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andy7171 wrote:The day they change their name is the day I become a Ravens fan.

grizzaholic wrote:Changing their name is wrong and just pushes the ULTRA-PC culture that the US has become accustomed to....just plain wrong

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/20 ... e-redskins" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



The drive to change the Washington Redskins' name will take a significant step forward when D.C. Council member David Grosso introduces a resolution calling for the team to eliminate what he calls it "a derogatory, racist" moniker.

TheDancinMonarch wrote:As soon as President Obama gets his hometown hockey team to change their name and logo then we can discuss the Redskins doing the same.

JayJ79 wrote:how about them Nantucket Negros......
(hey, if we're naming teams off of skin color slang.....)

ASUG8 wrote:The mayor is black, this pothead Grosso guy is white. Is there a lot of Native American backlash against this, or is it simply implied guilt for colonizing their country and putting them on reservations?

Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, 51, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykotsmovi, Ariz., and an avid devotee of the Atlanta Braves. "I don't see anything wrong with Indian nicknames as long as they're not meant to be derogatory. Some tribal schools on Arizona reservations use Indians as a nickname themselves. The Phoenix Indian High School's newspaper is The Redskin. I don't mind the tomahawk chop. It's all in good fun. This is sports, after all. In my living room, I'll be watching a Braves game and occasionally do the chop."

Native American activists dismiss such opinion as misguided ("There are happy campers on every plantation," says Suzan Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, an Indian-rights organization based in Washington, D.C.) or as evidence that Native Americans' self-esteem has fallen so low that they don't even know when they're being insulted. American Indians -- unlike, say, the Irish Catholics who founded Notre Dame and named its teams the Fighting Irish -- had no hand in creating most of the teams that use their names; their identities were plucked from them wholesale and used for frivolous purposes, like firing up fans at ball games.

"This is no honor," says Michael Yellow Bird, an associate professor of social work at Arizona State. "We lost our land, we lost our languages, we lost our children. Proportionately speaking, indigenous peoples [in the U.S.] are incarcerated more than any other group, we have more racial violence perpetrated upon us, and we are forgotten. If people think this is how to honor us, then colonization has really taken hold."...

While those who support names such as Seminoles (Florida State) and Braves can argue that the words celebrate Native American traditions, applying that claim to the Redskins is absurd. Nevertheless, Redskins vice president Karl Swanson says the name "symbolizes courage, dignity and leadership and has always been employed in that manner" -- conveniently ignoring the fact that in popular usage dating back four centuries, the word has been a slur based on skin color. Swanson trots out research that traces the term redskin to Native Americans' custom of daubing on red paint before battle. Many experts on Native American history point out that the red paint was used not for war but for burial, and that the word redskin was first used by whites who paid and received bounties for dead Indians. "If you research the origin of redskin, no one would want that associated with his team," says pro golfer Notah Begay III, who is half Navajo and half Pueblo. "Trading-post owners used to offer rewards for Indian scalps. Signs would say something like, 'Redskin scalps, worth so much.'"...

It resonates when an Olympic hero and former Marine Corps captain such as Mills, who speaks out against Indian names and mascots at schools around the country, insists that a team named Redskins in the capital of the nation that committed genocide against Native Americans is the equivalent of a soccer team in Germany being called the Berlin Kikes. Says Mills, "Our truth is, redskin is tied to the murder of indigenous people."

89Hen wrote:

JayJ79 wrote:how about them Nantucket Negros......
(hey, if we're naming teams off of skin color slang.....)

I'm defintely not a big PC supporter, but in this case, I honestly don't know how people can defend the name Redskins.

UNI88 wrote:

89Hen wrote: I'm defintely not a big PC supporter, but in this case, I honestly don't know how people can defend the name Redskins.

I'm with 89 on this one. I don't have a problem with names like Sioux, Seminoles, etc. Having a Native American tribe as a nickname/mascot isn't that much different than a European ethnic group like Vikings, Flying Dutchmen, Vandals, Fighting Irish, etc.

Redskins is a derogatory term and is similar to (but not quite the same as) Micks, Wops, Guineas, Dagos, Krauts, etc. Would Americans of Irish decent be happy about the Notre Dame Fighting Micks?

UNI88 wrote:Would Americans of Irish decent be happy about the Notre Dame Fighting Micks?

ASUG8 wrote:It probably is the right thing to do, but it just seems that it should be instigated by someone or some group that is genuinely offended by it.

alyssa wrote:I said something about this in one of my earlier posts. I've written an unpublished book about what mascots really mean. It is wrong to use the "R" word for it is bad medicine. It is the worst word to use against us. It is a death word. It has to do with skinning us and selling the skins for money.
I'm not looking up my post on another thread.
I hate talking about the subject now because of the defiance caused by ignorance and hated etc.
I've lost many relationships over this and I know many persons don't like me for standing up for my Indigenous peoples over the way we are treated. Far too many of our own peoples don't even know when they are being offended because of the forced changes in the past that continue to have hold on too many of us today. I'm glad my immediate family is smart and educated and understands.

One of my distant grandmothers was forced from her homeland when young, but old enough to remember, to Oklahoma. Then she was murdered in the 1890s by government men when the government came to take her reservation land away from her and she stood up to them to fight them. Of course, she was labeled an "upriser". It was in Bogey Depot, Oklahoma. The land was changed from reservation land to allotments in order to shrink the American Indians' land and give more to settlers. This made it so that many of her relatives ran in fear from the government men and did not sign the Dawes Roll. Today one cannot be a member of one of the tribes by law if an ancestor did not sign the roll. So now you have so many persons with Indigenous bloodlines that cannot be Indian by law because of frightened or ashamed ancestors who did not sign the roll. I'm lucky that I belong to another tribe though where we are all wealthy. The thing is there are not many of us left, even when it is someone like me, a mixed blood person.

"Eracism".

TheDancinMonarch wrote:As soon as President Obama gets his hometown hockey team to change their name and logo then we can discuss the Redskins doing the same.