The Final Call

Racist sports mascots condemned

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WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - A new law has been introduced which would ban the trademark of the term “redskins” and other racist language against Native Americans among sports teams logos and nicknames.

The term “redskins” actually refers to the Indian skins and body parts—including genitalia—that bounty hunters had to show in order to receive payment for killing Indians, attorney Suzan Shown Harjo told The Final Call.

The bill, called the Non-Disparagement of Native American Persons or Peoples in Trademark Registration Act of 2013, if passed, would strip the Washington football team of its trademarked name and put a stop to its exclusive profiteering from using the racist slur in its logo on sweatshirts, tee shirts, caps, coffee mugs and dozens of other products flooding the market. The bill would also prohibit any future trademarks that use the offensive term.

It was introduced in the House of Representatives March 21, by Del. Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa) and co-sponsored by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Del. Donna Christenson (D-Virgin Islands), and Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Karen Bass (D-Calif.), John Lewis (D-Ga), Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), Michael Honda (D-Calif.). and co-chairs of the Congressional Native American Caucus Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.).

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee), the president of The Morning Star Institute, celebrated the introduction of the bill. “It’s wonderful to have such distinguished and courageous members of Congress stand up for us to oppose this indefensible racial epithet. I hope this helps to open the eyes of those who have not seen or who have refused to see the harm this does to our young people,” she said, according to Indian Country Today Media Network.

The Washington National Football League’s team’s name “is patently offensive, disparaging and demeaning and perpetrates a centuries-old stereotype,” against Native people according to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI).

The legislation—which may not even get a hearing, let alone a vote in the Republican controlled House—adds to the momentum generated earlier this year when a group of Native petitioners argued in a courtroom at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Trial and Appeal Board March 7, challenging the team name “Redskins,” and when the National Museum of the American Indian held an all-day symposium in February on the use of racist names and logos in sports.

The Indian petitioners went head to head before three administrative law judges against the Washington team and the National Football League in an effort to have the name declared offensive and to strip the team of its exclusive right to the name and logo, the most lucrative for paraphernalia sales in all of professional sports.

The petitioners argued that the word “redskins” is a racial slur—like “chink” or “wetback” or “raghead” or “the n-word”—and therefore shouldn’t be entitled to federal trademark protection. The team’s lawyers countered that the name is wholly well-intentioned, an inoffensive honorific of sorts, rooted in pride and tradition.

The case was originally decided 14 years ago against the team’s use of the name, in 1999, when the Patent Board said the name could be interpreted as offensive to Native Americans. Trademark law prohibits registration of a name that “may disparage … persons, living or dead … or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.”

But that decision was overturned on appeal because the plaintiffs who brought the case were deemed to have been too old—that is they waited too long to file their charges in 1992. In 2009, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court which sided with the team.

This time the case—Blackhorse v. Pro Football filed by group of six younger Indian plaintiffs who filed the exact same claim against the team in 2006—will likely be decided based on whether the judges rule that “a substantial composite” of Indians find the name disparaging when the team’s trademarks were approved beginning in 1967.

At least 50 Indian organizations, in addition to the National Congress of American Indians, have now called for eliminating all Native American names and mascots in sports. This would include professional teams including the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves in Major League Baseball; the Washington and Kansas City Chiefs in the NFL; and the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks, among others.

Since 1968 when Native groups began urging high schools and colleges to voluntarily drop names tied to Native Americans, hundreds of schools have discontinued their use of Indian names and mascots. Current National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) policy prevents schools with American Indian-related names from participating in championship or playoff games.

In 2005, the NCAA listed 18 schools that would not be allowed to participate in postseason play until they changed the “hostile and abusive” American Indian mascots or images they used. Stanford University, St. Bonaventure University, The College of William & Mary and Dartmouth College all dropped their Indian monikers.

Florida State University—the Seminoles—and the University of Utah—the Utes—were given exemptions from the ban since they had worked with the local tribes to gain their permission and to ensure the names and images were used in a respectful manner, according to the IPS news service. Utah had been known as the “Redskins” until the 1970s.

