Which Do You Think Is Worse: An Offensive, Bigoted Epithet Or Cultural Appropriation? Same Shit: Different Pile As Far As I'm Concerned

I need to spend more time with the SA news ticker. Look what fell into my lap last night.

The Washington Red Clouds: A team name to honor a great warrior and leader

by Bob Drury and Thomas Clavin, authors of The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend.

When we last saw the hegemonic colonial ethos come face to face with history and good taste, my new hero Bob Costas was decrying the bigoted, anachronistic, but long-lived name of the Washington, D.C., American football team. I won't even repeat it here. But I can certainly make you squirm with some never-before-tried discursive equivalents. Imagine the Pittsburgh Pollacks, or the Cleveland Kikes, the Wisconsin Wetbacks, or the Arizona Amish. I think you get the picture.

I foolishly thought that once the lid was off, and the name "Redskins" finally crept back under the rock out from under which it first crawled into the light of day, a new, possibly culturally sensitive replacement would prevail. Talk about wrong!

Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud (1822--1909).

I can't condemn these guys for their earnestness. But to begin to redress, at a minimum, decades of humiliation of the original inhabitants of this continent, and lifetimes of cultural and ethnic cleansing up to and including strategic massacres and forced relocation, the NFL is gonna hafta do a lot better than propose this non-starter—at least from this anthropologist's point of view.

Since when did cultural appropriation balance bigotry and genocide? Without doubt, Red Cloud was a superlative leader and warrior. But on which side of the European usurpation of the Americas do the two benighted historians stand with their proposal calling for the team name to be switched from Redskins to Red Clouds? You might just as well ask on which planet they dwell.

Every word of this Washington Post article vibrates with the same lordly self-righteousness that presided over the original name. Drury and Clavin suggest that calling the team the Washington Red Clouds would heal old wounds and show the NFL establishment and the American people's respect. They believe that the suggested team mascot would please all of the living descendants of this continent's original inhabitants. Why? Because Red Cloud was the Sioux man who united a fifth of what's now the lower 48, and alongside his nation battled the U.S. government to a stalemate in the 19th century.

Did anyone ask his living descendants if they thought this was a good idea? [Obviously they couldn't ask Red Cloud.] So, by what right do Drury and Clavin, the Washington franchise owners, or the NFL brass steal the man's name?

If you're a fan of conundrums, riddle me this. First you call yourselves "redskins" because you want a team name that would evoke the ferocity and cunning of the American Indian. But, you can't think of another way to refer to Native Americans, as a group, except by using an epithet that was always meant to diminish and subjugate a people. Thus, the suggestion of the new name, even in the enlightened 21st century, amounts to barely disguised bigotry.

The Washington Red Clouds? How does that differ from the original choice? [Hint: it doesn't.] You're stealing a man's name to replace a bigoted epithet because the individual's name sounds vaguely like the status quo. Hmmm. But you have a precedent, you say. The Cleveland Browns were named for one of their own. That's a precedent for using a dead guy's name from within your ranks—it's not carte blanche permission to use any dead guy's name. The suggested name change is especially tone deaf when you remember that the dead guy's name and person represent a highlight of Native American resistance to oppression and cultural annihilation. Changing the team's name to Red Clouds makes. no. sense. at. all.

Reproduced with many thanks to The Elephant Journal. 

The suggested name change is not just misplaced conscience, it's what's known as cultural appropriation. If you're not familiar with the term or are inclined to pooh-pooh the idea, at left is a cartoon I found this afternoon on the intertubes that helps to make the point.

"No, really." It's fine! Dress like the people your ancestors persecuted and who your culture made certain would lose all touch with themselves as individuals and  as whole cultures, and who you choose, in the present, to marginalize.

Honest to gawd, they've never met a reality they couldn't spin to their own benefit. And this piece by Drury and Clavin* only perpetuates the status quo.

K. I'm outa here. Sleep the sleep of angels, for tomorrow the battle will be joined anew.

* wasn't he a character in American television's long-lived sitcom, Cheers?

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SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Doesn't It Make The Bile Rise In Your Throat?

This intertube broadcast is coming to you direct from the Subversive Archaeologist's (SA) temporary world headquarters (WH) in beautiful downtown Blaine, Washington, US of A. Previously WH was in an undisclosed location, because the SA was afraid of being the victim of weapons of mass instruction. I've been mono-tasking so much lately that any thought of adding to the corpus of worthwhile archaeological discourse was immediately repressed. Instead I've been looking for accommodation that isn't a tent or a run-down motor hotel. I'm living, for the time being, in an example of the latter. I'm in what passes for a non-smoking room in a concrete block warren that hasn't seen significant change since well before the era of the non-smoking room. Although it was redolent with some heavy floral air freshener when I moved in, it is no longer. At one time I smoked, but it's been years since I quit. So now I'm able to sniff a smoker or a smoker's habitat without ever seeing a nicotine delivery device.

