As a kid learning about the NFL teams, the Washington football team name surprised me. Redskins? That sounds pretty racist - are they sure that's ok? We had so many lessons at school about how the color of your skin doesn't matter, so isn't Redskins exactly what they're teaching us isn't ok to say? But it was the name of an NFL team and no one seemed to be complaining about it, so I just accepted it and watched the games. I thought even less about the Cleveland Indians or the Florida State Seminoles, and the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant actually seemed cool to me. The Native American legacy in American sports, or rather that white American assigned legacy to Native Americans, was deeply engrained but totally not well understood by me.
Flash forward to 2013, and inexplicably the Washington Redskins name controversy has seemingly come out of nowhere to be front page debate. Of course, there had always been movements against the names, but these movements only emerged into the mainstream in this past year, without a lightning rod event. In the time being, I've spent a lot of time thinking of racial and historical issues in America and was thus much more opinionated on this matter than when I first encountered it. When I started really diving into opinion pieces though, I began realizing how different this issue is than most modern social issues . Why? Well for starters, as far as I am aware, I have 0 friends who identify as Native American or Indian. Seriously zero. I think I talked to a girl one time who had significant descent from a First Nations tribe in Canada and spoke some Ojibwe, but I don't recall anyone else ever telling me they were significantly descended from Native Americans. The 2010 Census reported that nearly 2% of Americans reported as American Indian or Alaskan Native and nearly 1% did so without checking off any other boxes. From my anecdotes, American Indians are thus WAY underrepresented in the circles I ran in. I mean supposedly there are 2.9 million Native Americans and I've met none of them. Meanwhile I met people who were Mongolian (2.9 million), Icelandic (320,000) and from Wyoming (570,000) in the US and Mauritian (1.3 million) here in HK. In politics, sports and high profile jobs, Native Americans are few and far between, with Sam Bradford (Cherokee, Rams QB), Jacoby Ellsbury (Navajo, Red Sox OF) and Elizabeth Warren (fake, US Senator, MA-D) coming to mind.
Point is, there are not enough Native American voices not just in this debate, but in all mainstream American discussions. I'll argue that current American Indian issues and thought are not well understood by the vast majority of Americans. They teach us quite a bit in school about the early Pilgrims encounters and a lot of the dark devastation that occurred to Native Americans throughout the 16th to 19th century. But we only barely covered the Trail of Tears in AP US History, and I graduated college knowing very little about the modern day life of Native Americans, both on and off the reservations. I think the word "Redskin" is an inherently offensive word that also comes with loaded implicit historical baggage, but I don't feel like I have the proper perspective for my opinion to really matter. I do know that not all Native Americans will agree on this issue, that they generally have bigger issues of social injustice on their mind, and I do think that even if there were no Native Americans left, it still wouldn't be ok to use the word as a team name. However, what I can do is imagine an alternative history where the plight of the Native Americans also occurred in Asia.
If East Asians of the 1400s did not have immunity to the devastating diseases such as smallpox, they very likely would have had catastrophic population loss. Imagine a scenario then where 90%+ of the inhabitants of areas spanning Japan to India perished, and the lands were settled by white Europeans. There'd be pockets of survivors, maybe integrated into white society, maybe a poor marginal minority, and maybe on their own small semi-autonomous communities. I could be living in one of those communities in present-day South China, maybe an hours drive away from the bustling white-majority metropolis of Canton named after a native settlement that had been built on the same site. Imagine then that someone asked me about "Native Asian issues," or the plight of my fellow "Native Asians" in the coastal area of the Philippines who were living in traditional villages and had just been devastated by a strong typhoon. I'd be at a loss for what to say. What would I have in common with the "Native Asians" in the Philippines, or in Vietnam or Korea or those island people in Japan? We spoke unrelated languages and had far different cultures pre-contact, and what cultural diffusion had made common across the continent might be just a small part of our way of life. To be fair, being minority survivors in a white society would give some sort of group identity, but this would be a newly created one and not an innate historical one.
There are over 20 Native American language families as currently classified. As an aside, it's a possibility that some of these language families are related, we just don't know the languages well enough to figure it out. Indeed, it would seem unlikely that there were 20 individual intercontinental migrations pre-Columbus. Nonetheless, the Native Americans were/are linguistically diverse, much less culturally and geographically diverse. Perhaps the diversity is not as large as that of Asia, a place of more people and lengthier history of human settlement, but it's not all that far off. It's certainly not so far off that we should be grouping all Native Americans together. Having an individual or group speak for all Native Americans seems a lot more ludicrous in this light, doesn't it?
