During the past couple of seasons, there has been an
increasing wave of controversy regarding the names of professional sports
teams like the Atlanta "Braves," Cleveland "Indians,"
Washington "Redskins," and Kansas City "Chiefs." The issue
extends to the names of college teams like Florida State University "seminoles,"
University of Illinois "Fighting Illini," and so on, right on down
to high school outfits like the Lamar (Colorado) "Savages." Also
involved have been team adoption of "mascots," replete with
feathers, buckskins, beads, spears and "warpaint" (some fans have
opted to adorn themselves in the same fashion), and nifty little
"pep" gestures like the "Indian Chant" and "Tomahawk
Chop."
A substantial number of American Indians have
protested that use of native names, images and symbols as sports team mascots
and the like is, by definition, a virulently racist practice. Given the
historical relationship between Indians and non-Indians during what has been
called the "Conquest of America," American Indian Movement leader
(and American Indian Anti-Defamation Council founder) Russell Means has
compared the practice to contemporary Germans naming their soccer teams the
"Jews," Hebrews," and "Yids," while adorning their
uniforms with grotesque caricatures of Jewish faces taken from the Nazis'
anti-Semetic propoganda of the 1930's. Numerous demonstrations have occurred
in conjunction with games - most notably during the November 15, 1992 match-up
between the Chiefs and Redskins in Kansas City - by angry Indians and their
supporters.
In response, a number of players - especially African
Americans and other minority athletes - have been trotted out by professional
team owners like Ted Turner, as well as university and public school
officials, to announce that they mean not to insult but to honor native
people. They have been joined by the television networks and most major
newspapers, all of which have editorialized that Indian discomfort with the
situation is "no big deal," insisting that the whole things is just
"good, clean fun." The country needs more such fun, they've argued,
and a "few disgruntled Native Americans" have no right to undermine
the nation's enjoyment of it's leisure time by complaining. This is especially
the case, some have argued, "in hard times like these." It has even
been contended that Indian outrage at being systematically degraded - rather
than the degradation itself - creates "a serious barrier to the sort of
intergroup communication so necessary in a multicultural society such as
ours."
Okay. let's communicate. We are frankly dubious that
those advancing such positions really believe their own rhetoric but, just for
the sake of argument, let's accept the premise that they are sincere. If what
they say is true, then isn't it time we spread such
"inoffensiveness" and "good cheer" around among all the
groups so that everybody can participate equally in fostering the national
round of laughs they call for? Sure it is - the country can't have too much
fun or "intergroup" involvement - so the more, the merrier. Simple
consistency demands that anyone who thinks the Tomahawk Chop is a swell
pastime must be just as hearty in their endorsement of the following ideas -
by the logic used to defend the defamation of American Indians - should help
us all really start yukking it up.
First, as a counterpart to the Redskins, we need an
NFL team called "Niggers" to honor Afro-Americans. Half-time
festivities for fans might include a simulated stewing of the opposing coach
in a large pot while players and cheerleaders dance around it, garbed in
leopard skins and wearing fake bones in their noses. This concept obviously
goes along with the kind of gaiety attending the Chop, but also with the
actions of the Kansas Chiefs, whose team members - prominently including black
members - lately appeared on a poster ,looking "fierce" and
"savage" by way of wearing Indian regalia. Just a bit of harmless
"morale boosting," says the Chief's front office. You bet.
So that the newly-formed Niggers sports club won't end
up too out of sync while expressing the "spirit" and
"identity" of Afro-Americans in the above fashion, a baseball
franchise - let's call this one the "Sambos" - should be formed. How
about a basketball team called the "spearchuckers/" A hockey team
called the "Jungle Bunnies/" Maybe the "essence of these teams
could be depicted by images of tiny black faces adorned with huge pairs of
lips. The players could appear on TV every week or so gnawing on chicken legs
and spitting watermelon seeds at one another. Catchy, eh? Well, there's
"nothing to be upset about," according to those who love wearing
"war bonnets" to the Super Bowl or having "Chief Illiniwik"
dance around the sports arenas of Urbana, Illinois.
And why stop there? There are plenty of other groups
to include. "Hispanics?" They can be "represented" by the
Galveston "Greasers" and the San Diego "Spics," at least
until the Wisconsin "Wetbacks" and Baltimore "Beaners" get
off the ground. Asian Americans? How about the "slopes,"
"Dinks," "Gooks," and "Zipperheads?" Owners of
the latter teams might get their logo ideas from editorial page cartoons
printed in the nation's newspapers during World War II: slanteyes, buck teeth,
big glasses, but nothing racially insulting or derogatory, according to the
editors and artists involved at the time. Indeed, this Second World
War-vintage stuff can be seen as just another barrel of laughs at least by
what current editors say are their "local standards" concerning
American Indians.
