Opinion : Amid mockery and stereotyping, where is the honor? (Montrose, CO)

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Amid mockery and stereotyping, where is the honor?

Published/Last Modified on Sunday, January 10, 2010 4:10 AM MST

Billie Stanton
Straight Shootin’

Ditch the headdresses. Eradicate the face paint. Stop dancing, and stifle those phony war whoops.

Please. That’s all C.J. Brafford and Roland McCook ask of the Montrose High School “Indians” sports teams.

But despite an earlier casual agreement that such costumed dancers would stop their warrior-like antics at “Indians” and “Lady Indians” games, the practice continues, as documented by Daily Press photographers.

Brafford, executive director of the local Ute Indian Museum, is a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe. McCook is a Northern Ute �“ or, for cultural accuracy, an Uncompahgre Nuche �” who serves on the museum’s board of directors. He also is a descendant of Ute Chief Ouray and Ouray’s wife, Chipeta, who is buried on the museum grounds.

Unlike me, neither Brafford nor McCook has a problem with the team name “Indians.” Both say the term is generic and was intended to honor the original, indigenous inhabitants of this area.

But the Hollywood-type costuming and gyrations? “It’s not respectful toward us,” McCook says.

Likewise, one of the school’s hallways is labeled “WARPATH” �” an “aggressive word,” he notes, whose connotations apply more accurately to the European invaders who waged genocide on Native Americans.

“If it’s going to honor the Indians,” Brafford says, “then do it with integrity.”

American sports teams long have portrayed Indians as warring savages, an inaccurate and derogatory stereotype. The insidious problem spurred the National Congress of American Indians to file a lawsuit over the trademark of the Washington Redskins, whose logo is particularly onerous.

The U.S. Trademark Act specifies that defamatory or derogatory names cannot receive trademark protection. But while the lawsuit initially succeeded, it lost after repeated appeals �” because it was filed in 1991, deemed too long after the 1967 trademark, says John Dossett, general counsel for the congress.

Some progress has been achieved, however. The NCAA in recent years banned post-season play for any university using such mascots, with a namesake exception for those with tribal approval, Dossett says. Florida State University, for example, worked closely with the Seminole tribe to ensure that FSU’s cultural representations were accurate and not derogatory. FSU also provided scholarships and outreach to the tribe.

And thousands of high schools have eliminated Indian-affiliated names over the past 20 years, Dossett notes.

Not Montrose High, however. No more than a half-dozen Indian households are in Montrose, including Dine (formerly known as Navajo) and Cherokees, McCook estimates.

I doubt they’ll mount a campaign to change the teams’ names. But I wish they would.

With the exception of Notre Dame’s “Fighting Irish,” I can’t think of another group of human beings that is exploited to symbolize sport team ferocity.

Imagine the uproar if teams were named “the Jews,” “the Negroes” or “the Asians.” So why are Indians considered fair game?

America’s original inhabitants suffered extermination and capture by our government. They were ripped from their traditional, historic homelands and virtually imprisoned on reservations far away, notes my cousin, Sandra Miller of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

The United States suppressed their culture, beliefs and language, took their land, “signed treaties of broken promises, then snatched their children, forcing them into boarding schools for years to live without their true language, true names and their families to support and protect them,” says Miller, an environmental lawyer.

“We survived because we are strong, courageous and tenacious. Then out of respect, please just leave our people alone. We were warred against until we had to succumb . . . and now you want to take our name, mimic our sacred dances, don replicas of our sacred regalia and make it yours? Your teams, your rituals and team tradition?

“No,” Miller says. “You’ve taken enough.”

Indeed we have. As thousands of high schools and plenty of universities have determined, sometimes traditions need to be changed. The Montrose High Eagles? Now that’s got a ring to it.

To comment on this story, visit our Web site at www.montrosepress.com.

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Comments

Steve Hicks wrote on Apr 8, 2010 9:12 PM:

" The high school in Idaho that got some talk-back about its Indian-named team "the Savages" was clever. They changed their mascot from an Indian brave on a horse to a Viking on a horse. "

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Amid mockery and stereotyping, where is the honor?

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