We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless or God would not have created us.

He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each. – Geronimo

It’s time to change the name of the Washington Redskins

Clarence Page for the Chicago Tribune. May 4, 2014. Please note the date.

Now that the National Basketball Association has banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life over his racist comments, how about those Washington Redskins?

Sterling is getting punished for insults he uttered in private. Redskins owner Daniel Snyder insults Native American Indians in public every day that he refuses to change the football team’s name.

The dispute continues in the nation’s capital, where 10 members of the Congressional Native American Caucus boosted the cause a year ago with a letter to Snyder, urging him to change the team’s name.

Snyder memorably rebuffed mounting pressure with a resounding declaration that he would “NEVER,” all caps, change the team’s name.

But now that Sterling has made himself so embarrassing that even his fellow NBA team owners are hard pressed to defend him, even as a privacy matter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is encouraged.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat who says his state has 22 tribes, argued in a Senate floor speech after Sterling’s ban that the National Football League should treat racial slurs as seriously as the National Basketball Association treated Sterling’s racism: force the owner of Washington’s professional football team to change its name.

“How long will the NFL continue to do nothing, zero, as one of its teams bears a name that inflicts so much pain on Native Americans?”

Good question. It’s not like a name change can’t be done, as Washington basketball fans know. When the Washington Bullets sounded inappropriate for the pro basketball team in a city suffering through an epidemic of gun-related homicides, the late Abe Pollin in 1997 changed the team’s name to the Wizards.

Aside from scattered objections from some critics who complained that the name reminded them of Ku Klux Klan (You can’t please everybody), the Wizards’ name change stuck.

Emotions do run high over such issues. It took some 25 years of arguments before Miami University of Ohio, for example, finally changed the school’s team name to the RedHawks in the late 1990s after more than a century as the Redskins.

Like the Cleveland Indians or Atlanta Braves, Indian-related team names hark back to earlier cultural times in America. But that doesn’t excuse the continued use of Redskins, an indisputably vulgar racial slur. It only shows how some people win respect in the world of pro sports more easily than others do.

That’s the question at heart in the new name dispute. Who gets respect?

African-Americans and our allies can celebrate the swift, strong and decisive response by the NBA to Sterling’s comments that were leaked to the TMZ celebrity news site. It was strange indeed to hear Sterling, an NBA team owner, telling his mixed-race lady friend to avoid being seen in public with “black people” in this day and age. But it would have been even more weird for the predominantly black NBA to respond with anything less than full respect for its black players after Sterlings’ insults.

The same would be true in the NFL, I am certain, if an owner wanted to call his team, say, the “Newark Negroes.” The league would be loony to risk the walkout, not only by players, but also by fans that undoubtedly would follow.

Yet that, in effect, is the signal that the Washington Redskins name sends to this country’s native people with its name. The irony is in the lame defense offered by Snyder and others who insist they actually are paying tribute to Native Americans. There is no lower insult to any group than to insist that you know better than they as to when and why they should feel insulted — or not.

If the NFL was two-thirds Native American Indian instead of two-thirds black, we wouldn’t be having the same conversation. But it is a sad, cynical reality of today’s racial etiquette that respect goes to those who have, not just sympathies, but numbers, money, votes or some other leverage with which to wield real power.

Still, I am optimistic that “Redskins” and similar vulgarities are on their way out. It is only a matter of how long public attitudes and generational viewpoints change to where even Snyder’s players, fans or fellow NFL owners think it’s time to give this R-word a rest.

On Monday, July 13, 2020, please note the date, pressured by corporate sponsors, the team announced its most dramatic step, it will drop its logo and “Redskins” from its name, an all but forced turnaround by owner Daniel Snyder, who for decades said he would never change the name long considered a racial slur.

The team has long been in the spotlight, in part because of its checkered racial past. Marshall was the last owner in the N.F.L. to sign a Black player, and only under pressure from the federal government. He named the team the Redskins, which he considered a nod to bravery.

But only in the past few weeks has there been movement to address his legacy by removing the monument and his name from team facilities. Monday’s decision came just 10 days after the franchise said it would review the 87-year-old team name under significant pressure from major corporate partners including FedEx, which threatened to end its naming rights sponsorship of the team’s stadium.

Snyder’s shift from total resistance to grudging acceptance in just a few weeks has been remarkably swift in a league that often moves forward deliberately, if at all. But after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in late May, much of the country has moved rapidly to confront historical representations of racist symbols.

“This day of the retirement of the r-word slur and stereotypical logo belongs to all those Native families,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American activist. She said that the change was a victory for all those who “bore the brunt of and carry the scars from the epithets, beatings, death threats and other emotional and physical brutalities resulting from all the ‘Native’ sports names and images that cause harm and injury to actual Native people.”

This morning, July 14, 2020, please note the date, I get an email. Buddy tells me somebody wrote a letter to Mr. Page.

