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Epithets and Implicatures, and History as Damage Control

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Politics, White Indians

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Football, Indian Mascots, Ives Goddard, Native Americans, Race, Redskins, Sports, Sports Mascots, Washington redskins

I haven’t been monitoring the controversy about the Washington football team that closely for awhile now, but the topic hasn’t entirely escaped my attention. This morning, I took a moment to scan the old Redskinsfacts website, which is a case-study in double-speak if there ever was one. That hasn’t changed.

…either.

One thing I find fascinating and revolting in equal measures is the way the site uses the work of a linguist, Ives Goddard, in defense of the team’s name, If you click on the option to “Get the facts” on the home page of the “Redskins Facts” website, you will be taken to another page telling you about the history of the name. Near as I can tell, that page hasn’t changed in awhile. Here is a screenshot of that history as it is now on 4/19/18:

Screenshot 2018-04-19 12.19.54

With just three items, this is a brief history to be sure, but the omissions aren’t entirely a function of brevity. What they leave out here is every bit as important as what they choose to tell us. Taking their bullet points in reverse order:

Notice they tell us that when the team came into being four players and the head coach “identified themselves as Native Americans.” This wording was carefully chosen to promote a common team legend without actually claiming that legend is true. Defenders of the team name commonly tell us that the team was named after a Native American (William “Lone Star” Dietz). It’s not at all clear that the team name was ever meant to honor him, but more importantly, Dietz’s claims to Native American heritage are questionable at best, having come under intense scrutiny when Dietz stood trial for evading the draft during World War I. The folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that team fans team defenders still cite the story of Lonestar Dietz in defense of the team name. Telling us that Dietz claimed a Native American identity enables them to promote that story without actually making any false claims on the topic themselves. So, I guess it’s not an outright lie. More like, a cowardly equivocation.

The second bullet point in this ‘history’ is simply off topic (and rather vague). That prominent native leadership of the 19th century, have referred to themselves as ‘redskins’ does not establish that the term is not now or at any other time free of pejorative implications. Resting as it does in this simple, narrative the claim that some of them have done so does nothing to tell us how they felt about the term or why they came to use it. It doesn’t even enable us to sort which ones called themselves ‘red men’ and which ones called themselves ‘redskins’. It doesn’t address problems of translation. It really doesn’t establish anything except for the sloppy thought process of the website administrator. He’d have to answer a few questions before we could even get to the ‘so what?’ part of the conversation. Or we could just skip to the chase, I suppose.

So what?

The first point in the pseudo-history of the team name is the one that interests me the most. Defenders of the name will often cite Goddard’s article as proof that the term in question is not an insult. (Seriously, I’ve long since lost track of the number of people that have done this,) I always ask them if they have actually read the article. Often that seems to be the end of the conversation. When these folks do tell me they’ve read the article, I ask them if they’ve read the last line in the article. To date, none have answered that question. So, what is the last line in Goddard’s article?

The descent of this word into obloquy is a phenomenon of more recent times.

My point is of course that Goddard didn’t write an article telling us that the term in question is not an insult. He wrote an article telling us that it did not begin as an insult, which is an entirely different claim. It isn’t entirely clear from Goddard’s piece just how he would account for the present significance of the term, but he is very clear on the fact that his own work does not actually address that question. So, the article should leave us with a full stop right around the 1830s. Goddard helps us to understand the use of the term up to that point, and he doesn’t have much to say about anything after that.

Goddard’s work is interesting for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t tell us much about what the term means today, or even what it meant by the end of the 19th century. He does take issue with the claims of at least some modern activists, Susan Shown Harjo being among them, but he himself points out that rejecting her claims about the origin of the term does not prove that many Native Americans find the term objectionable in the present time (p.1). I think Goddard does a pretty good job of showing that Harjo and others have been wrong about the origins of the term, leaving the rest of the case against the team name largely untouched by his article. The correction seems a bit one-sided to me, but at least Goddard has been clear about the limits of his own work on the subject. If he has published anything addressing the later history of the term or correcting any of team’s misuse of his work, I am not aware of it. (If anyone does know of such a response, I would very much appreciate a reference.)

So, why is Goddard’s work the first thing Redskinsfacts.com cites in their history of the term? Well they have to know that many people equate the origin of a term (or at least our earliest known account of it) with its contemporary meaning. This is called the etymological fallacy, and it’s an extraordinarily common mistake. So, they don’t really have to tell us the article proves the term is innocent; the folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that is what many of their fans will take away from their reference to the article. Citing Goddard and providing a link to his work enables them to strengthen the impression that the team name is innocent without actually going so far as to say that’s what Goddard has shown. They invite their readers to indulge in an etymological fallacy, just as they invite us to think of Lonestar Dietz as a Native American when he was likely an outright fraud. It’s fascinating to see how the site avoids making the false claims in question, even as they invite readers to infer those very claims from the one they do make.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t even the worst of it. Defense of the Washington football team has produced all manner of horribles over the years. This isn’t even the worst of it.

Still, it’s pretty damned deceitful.

And cowardly.

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A Little Monday Mischief

23 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Uncommonday

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Chiefs, High Scool, Humor, Metlakatla, Miss Chiefs, School, Sports, Sports teams

GetImage

When I brought up the Fighting Whities, a colleague of mine mentioned this little gem of a women’s basketball team here. You see in Metlakatla, the high school sports teams go by the ‘Chiefs’, at least the men’s teams do. The women go by the Miss Chiefs.