Let's see. Who's been left out Teams like the Kansas
City "Kikes," Hanover "Honkies," San Leandro
"Shylock," Daytona "Dagos," and Pittsburg
"Polacks" will fill a certain social void among white folk. Have a
religious belief? Let's all go for the gusto and gear up the Milwaukee "Mackeral
Snappers" and Hollywood "Holy Rollers." The Fighting Irish of
Notre Dame can be rechristened the "Drunken Irish" or "Papist
Pigs." Issues of gender and sexual preference can be addressed through
creation of teams like the St. Louis "Sluts," Boston
"Bimbos," Detroit "Dykes," and the Fresno
"Fags." How about the Gainsville "Gimps" and the richmond
"Retards," so the physically and mentally impaired won't be excluded
from our fun and games?
Now, don't go getting "overly sensitive" out
there. None of this is dreaming or insulting, at least not when it's being
done to Indians. Just ask the folks who are doing it, or their apologists like
Andy Rooney in the national media. They'll tell you - as in fact they have
been telling you - that there's no been no harm done, regardless of what their
victims think, feel, or say. The situation is exactly the same as when those
with precisely the same mentality used to insist that Step 'n' Fetchit was
okay, or Rochester on the Jack Benny show, or Amos and Andy, Charlie Chan, the
Frito Bandito, or any other cutesy symbols making up the lexicon of American
racism. Have we communicated yet? Let's get just a little bit real here. The
notion of "fun" embodied in rituals like the Tomahawk Chop must be
understood for what it is. There's not a single non-Indian example used above
which can be considered socially acceptable in even the most marginal sense.
The reasons are obvious enough. So why is it different where American Indians
are concerned? One can only conclude that, in contrast to the other groups at
issue, Indians are (falsely) perceived as being too few, and therefore too
weak, to defend themselves effectively against racist and otherwise offensive
behavior.
Fortunately, there are some glimmers of hope. A few
teams and their fans have gotten the message and have responded appropriately.
Stanford University, which opted to drop the name "Indians" from,
has experienced no resulting drop in attendance. Meanwhile, the local
newspaper in Portland, Oregon recently decided its long-standing editorial
policy prohibiting use of racial epithets should include derogatory teams
names. The Redskins, for instance, are now referred to as "the Washington
team," and will continued to be described in this way until the franchise
adopts an inoffensive moniker (newspaper sales in Portland have suffered no
decline as a result). Such examples are to be applauded and encouraged. They
stand as figurative beacons in the night, proving beyond all doubt that it is
quite possible to indulge in the pleasure of athletics without accepting
blatant racism into the bargain.
Nuremburg Precedents
On October 16, 1946, a man named Julius Stricher
mounted the steps of a gallows. Moments later he was dead, the sentence of an
international tribunal composed of representatives of the United States,
France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union having been imposed. Streicher's
body was then cremated, and - so horrendous were his crimes thought to have
been - his ashes dumped into an unspecified German river so that "no one
should ever know a particular place to go for reasons of mourning his
memory."
Julius Streicher had been convicted at Nuremberg,
Germany of what were termed "Crimes Against Humanity." The lead
prosecutor in his case Justice Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme
Court had not argued that the defendant had killed anyone, nor that he had
personally committed any especially violent act. Nor was it contended that
Streicher had held any particularly important position in the German
government during the period in which the so called Third Reich had
exterminated some 6,000,000 Jews, as well as several million Gypsies, Poles,
Slavs, homosexuals, and other untermenschen (subhumans).
The sole offense for which the accused was ordered put
to death was in having served as publisher/editor of a Bavarian tabloid
entitled Der Sturmer during the early-to-mid 1930s, years before the Nazi
genocide actually began. In this capacity, he had penned a long series of
virulently anti-Semetic editorials and ''news."
Stories, usually accompanied by cartoons and other
images graphically depicting Jews in extraordinarily derogatory fashion. This,
the prosecution asserted, had done much to "dehumanize" the targets
of his distortion in the mind of the German public. In turn, such
dehumanization had made it possible or at least easier for average
Germans to later indulge in the outright liquidation of Jewish
"vermin." The tribunal agreed, holding that Streicher was therefore
complicit in genocide and deserving of death by hanging.