The University of Louisiana-Monroe, Arkansas State University and Southeast Missouri State University are also among the universities that have changed their nicknames from “Indians” in recent years. The sports teams of Miami University in Ohio were known as the “Redskins” until 1997.

The all-day symposium at the new National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, dealing with “racist stereotypes and cultural appropriation in American sports,” and it attracted scholars, activists as well as hundreds of observers.

Former U.S. Sen. Ben “Nighthorse” Campbell, a Democrat turned Republican from Colorado was there and he declared that the four most offensive words ever spoken to him were: “savage,” “squaw,” “buck,” and of course “redskin.” Dictionaries today routinely label “redskin” as often or usually offensive. Until the late 1960s, they typically identified it as a neutral term.

But even the spectacle which is staged before games by Florida State University when their mascot Seminole “Chief Osceola” rides out on a horse and plunges his spear (presumably into the head of an opposing team player), is a lie and a disgrace, according to Dr. E. Newton Jackson, a Washington, D.C. native, who is now associate provost and professor of sport management at the University of North Florida. Dr. Jackson was a panelist at the symposium.

Chief Osceola, was an escaped African slave who ran away to join the tribe in the Great Dismal Swamp. But, according to Dr. Jackson, he could not ride a horse, and when he tried to make peace with America, he was captured and beheaded, and the officer who executed Chief Osceola, kept his head and gave it to his child as a souvenir.

Ironically, some sports fans insist they are “honoring” the bravery of Native Americans by imitating tribal dress and customs which they don’t even understand. Dr. C. Richard King, co-editor of Encyclopedia of Native Americans in Sports, and a professor at Washington State University said at the symposium, those who believe that are simply holding on to a “sincere fiction.” The reality is that objectifying Native people with sports team names in Washington, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Atlanta is ugly and offensive he said.

The term “redskins” actually refers to the Indian skins and body parts—including genitalia—that bounty hunters had to show in order to receive payment for killing Indians, attorney Suzan Shown Harjo told The Final Call at the time of the original suit in which she was the lead plaintiff. “To many Native Americans, the term ‘Redskins’ is associated with the barbaric practice of scalping,” Ms. Harjo said.

“The organizations and Indian tribes stand together to express with one voice their collective opinion on the fundamental fact underlying this case: the ‘Redskins’ trademark is disparaging to Native Americans and perpetuates a centuries-old stereotype of Native Americans as ‘blood-thirsty savages,’ ‘noble warriors,’ and an ethnic group ‘frozen in history,’” NCAI argued in its court papers filed before the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the trademark office has implicitly recognized a shift in how “Redskins” is viewed. From 1996 to 2002, it rejected at least three attempts by the team when it tried to register new brands using the word. In each case, examiners cited disparagement as the grounds for action.

The Cleveland team’s primary logo, called Chief Wahoo, depicts the bright red face of a cartoon caricature American Indian with red feather, headband, toothy smile and large nose. It has been condemned for years, but the team has refused to consider changing it. But on the other hand, the National Basketball Association’s Washington Bullets changed its name to the “Wizards” in 1997 when owner Abe Pollin felt “Bullets” was too violent a name in the city which was often referred to as the “murder capital.”

The Native groups which joined in 2009 in friend of the court filings in the original lawsuit were: The National Congress of American Indians; Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, Oneida Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, and Seminole Nation of Oklahoma; National Indian Education Association; National Indian Youth Council; National Indian Child Welfare Association; American Indian Higher Education Consortium; American Indian College Fund; National Native American Law Student Association; Tulsa Indian Coalition Against Racism; Capitol Area Indian Resources; American Indian Studies ‑ University of Illinois (Urbana Champaign); Native American House, a student services unit at the University of Illinois; Wisconsin Indian Education Association “Indian” Mascot and Logo Taskforce; Native Americans at Dartmouth; Native Americans at Brown; National Institute for Native Leadership in Higher Education; Society of American Indian Government Employees; Native American Journalists Association; Native American Finance Officers Association; Indigenous Democratic Network; Americans for Indian Opportunity; Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras and the International Indian Treaty Council.