I agree with our Native American population. I am highly jilted by the racially charged name of the Washington Redskins.

One might argue that to name a professional football team after Native Americans would exalt them as fine warriors, but nay, nay. We must be careful not to offend, and in the spirit of political correctness and courtesy, we must move forward. 

Let’s ditch the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians. If your shorts are in a wad because of the reference the name Redskins makes to skin color, then we need to get rid of the Cleveland Browns. 

The Carolina Panthers obviously were named to keep the memory of militant Blacks from the 60’s alive. Gone. It’s offensive to us white folk. 

The New York Yankees offend the Southern population. Do you see a team named for the Confederacy? No! There is no room for any reference to that tragic war that cost this country so many young men’s lives. I am also offended by the blatant references to the Catholic religion among our sports team names. Totally inappropriate to have the New Orleans Saints, the Los Angeles Angels or the San Diego Padres. 

Then there are the team names that glorify criminals who raped and pillaged. We are talking about the horrible Oakland Raiders, the Minnesota Vikings, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburgh Pirates! 

Now, let us address those teams that clearly send the wrong message to our children. The San Diego Chargers promote irresponsible fighting or even spending habits. Wrong message to our children. 

The New York Giants and the San Francisco Giants promote obesity, a growing childhood epidemic. Wrong message to our children. The Cincinnati Reds promote downers/barbiturates. Wrong message to our children. 

The Milwaukee Brewers. Well that goes without saying. Wrong message to our children. 

So, there you go. We need to support any legislation that comes out to rectify this travesty, because the government will likely become involved with this issue, as they should. Just the kind of thing the do-nothing Congress loves. 

As a die-hard Oregon State fan, my wife and I, with all of this in mind, suggest it might also make some sense to change the name of the Oregon State women’s athletic teams to something other than “the Beavers” (especially when they play Southern California.

Do we really want the Trojans sticking it to the Beavers??? 

I always love your articles and I generally agree with them. As for the Redskins name I would suggest they change the name to the “Foreskins” to better represent their community, paying tribute to the dick heads in Washington DC.

This would be a good time to put up a gigantic statue of some great Native Americans. I nominate Geronimo.

Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: Goyaałé Athabaskan pronunciation: [kòjàːɬɛ́] “the one who yawns,” June 16, 1829 – February 17, 1909) was a prominent leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Apache tribe. From 1850 to 1886, Geronimo joined with members of three other Chiricahua Apache bands — the Tchihende, the Tsokanende and the Nednhi — to carry out numerous raids, as well as fight against Mexican and U.S. military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo’s raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache–United States conflict, which started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848.

While well known, Geronimo was not a chief of the Chiricahua or the Bedonkohe band. However, since he was a superb leader in raiding and warfare, he frequently led large numbers of men beyond his own following. At any one time, he would be in command of about 30 to 50 Apaches.

During Geronimo’s final period of conflict from 1876 to 1886, he “surrendered” three times and accepted life on the Apache reservations in Arizona. Reservation life was confining to the free-moving Apache people, and they resented restrictions on their customary way of life.

In 1886, after an intense pursuit in northern Mexico by American forces that followed Geronimo’s third 1885 reservation “breakout,” Geronimo surrendered for the last time to Lt. Charles Bare Gatewood, an Apache-speaking West Point graduate who had earned Geronimo’s respect a few years before. Geronimo was later transferred to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, just north of the Mexican/American boundary. Miles treated Geronimo as a prisoner of war and acted promptly to move Geronimo, first to Fort Bowie, then to the railroad at Bowie Station, Arizona, where he and 27 other Apaches were sent to join the rest of the Chiricahua tribe, which had been previously exiled to Florida.

While holding him as a prisoner, the United States capitalized on Geronimo’s fame among non-Indians by displaying him at various events. For Geronimo, it provided him with an opportunity to make a little money. In 1898, for example, Geronimo was exhibited at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska. Following this exhibition, he became a frequent visitor to fairs, exhibitions, and other public functions. He made money by selling pictures of himself, bows and arrows, buttons off his shirt, and even his hat. In 1905, the Indian Office provided Geronimo for the inaugural parade for President Theodore Roosevelt. Later that year, the Indian Office took him to Texas, where he shot a buffalo in a roundup staged by 101 Ranch Real Wild West for the National Editorial Association. Geronimo was escorted to the event by soldiers, as he was still a prisoner. The teachers who witnessed the staged buffalo hunt were unaware that Geronimo’s people were not buffalo hunters.

He died at the Fort Sill hospital in 1909, as a prisoner of war. Geronimo is buried at the Fort Sill Indian Agency Cemetery, among the graves of relatives and other Apache prisoners of war.

Twenty three years. The rest of his life. Paraded around like a sideshow act.

“I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun,” Geronimo said.

“I was born where there were no enclosures.”

A life sentence because he wanted to live free on his own land.