So I think the ultimate legacy of this Redskins debate is to put Native American issues, so marginalized for so long, more into the forefront of American issues. Even though the discussion concerns sports and not income inequality, cultural transmission or issues more relevant to reservations, and though the issue seems to be fading, it's at the very least made me more aware of the state of modern Native Americans.
Flash forward to 2013, and inexplicably the Washington Redskins name controversy has seemingly come out of nowhere to be front page debate. Of course, there had always been movements against the names, but these movements only emerged into the mainstream in this past year, without a lightning rod event. In the time being, I've spent a lot of time thinking of racial and historical issues in America and was thus much more opinionated on this matter than when I first encountered it. When I started really diving into opinion pieces though, I began realizing how different this issue is than most modern social issues . Why? Well for starters, as far as I am aware, I have 0 friends who identify as Native American or Indian. Seriously zero. I think I talked to a girl one time who had significant descent from a First Nations tribe in Canada and spoke some Ojibwe, but I don't recall anyone else ever telling me they were significantly descended from Native Americans. The 2010 Census reported that nearly 2% of Americans reported as American Indian or Alaskan Native and nearly 1% did so without checking off any other boxes. From my anecdotes, American Indians are thus WAY underrepresented in the circles I ran in. I mean supposedly there are 2.9 million Native Americans and I've met none of them. Meanwhile I met people who were Mongolian (2.9 million), Icelandic (320,000) and from Wyoming (570,000) in the US and Mauritian (1.3 million) here in HK. In politics, sports and high profile jobs, Native Americans are few and far between, with Sam Bradford (Cherokee, Rams QB), Jacoby Ellsbury (Navajo, Red Sox OF) and Elizabeth Warren (fake, US Senator, MA-D) coming to mind.
Point is, there are not enough Native American voices not just in this debate, but in all mainstream American discussions. I'll argue that current American Indian issues and thought are not well understood by the vast majority of Americans. They teach us quite a bit in school about the early Pilgrims encounters and a lot of the dark devastation that occurred to Native Americans throughout the 16th to 19th century. But we only barely covered the Trail of Tears in AP US History, and I graduated college knowing very little about the modern day life of Native Americans, both on and off the reservations. I think the word "Redskin" is an inherently offensive word that also comes with loaded implicit historical baggage, but I don't feel like I have the proper perspective for my opinion to really matter. I do know that not all Native Americans will agree on this issue, that they generally have bigger issues of social injustice on their mind, and I do think that even if there were no Native Americans left, it still wouldn't be ok to use the word as a team name. However, what I can do is imagine an alternative history where the plight of the Native Americans also occurred in Asia.
If East Asians of the 1400s did not have immunity to the devastating diseases such as smallpox, they very likely would have had catastrophic population loss. Imagine a scenario then where 90%+ of the inhabitants of areas spanning Japan to India perished, and the lands were settled by white Europeans. There'd be pockets of survivors, maybe integrated into white society, maybe a poor marginal minority, and maybe on their own small semi-autonomous communities. I could be living in one of those communities in present-day South China, maybe an hours drive away from the bustling white-majority metropolis of Canton named after a native settlement that had been built on the same site. Imagine then that someone asked me about "Native Asian issues," or the plight of my fellow "Native Asians" in the coastal area of the Philippines who were living in traditional villages and had just been devastated by a strong typhoon. I'd be at a loss for what to say. What would I have in common with the "Native Asians" in the Philippines, or in Vietnam or Korea or those island people in Japan? We spoke unrelated languages and had far different cultures pre-contact, and what cultural diffusion had made common across the continent might be just a small part of our way of life. To be fair, being minority survivors in a white society would give some sort of group identity, but this would be a newly created one and not an innate historical one.
There are over 20 Native American language families as currently classified. As an aside, it's a possibility that some of these language families are related, we just don't know the languages well enough to figure it out. Indeed, it would seem unlikely that there were 20 individual intercontinental migrations pre-Columbus. Nonetheless, the Native Americans were/are linguistically diverse, much less culturally and geographically diverse. Perhaps the diversity is not as large as that of Asia, a place of more people and lengthier history of human settlement, but it's not all that far off. It's certainly not so far off that we should be grouping all Native Americans together. Having an individual or group speak for all Native Americans seems a lot more ludicrous in this light, doesn't it?
So I think the ultimate legacy of this Redskins debate is to put Native American issues, so marginalized for so long, more into the forefront of American issues. Even though the discussion concerns sports and not income inequality, cultural transmission or issues more relevant to reservations, and though the issue seems to be fading, it's at the very least made me more aware of the state of modern Native Americans.