During his remarks to the Nuremburg tribunal, Justice
Jackson observed that, in implementing its sentences, the participating powers
were morally and legally binding themselves to adhere forever after to the
same standards of conduct that were being applied to Streicher and the other
Nazi leaders. In the alternative, he said, the victorious allies would have
committed "pure murder' at Nuremberg no different in substance from
that carried out by those they presumed to judge rather than establishing
the "permanent benchmark for justice" which was intended.
Yet in the United States of Robert Jackson, the
indigenous American Indian population had already been reduced, in a process
which is ongoing to this day, from perhaps 12.5 million in the year 1500 to
fewer than 250,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. This was
accomplished, according to official sources, "largely through the cruelty
of Euro American settlers," and an informal but clear governmental policy
which had made it an articulated goal to "exterminate these red
vermin" or at least whole segments of them.
Bounties had been placed on the scalps of Indians
any Indians in places as diverse as Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, the Dakotas,
Oregon, and California and had been maintained until resident Indian
populations were decimated or disappeared altogether. Entire peoples such as
the Cherokee had been reduced to half their size through a policy of forced
removal from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to what were then
considered less preferable areas in the West.
Others, such as the Navajo, suffered the same fate
while under military guard for years on end. The United States Army had also
perpetrated a long series of wholesale massacres of Indians at places like
Horseshoe Bend, Bear River, Sand Creek, the
Washita River, the Marias
River, Camp Robinson and Wounded
Knee.
Through it all, hundreds of popular novels - each
competing with the next to make Indians appear more grotesque, menacing, and
inhuman - were sold in the tens of millions of copies in the U.S. Plainly, the
Euro American public was being conditioned to see Indians in such a way so as
to allow their eradication to continue. And continue it did until the Manifest
Destiny of the U.S a direct precursor to what Hitler would subsequently
call Lebensraumpolitik (the politics of living space) was consummated.
By 1900, the national project of "clearing"
Native Americans from their land and replacing them with "superior"
Anglo American settlers was complete; the indigenous population had been
reduced by as much as 98 percent while approximately 97.5 percent of their
original territory had ''passed'' to the invaders. The survivors had been
concentrated, out of sight and mind of the public, on scattered
"reservations," all of them under the self-assigned
"plenary" (full) power of the federal government. There was, of
course, no Nuremberg-style tribunal passing judgment on those who had fostered
such circumstances in North America. No U.S. official or private citizen was
ever imprisoned never mind hanged for implementing or propagandizing
what had been done. Nor had the process of genocide afflicting Indians been
completed. Instead, it merely changed form.
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, nearly half of all
Native American children were coercively transferred from their own families,
communities, and cultures to those of the conquering society. This was done
through compulsory attendance at remote boarding schools, often hundreds of
miles from their homes, where native children were kept for years on end while
being systematically '"deculturated" (indoctrinated to think and act
in the manner of Euro Americans rather than as Indians). It was also
accomplished through a pervasive foster home and adoption program including
- blind adoptions, where children would be permanently denied information as
to who they were/are and where they'd come from - placing native youths in
non-Indian homes.
The express purpose of all this was to facilitate a
U.S. governmental policy to bring about the "assimilation"
(dissolution) of indigenous societies. In other words, Indian cultures as such
were to be caused to disappear. Such policy objectives are directly contrary
to the United Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the
Crime of Genocide, an element of international law arising from the Nuremburg
proceedings. The forced "transfer of the children" of a targeted
"racial, ethnical, or religious group" is explicitly prohibited as a
genocidal activity under the Convention's second article.
Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly
prohibits involuntary sterilization as a means of ''preventing births
among" a targeted population. Yet, in 1975, it was conceded by the U.S.
government that its Indian Health Service (IHS) then a subpart of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA), was even then conducting a
secret program of involuntary sterilization that had affected
approximately 40 percent of all Indian women. The program was allegedly
discontinued, and the IHS was transferred to the Public Health Service, but no
one was punished. In 1990, it came out that the IHS was inoculating, Inuit
children in Alaska with Hepatitis-B vaccine. The vaccine had already been
banned by the World Health Organization as having demonstrated a correlation
with the HIV-Syndrome which is itself correlated to AIDS. As this is written
[March, 1993], a "field test" of Hepatitis-A vaccine, also
HIV-correlated, is being conducted on Indian reservations in the northern
plains region.
