Washington Redskins Appropriation Of Native American Culture

In the collective effort of the American masses to become increasingly politically correct and sensitive of human rights, there has been much debate regarding the Washington Redskins appropriation of Native American culture in their team name and logo. Other sports teams Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs also use race and ethnicity derived iconography that some believe also belittles the sordid legacy of the near extermination of American Indians by white colonist-invaders. However, the Redskins seem to garner more attention and controversy in recent times due to the interesting decision of the US Patent and Trademark office to revoke the Redskins’ team name. According to MSNBC reports, “The United States Patent and Trademark Office…cancelled

six federal trademark registrations for the Washington Redskins and referred to the football team’s name as ‘disparaging to Native Americans.’ As a result, the term cannot be trademarked under federal law that bans the protection of offensive language (Richinik, p1)”
Some may muse, like the petulant Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet ”: however, is the history of this nation’s brutal and, indeed, unparalleled degrees of racism the “rose” that blooms “sweet”? Teri P, the online moniker of a Huffington Post online commenter, regards the use of Washington’s racially charged team name and caricatured logo, as “flaunting our [America’s] genocide” and perhaps he is not out of bounds with the boldness of his statement. Statistics reveal a reported 90% of Americans “see no problem” with the team’s moniker, and HuffingtonPost reports that official Redskins and NFL spokespersons approve the use of the name as “a strong, positive, and respectful image” and one that allegedly “originated as a Native American expression of solidarity (Associated Press, p1).” However, the Oneida Indian Nation stand strongly on the belief that the widespread perpetuation by majority white Americans of the cavalier support of this stereotypical team name and logo allows “the team’s billionaire owner to keep profiting off the denigration and dehumanization of Native Americans (Richinick, p2).”
Kimberly A Pace, in her coverage and analysis of the Redskins patent case, brings to mind some sobering questions in the cold context of America’s dark past of racial intolerance and oppression, including the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of stolen Africans, the forced labor and internment of Asian immigrants, and even America’s good Protestant tradition of Anti-Semitism:
Although names such as “New Jersey Fighting Jews” or the “New York Negroes” might seem unrealistic in contemporary society, there are ethnic groups still held out for public ridicule as team mascots. Why would it be socially repugnant to name a team the “New York Negroes” but not to name one the “Cleveland Indians?” Worse yet, could there be a team names the “New York Niggers?” Isn’t that just the racial equivalent of the “Washington Redskins?” (Pace, p1)
Symbols (including racial epithets) are highly subjective, their interpretation intimate and unambiguously personal, yet symbols are somehow understood through a collective sub[un]conscious.

Psychologist Carl Jung pioneered theories on archetypes and archetypal symbolic language that is recognized across cultures by the social collective through images and experiences similarly recognizable and transcendent of race, language, and culture. Indeed, someone with no awareness of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II, might see a six pointed star on the front of a blue-and-white striped t-shirt as having no significance, or as being “just a t-shirt.” Yet for someone of Jewish heritage, the sight would have a terribly poignant resonance, a cultural memory of oppression attached. Such may be the case for Native Americans and their perception of the Washington Redskins’ team name and Brand symbols. For those who have inherited the Native American history of inhuman savagery at the hands of Europeans and early white Americans—including slaughter, servitude, displacement, forced relocation, and flagrant theft and desecration of their entire land—the somber face of the painted Chief on Redskin helmets may be a painful reminder of the stoic faces of their ancestral tribal fathers who tried to calmly and civilly exchange with the strange European invaders and unknowingly handed their entire race into the ravaging and raging clutches of irreverent, blood-land-and-gold-thirsty colonizers. The term Redskin may indeed evoke images of their Native tribal ancestors’ red blood spilled into the shamed earth that was once exclusively their paradise. Their collective subconscious, through the generations, retains and re-members these shattered and shattering memories—the Native Americans scarcely left alive today must condescend to marginal and invisible lives where their race has been so near-completely wiped out that many Americans forget they even exist and, indeed, they become

somewhat mythical and, sadly, seen fit to be caricatured as mascots and logos.
In this era of increased social tolerance and increased punishment of hate crimes and other forms of prejudice, one may wonder if there’s such a thing as “too politically correct.” The nation’s collective must stop to consider whether the Redskins symbol is actually a fun but respectful emblem offering subtle acknowledgement of the Native Americans’ place in history. Or should the Redskins symbol be considered a nasty glorification of a racial stereotype, an image reminding the “good old boys,” America’s WASP patriots, of the golden days when they terrorized, sterilized, and marginalized to near nonexistence an entire subgroup of the human species. Or, finally, should the symbol—and the controversy surrounding it—merely remind Americans that this country still has a long way to go in learning tolerance, a long way even for its African American president, Gay and Transgender Civil Rights, and all.