Last week, the Washington Redskins announced that they will change their team name and logo, which some say are offensive to Native Americans. This decision by the team came less than two weeks after FedEx, the corporate sponsor which holds the naming rights to the Redskins’ home stadium, sent a letter to team owner Dan Snyder threatening to withhold the FedEx brand from the stadium unless the team was renamed.
Those who have followed the story of FedEx’s ultimatum to Snyder know that the Redskins logo was created by the one-time President of the National Congress of American Indians, Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, in 1971. The Redskins’ logo is a profile of Two Guns White Calf, a Blackfoot chief.
Does it matter who the artist is? In our age of identity politics and cultural appropriation, you bet it does. So let this sink in: A corporate board of non-Native Americans has decided that a Blackfoot man’s drawing of a Blackfoot chief is insulting to the Blackfoot people. The corporate powers have achieved through financial muscle what the advocates of a Redskins name change could never sustain through the courts: to remove the art of Blackie Wetzel and the name Redskins from the NFL.
There have been Indigenous nicknames as long as there has been sport in North America. Native people have been disparaged on this continent in many ways, but the naming of sports teams has not been one of them. Quite the opposite. Sports teams have always likened themselves to a fearless force of brothers in battle, which is why they so frequently adopt Indigenous names.
This romantic image of the Indian warrior still resonates with anyone who has ever played against an all-Native lacrosse or hockey team. Many of those all-Native teams have Indigenous names and logos. One of my favorites is the Six Nations Rivermen of the Ontario Lacrosse League, whose logo sports a muscular, very red-skinned Mohawk paddling a canoe with his lacrosse stick. Many of these logos are cliche and a little cartoonish but no more than that of the Minnesota Vikings’ fierce Norseman with his braided blonde hair. He does not cause the Scandinavians any offense, as far as I’m aware.
Images of the Indian have been present across the cultural and commercial landscape of North America for the last two centuries, not only on sports jerseys but also coins, stamps, motor vehicles, and (before it was demonized) tobacco products. One of my cherished possessions from childhood is a signed photograph of Terry Bradshaw holding a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco.
As Indian icons have been vanishing from the popular culture over the last several decades, the sports logos remain the last enduring images of the Native in the collective consciousness of North Americans. Blackie Wetzel’s son, Lance, anticipating the fate coming to his beloved Redskins, had said days earlier: “It [the Redskins logo] depicted Native Americans in a different way. It gave them a face because the Native American population is very low compared to other races. They are the forgotten race when you look at it nationally.”
Let us be clear about the motive behind the retirement of the Redskins name and logo. The latest push to remove Native American names from sports teams is not about Native sensitivities. It is about adding victims to the ledger of bad deeds done by white men. People who know little of our history or culture or our relations with the white population have seized the Redskins name for a purpose that is offensive: the advancement of their simplistic worldview of villains and victims.
The relationship between the Europeans and the First Nations has been a tangle of admiration, contempt, fear, envy, friendship, and enmity. Like Lance Wetzel, it gives me a kind of satisfaction or pride in seeing Indian images inhabiting popular American culture, even as those images evoke the complexities of that relationship. We Indians lost our history once already. We are in danger of losing control of the narrative again as corporations and the cancel culture spurring them on typecast us as mere victims in their revisionist history.
Dr. Paul Gallagher is a member of the Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation. He is an assistant dean of students and lecturer at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