The Genocide Convention makes it a crime against
"humanity" to create conditions leading to the destruction of an
identifiable human group, as such. Yet the BIA has utilized the government's
plenary prerogatives to negotiate mineral leases "on behalf of"
Indian peoples paying a fraction of standard royalty rates. The result has
been "super profits" for a number of preferred U.S. corporations.
Meanwhile, Indians, whose reservations ironically turned out to be in some of
the most mineral-rich areas of North America, which makes us, the nominally
wealthiest segment of the continent's population, live in dire poverty.
By the government's own data in the mid-1980s, Indians
received the lowest annual and lifetime per capita incomes of any aggregate
population group in the United States. Concomitantly, we suffer the highest
rate of infant mortality, death by exposure and malnutrition, disease, and the
like. Under such circumstances, alcoholism and other escapist forms of
substance abuse are endemic in the Indian community, a situation which leads
both to a general physical debilitation of the population and a catastrophic
accident rate. Teen suicide among Indians is several times the national
average
The average life expectancy of a reservation-based
Native American man is barely 45 years; women can expect to live less than
three years longer.
Such itemizations could be continued at great length,
including matters like the radioactive contamination of large portions of
contemporary Indian Country, the forced relocation of traditional Navajos, and
so on. But the point should be made: Genocide, as defined in international
law, is a continuing fact of day-to-day life (and death) for North America's
native peoples. Yet there has been and is only the barest flicker of
public concern about or even consciousness of, this reality. Absent any
serious expression of public outrage, no one is punished and the process
continues.
A salient reason for public acquiescence before the
ongoing holocaust in Native North America has been a continuation of the
popular legacy, often through more effective media. Since 1925, Hollywood has
released more than 2,000 films, many of them rerun frequently on television,
portraying Indians as strange, perverted, ridiculous, and often dangerous
things of the past. Moreover, we are habitually presented to mass audiences
one-dimensionally, devoid of recognizable human motivations and emotions:
Indians thus serve as props, little more. We have thus been thoroughly and
systematically dehumanized.
Nor is this the extent of it. Everywhere we are used
as logos, as mascots, as jokes: "Big Chief" writing tablets,
"Red Man" chewing tobacco, "Winnebago," campers.,
"Navajo" and "Cherokee" and "Pontiac" and
"Cadillac" pickups and automobiles. There are the Cleveland
"Indians," the Kansas City "Chiefs," the Atlanta
"Braves" and the Washington "Redskins" professional sports
teams not to mention those in thousands of colleges, high schools, and
elementary schools across the country each with their own degrading
caricatures and parodies of Indians and or things Indian. Pop fiction
continues in the same vein including an unending stream of New Age manuals
purporting to expose the inner works of indigenous spirituality in everything
from pseudo-philosophical to do-it-yourself styles. Blond yuppies from Beverly
Hills amble about the country claiming to be reincarnated 17th century
Cheyenne Ushamans ready to perform previously secret ceremonies.
In effect, a concerted, sustained, and in some ways
accelerating effort has gone into making Indians unreal. It is thus of obvious
importance that the American public begin to think about the implications of
such things the next time they witness a gaggle of face-painted and
war-bonneted buffoons doing the "Tomahawk Chop" at a baseball or
football game. It is necessary that they think about the implications of the
grade-school teacher adorning their child in turkey feathers to commemorate
Thanksgiving. Think about the significance of John Wayne or Charleston Heston
killing a dozen "savages" with a single bullet the next time a
western comes on TV. Think about why Land-o-Lakes finds it appropriate to
market its butter with the stereotyped image of an "Indian princess"
on the wrapper. Think about what it means when non-lndian academics profess
as they often do to "know more about Indians than Indians do
themselves." Think about the significance of charlatans like Carlos
Castaneda and Jamake Highwater and Mary Summer Rain and Lynn Andrews churning
out "Indian" bestsellers one after the other,while Indians typically
can't get into print.
Think about the real situation of American Indians.
Think about Julius Streicher. Remember Justice Jackson's admonition.
Understand that the treatment of Indians in American popular culture is not
"cute'' or "amusing," or just "good, clean fun."
Know that it causes real pain and real suffering to
real people. Know that it threatens our very survival. And know that this is
just as much a crime against humanity as anything the Nazis ever did. It is
likely the indigenous people of the United States will never demand that those
guilty of such criminal activity be punished for their deeds. But the least we
have to expect - indeed to demandis that such practices finally be brought
to a halt.
