Re: Indian mascots
Silvester Brito (sjbbear@corral.uwyo.edu)
Tue, 28 Jan 1992 11:57:00 MST
Any of you who watched Super Bowl 26 probably saw the pregame objection to
the Washington Football team's use of the term Red Skins by Banks and
Bellcourt from the AIM movement. I beleive thir point of view is well taken
if it falls into a similar point of obsevation by Wilcomb E. Washburn in
his article "The Noble and Ignoble Savage" in Handbook of American Folklore.
"The treatment and status of the American Indian in the United States have
depended more upon the image of the Indian in white eyes than upon any
objective reality. So vivid has that image been-whether of a noble or
ignoble character-that a major and still unsolved Scholarly task is to
determine what in fact is imaginary and what is real in the white view of
the Indian. ... [But] Any discussion of the "myth" of the noble or ignoble
savage must start, as does the discovery of America itself, with Columbus's
voyage of 1492. Columbus found the natives of the West Indies gentle and
unoffending and described them in a manner reminiscent of biblical
description of the Garden of Eden....Although I would accept the relevance
and influence of the economic motive in shaping the European image of the
American Indian, any purely economic explanation of the myth of either the
"noble" or "ignoble" Indian is deceptive." [I believe this is the point that
both Banks and Bellcourt were trying to make in their objection to Red Skins
as a name for a nationally known football team.] Wasburn goes on to say "In
the English colonies, to give one example (of the complexity of the image of
the American Indian), Thomas Morton of Merry Mount in Massachusetts Bay saw
the Indians of that area in the 1620s as noble children of nature, with whom
he and his men enthusiastic- ally engaged in the most intimate terms-sexual
and otherwise-" [So is this to lead us to believe that that is all the
"noble" savage was good for 'to engage [with] in the most intimate terms-
sexual and otherwise?] Wasburn continues"With the rise of the "penny
dreadfls" portrait of the Indian became more often that of a degraded or
vindictive foe than of a noble, generous comrade."
[It amazes me that such a learned man as Washburn would present these
contrasting views of the American Indian and still go on to covertly object
to the AIM peoples protest of the use of Indian names or images by
professional athletic teams.] He goes on to say"The power of symbols and
the sensitivity of people to them can be illustrated by the furor that
arosethey regarded as contemptuous or condescending the case of the "Atlanta
Braves" in the 1991 World Series] over the use of the Indian symbol to
repesent amateur and professional athletic teams. Indian radicals [note the
use of this term] captured headlines by denouncing what nding references to
Indians. In January 1972 Russell Means, a leader of the radical American
Indian Movement (AIM), filed a lawsuit against the Cleveland nd Indians'
baseball team over its symbol, a caracature of an Indian rendered in in a
manner that can be called humorous at best and contemptuous at worst." I
believe that this was the point that Banks and Bellcourt were trying to get
across to the owner of the "Washington Red Skins," but he, the owner of this
pro football team would not hear or respond to their, Banks and Bell courts'
adament protest for after all, wasn't he a 'white man' who as others have
done in the historical past, set forth their right to determine the image of
the American Indian, to reinterate what Washburn stated at the beginning of
the above cited article on the noble or ignoble savage, Indian.