Once I am settled in new digs [which won't be for at least two weeks, as it happens] I'm gonna hafta spend a bunch o' time dragging me BS net through the pertinent literature that's come to light in the past month. So, please don't expect today's blurt to contain anything sensible about our favourite anthropological fields. Instead I wanna tell you about my experience while lunching yesterday at the Chinese restaurant next door, The Ocean Bay, on 3rd Street.

Two couples wandered in and took a table a couple of yards away from mine. Including them the clientele numbered just seven. In such circumstances it requires a level of concentration that I don't possess to close one's ears to audible conversation. When I left, I wished I'd been blessed with that kind of concentration. I would gladly have settled for tinnitus!

I learned how to think more or less anthropologically beginning in 1970, from my pal Al McMillan, at the then Douglas College campus in Richmond, BC. At that time I began to learn about the past and present circumstances of the First Nations of the northwest coast of North America. My learning comprised many, many empirical observations to the effect that us European oppressors were and continue to be responsible for the social circumstances of those First Nations and their people. It all seemed so clear to me. It still does. So, when lunching at the Ocean Bay I heard the same execrable harangue of First Nations in the present that I first heard almost fifty years ago, I couldn't keep the bile down.

Here's a paraphrase of what I heard.

'They call themselves First Nations now. I don't care if they were here first, and I'm not certain even if they were the first. But we're all here now and we should all act responsibly. Giving them handouts hasn't helped and it should be stopped. That way they'd have to learn self-reliance, and blah, blah, blah.'

later

'One of them was behind me in line the other day and something I said obviously irked him, because he said that his circumstances and those of his peers was the result of what I'd call water under the bridge. He said that when he was seven years old he was taken from his family and put in a residential 'school' and mistreated terribly by the nuns. Sure, he might have suffered abuses in the school, but he was probably already being abused at home. So, what difference would it have made whether he lived with his abusive parents or some overzealous nuns? And let's face it, we're talking decades in the past when most of the badness took place. Why can't they just get over it?'

and so on, and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby. [The first person to correctly identify the song from which this last phrased originated, the artist(s) that first recorded it, and how it fits in the context of today's blurt will receive, free of charge, free of postage and handling charges, a bona fide "A drink is like a hug" t-shirt in any colour and size you want.]

So, now to the litany of empirical observations that at a bare minimum go together to explain the present-day circumstances of a great many of the indigenous peoples of North America. I'll try to keep it brief.

First, the stereotypes of an 'Indian'
In the beginning, they were untrustworthy renegades, ruthless killers, drunkards.
Today they're drunkards and drug addicts, leeches, unambitious, lazy, always blaming their past.

Second, the depredations that Europeans visited on the 'Indians'
Arrogant entitlement involving usurpation of land and resources.

Third, 'Pacification' such that Europeans could settle and prosper on what had been their land and resources. This took the form of overt and covert actual and cultural genocide---organized massacres; provision of disease-ridden blankets as part of the European end of a mutually agreed upon trade agreement; outlawing traditional ceremonies such as the potlatch; forced relocation to 'reserves;' precluding them from taking part in the political process through election laws if they did not give up their treaty rights and registered Indian status to do so. This last was part of the official strategy of assimilation, which included legally removing children from their families and relocating them to residential schools where their persons were derided for being who they were, and where they were forbidden from and punished for speaking their native language and acting in accordance with their cultural traditions.

I could go on. There are [increasingly small numbers of] indigenous people in North America who were victims of cultural genocide, and are less than a generation removed from those whose parents were directly affected by the attempted actual genocide that occurred in the 19th century. How is it that my fellow restaurant-goer can suggest that the native people just 'get over it?' What arrogance! What ignorance! What a paradigm of public opinion that to this day continues to oppress and disenfranchise the first people of these lands while at the same time proclaiming that they aren't to blame for what their forbears did in the recent past.

No offense intended, but if you weren't already familiar with the myriad reasons for the political and social circumstances of First Nations and Metis people in Canada, I hope this makes you sick to your stomach. And I hope that the next time some descendant of European immigrants blathers on about how they aren't responsible for and shouldn't feel ashamed about the ongoing treatment of indigenous peoples, I hope you're better able to disabuse them of their bigoted stereotype and their myopic historical and social perspective. We all bear responsibility, just as any other genocidal society always will.

I'm outa here. Have a nice day.

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.