American Indian Mascots and Team Names Need to be Retired and Banned

and having red paint all over one's face at a keg party. Or by attending a game dressed up in such costumes.

Nathan Phillips' unfortunate encounter with the college party is the main reason Indian sports names and mascots need to be retired and banned for good. I don't think the EMU students are diabolical and dangerous racial bigots or supremacists - the kind of sinister racists filled with hatred and violence that are all too prevalent in our turbulent world today. No, these kids are mere victims of something that's gone on for far too long - the proliferation of team names and mascots borrowed from the heritage and culture of a race that has been persecuted, maligned, and even slaughtered in genocidal proportions for centuries. It's okay to dress and act this way, those in this dominant culture believe, because all their young lives they've been around it. It's accepted and celebrated. After all, their parents were most likely 'Hurons', and not sports fans of a bird of prey.

Unfortunately and ironically, most of this so-called "honoring" is being done by descendants of the very race that stole Indian land, persecuted First Nations peoples, and even moved them onto reservations. And these days, whenever there's anything to be mined, sucked-out, or consumed on these reservations, this 'persecuting race' has no problem fracking, drilling, mining and pipelining all over this set-aside "Indian land".

Another writer sees much wrong with the EMU partiers' choice of party dress and their reaction to being told they were committing racism. "Incidents such as this reiterate the detrimental effects of Native-themed mascots, and this particular instance shows how quickly those who claim to celebrate Native mascots will physically attack actual Native people in defense of their use of Native imagery," writes Michelle Lietz in Native News Online.Net.

"Any sanction of these mascots and representations from the university fosters a mass acceptance and validation of these humiliating and harmful practices. Having the Huron mascot anywhere on campus leaves an opening for the acceptance of all harmful images of Natives, from the picture in McKenny of young girls dressing up in fake headdresses, to the new mural to hang in Porter, with the empty canoes of an extinct people floating down the river," Lietz writes.

Marjorie Villafane of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe told Indian Country Today Media Network on Friday, April 10, at Progressive Field in Cleveland before the Cleveland Indians played their home opener against the Detroit Tigers, "We have experienced a lot of racial prejudice here. it wears you down. We were taught not to rock the boat, so I didn't say anything, but it made me mad."

About 150 protesters greeted Cleveland Indian fans on the sidewalks around Progressive Field for the game. Wearing their jackets, sweat shirts and tee-shirts emblazoned with the Chief Wahoo mascot, some of the Cleveland Indian fans yelled at the protesters. Some even jeered, "Go back to the reservation," according to reports.

In the video accompanying the ICTMN article, Cleveland City Councilman (2nd ward) Zach Reed, holding a megaphone, says, "We got rid of the Little Black Sambo because it was wrong and we have to get rid of Chief Wahoo because it is wrong."

Another protester, Ian Washburn, said Indian team names and mascots need to go, primarily what he refers to as "the big five" - the Washington R$d$k$ns, the Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Blackhawks, the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians.

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