiles and trucks. Although I did find it a bit interesting when a European automaker (Volkswagen) did the same thing from another colonial context with the Tuareg.

The idea of a Florida Seminole on a horse is pretty funny. Horses were not a big part of historic Seminole culture, though probably adapted by that segment who were forced to move to what became Oklahoma.

The place-name point is interesting -- don't stop with Seattle & Tacoma, Oregon is a (mis)rendering of a Native name for the Columbia River if I'm not mistaken, given at time when "the Oregon Country" referred to most of the Columbia watershed. Of course, some would argue that Columbia is pretty offensive.

As for mascots, n.b. that the story reports abuses by OPPOSING teams as well as home teams.

Back to the social attitude change thing. In the town in Massachusetts (n.b. Indian name -- state seal has an Indian standing with a bow I think -- original version had the slogan "Come Over and Help Us" removed some time ago -- when I was a kid the Mass Turnpike symbol was a Pilgrima hat with an arrow through it, they removed the arrow when Dukakis was governor I think) where I grew up for many years the owner of a local Ford dealership would color his whole body with something that produced a kind of coppery red color, with an effect something like bad fake tanning lotion only darker, and ride bareback on a horse wearing a loincloth, mocassins and a big Plains Indian type headress, and ride in the Fourth of July parade.

For long years he was a well-known and popular figure in this garb, a looked-for regularity in the parade along with the bagpipe band, the venerable lady Republican state senator in the open car, and other amusements. Eventually he got too old and his son took over the role, along with the dealership. At some point people started to notice how royally f'd up this was, the resemblance to blackface minstrelsy etc., and about 10 years ago he was eased out of the parade, completely bewildered because of course he didn't mean anything bad by it.

There are several aspects to this. One is that intentions aren't the same as effects. Another is the shift in popular views from complete, naive, deeply racist obliviousness on the part of Needhamites to a level of discomfort that led the parade organizers to put a stop to it -- that awareness almost certainly arose because of Native American agitation against racist caricatures and appropriations.

But there may also be a back story -- somewhere I've seen a photo from ca. 1960 with a high school booster rally & a big banner saying "From Redmen to Rockets". When I got to high school in the 1970s the school's teams name was the Rockets -- I have a speculation that it had been the Redmen at some point, and got changed to Rockets in the age of Nike missile sites (Greek goddess), Sputnik and the space race, though I haven't pinned it down yet (old Needham Times' being low on the digitization priority list).

If that's right, the photo is interesting because it looks like the name change was negotiated in part by choosing a new one that could be made exciting, modern, forward-looking etc. Might even be a model of an approach... But this might be wishful thinking on my part.

A reference: Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, Yale U. Press, 1998.

A description:

The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts are just a few examples of the American tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles. This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Indians to shape national identity, in different eras -- and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual.At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence -- for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises.Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identifies that have never been fully secure."Playing Indian will help the reader understand why, from the revellers at Merrymount to the Berkeley tribes of the 1960s, every oppositional current in America has foundits way to the people called 'Indians, ' and why, though (as D. H. Lawrence said.) the Red Indians will never again possess the broad lands of America, their spirit will".

-- Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White and coeditor of Race Traitor

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Italian caricatures don't excuse Indian ones. Would you put a lawn jockey in front of your house?

And it's not like Italians have never complained of popular culture stereotypes, now, is it? Remember when Richard "law and order" Nixon wouldn't allow the use of the terms "mafia" and "la Cosa Nostra" in federal discussions of organized crime, because of pressure from ethnic organizations and the tendency of Italians to vote Republican in the old urban machine politics?

Whoa, Chris, don't take Red down with you: he was a pioneer in integration. He selected the first black player in the draft in 1950; in 63 it was the first all-black starting five and he left Bill Russell with the coaching job when he left--the first black coach in the NBA. Auerbach was a pioneer in civil rights.