The Clear Voice of the Left: Dept. of Sports

Post columinst Mike Wise unleashes his inner Ward Churchill to announce opposition to the use of the name "Redskins" for D.C.'s NFL team. In doing so he's relied too heavily on activist Suzan Shown Harjo, whose sensitivity to inter-ethnic respect can be sampled in columns like The Whiteman and the Disease: the craziness and greed of the Whiteman that made him hate us because he did bad things to us is now a disease that blankets much of the legal system and popular culture...

Harjo is a plaintiff in the recently revived trademark case against the Redskins, so it's natural to interview her as a source for this column. But Wise should have placed a few more phone calls before retailing Harjo's story:

If the term "Redskins" was first used in the late 1580s, as the team says, it was also used when Europeans introduced commercial scalping to North America. Ask Suzan Harjo, the Cheyenne and Muskogee writer who is the lead plaintiff in a trademark lawsuit against the team dating from 1992.

In a telephone interview and a recent article, she gives a much more disturbing historical description than the one the team wants you to believe:

"When they started paying bounties for Indian bodies and Indian skulls as proof of an Indian kill, the trappers and mercenaries would come in with wagons full of men, women and children's bodies and with gunny sacks of heads. It became a transportation and storage problem, so bounty payers began to pay for scalps in lieu of skulls and bloody red skins in lieu of bodies."

Disturbing, yes, but is it true? Probably not. Houghton Mifflin's online Encyclopedia of North American Indians rejects the notion of Europeans introducing what Wise calls commercial scalping, or any scalping at all, a custom Europeans discovered on their arrival.  Wikipedia--in  an entry at risk of being changed after the latest revival of this dispute--explicitly rejects derivation of the word from  "bloody red skins" ("a myth"), preferring the customary and well-founded idea that it was an allusion to the supposed color of Indians' skin. These references stretch back hundreds of years, as established by the Oxford English Dictionary, accurately quoted here.  The Redskin media guide's position that it refers to reddish painting has also been in circulation, and here's one reference  to that.

But blood-stained victims? Heck, even Marc Fisher found academics shooting down Harjo's idea, writing here here in a public forum about a column in 2002:

While I spoke to many people—Indians and non—who oppose the Redskins name, and I have quoted them at length in previous columns on the same issue, I did not do so in this most recent column because those viewpoints are rather thoroughly discredited. For example, there is no evidence backing up the claim that the name stems from the scalping of Indians. All six of the academics I consulted with said they have been unable to find any evidence to back that notion.

Harjo and other figures from the left have been promoting these ideas for awhile, but even a columnist isn't obliged to take them at face value. So pardon me if I'm skeptical about claims that coach William Lone Star Dietz wasn't of Indian ancestry--or wondering what difference that makes if owner George Marshall thought he was.

For me, a few alarms would have gone off after reading columns like this, about the aforementioned Whiteman Disease:

First, the Whiteman is no longer solely white or a man or a descendant of someone who killed our grandpas or stole our grandmas' lands.

Second, the craziness and greed of the Whiteman that made him hate us because he did bad things to us is now a disease that blankets much of the legal system and popular culture, and infects many who never met us, historically or today.

Third, a manifestation of this pathology is that the new whiteman (a.k.a., the Disease) must keep us in our place. Socially and economically, this means anywhere below everyone else's rung of the ladder. Physically, it means any place or thing the Disease does not want for itself. No matter how many times a Native nation or person may move to accommodate it, eventually the new whiteman will covet the new place.

The Disease will want not only the new place, but will desire what we do there - pray or paint or dance or sing - and will try to control our behavior. Once it controls our behavior, it will assume the reigns of our lives and assume our very identity.

Why does it do this? On the theory that, once in positions of power, we will be as bad to the new whiteman as the Whiteman has been to us. Of course, that is not our history or experience, but the new whiteman still takes it as fact that he must control us or become us, or both.

Wise is entitled to whatever agitprop he prefers, and at least Harjo is being inclusive: Whiteman--It's Not Just For Whites Anymore! But if Wise is interested in persuading people, he's better off basing his appeal on facts that are, you know, factual. Which may be why he skated so quickly past this one:

The most disturbing part is, the Redskins annually present data rationalizing their callous insistence on keeping the name, putting poll numbers to support their cause in their own news releases, as if to say, "See, we have Indian friends."

Lots. AP via MSNBC last year:

WASHINGTON - A poll of American Indians found that an overwhelming majority of them are not bothered by the name of the Washington Redskins.

Only 9 percent of those polled said the name of the NFL team is “offensive,” while 90 percent said it’s acceptable, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey, released Friday...

End the discussion? No. It just helps make an intelligent discussion possible.

Update: Linked to Wizbang's generous Carnival of Trackbacks

 

Comments

[Rich]

There is a certain amount of truth in what you say for other names -- Seminoles, Illini, etc. However, I dare any white guy to walk onto a Native American reservation and start calling the folks there "redskins" -- then tell me it's not a bad word.