🙂

71.271549 -156.751450

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Uncommonday – The Sun Never sets on the Cricket Empire

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Anthropology, Uncommonday

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anthropology, Cricket, Cultural Change, Cultural Diffusion, Culture, Maasai, Sports, Trobiand Islands

Just what ain’t Cricket? I really wouldn’t know the answer to that question, but I am occasionally quite amused to find out just what is cricket, or at least who has learned to play and how they play it. More than most of the big world sports, it seems that cricket lends itself to regional variation, and there are some really interesting variations out there. I’m not a very sporty guy, but I’m thinking Kilikiti Estonian style out on the lagoon for Piuraagiaqta.

Oh yes!

Kilikiti (Samoan Cricket).

This Masai team appears to play a pretty standard version of the game, but you wouldn’t know it from their uniforms.

And heading back out into the Pacific, we get Trobriand Cricket.

This is how they do it in Estonia.

71.271549 -156.751450

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Unommonday – The Fightin’ Whities!

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Uncommonday

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

American Indians, Basketball, Native Americans, Sports, Sports Mascots, The Fighting Whites, The Fighting Whities, University of Northern Colorado

fightinwhitesSince sports mascots are on the public mind once again, I thought it might be a good time to post my all-time favorite team. Mind you, I don’t follow sports. When people talk about sports, to me it sounds a lot like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. When a game is on the tube, I just see a blue screen. And I must say that I have never seen these guys play, nor do I know anything about their record. I just know the name of the mascot for an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado: It’s ‘The Fightin’ Whites’, or the ‘fightin’ whities’ as they were more popularly known. Their motto was “Every thang’s gonna be all white.” And just in case the ironic tone isn’t clear, let me point out that the school used sales of team merchandise to fund an excellent scholarship program for Native American Students.

71.271549 -156.751450

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Great Movie Villains, Volume IX: That Witch With a Bow!

30 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movie Villainy, Movies

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Film, Hunger games, Jennifer Lawrence, Movies, Satire, Sports, Suzanne Collins, Villainy

Katniss Everdeen
(Avoid at all costs!)

Now some of you may think the title to this piece is a little harsh, maybe even disrespectful. But I’m telling you, if you had seen the movie I just saw, you might be calling her something a little to the left of the term I actually used.

There is a word for her kind, and it rhymes with itch!

I’ve been hearing about this movie for months, and I was really looking forward to it. The title alone had me sold from the beginning. It sounded like a nice sports flick, maybe with a bit of a charity angle worked in. How can you not love a movie with sports and philanthropy? I was really looking forward to this.

I missed a minute or two at the beginning, but as I understand it, there were supposed to be 24 kids in this contest; it’s winner take all. Great! I love a nice high-stakes contest. So, I can’t wait to learn how the games are played and watch our hero develop character and depth on the way to becoming a true champion.

What followed was the most vulgar display of brutality and poor sportsmanship that I have ever seen.

Ever!

Run!!!

You see, the lead actress is not down with the plan. Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Shrader Lawrence) doesn’t even want to hold her team-mates hand in the opening ceremonies. With all the people from her home town pulling for the two of them, she has to be talked into this simple gesture of solidarity.

As if that wasn’t enough, you should see what this spoiled little princess does when some television executives don’t give her enough attention. All I can say is you better stay away from the orchard fruit when this girl wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.

I mean seriously, …sounds a bit like glitch!

Katniss doesn’t even stick around for the start of the game. When the pepper meats the paprika, this spoil-sport takes off and runs the opposite direction. It works out in her favor though, because some sort of disaster befalls the other contestants. I really couldn’t figure out what it was that happened, because the cameraman was awfully shaken up by the whole thing. That sequence was really hard to follow, but the one thing that I know about the opening sequence to the games is that while other athletes were playing and dying, our main character was doing her damnedest to get the hell out of Town.

Cowardly stitch!

The people who run the games had to trick little Katniss back out onto the game field, and even then she spent most of her time hiding in the trees. When some of the other boys and girls came to welcome our wayward girl back to the contest, she wouldn’t even come down to meet them. Worse than that, Katniss soon proved just how far she was willing to go to prove herself the worst sport ever to disgrace any game ever. She knocked a big nest of wasps down onto her fellow contestants as they slept below her.

It was awful. One of the girls died. I can only assume the poor girl was allergic or something. That’s right, Katniss killed one of the other contestants. I don’t even think she was sorry.

Knows a guy named Mitch!

In fact, Little Miss spoil-sport was just getting started with the wasp nest. Next, she blew-up the food stores for all the contestants (apparently the games had an endurance element to them). Katniss followed that up by killing yet another of the other contestants just as her new best friend falls prey to some terrible accident. That’s right, while the innocent little girl dies an unfortunate death (the cause of which I never quite understood), our girl Katniss was busy shooting another contestant with an arrow.

Yes, it was fatal.

Rue (Died of an Unfortunate Coincidence)

Up to this point, you could perhaps have given Katniss the benefit of the doubt. She had no way of knowing about the one girl’s allergies, and her friend, Rue? Well Katniss can’t really be blamed for that, …I don’t think. I don’t even think you can blame her for disaster that befell the other contestants. But when you shoot a guy with an arrow, there just isn’t much doubting your intent. By this point it’s damned clear. Our girl Katniss is a damned murderer.

An itchy murderer!

I can only guess as to the intended nature of the games, but what difference could that possibly make? When you invite this girl to the party, it turns into a war of attrition.

The whole thing comes to a head when one of the contest finalists falls prey to a pack of wolves. Guess how our hero helps out!

Go-one guess!

She kills the guy. I mean how cold do you have to be to refuse help to a man being eaten by wolves?

Cold! I tell you. Stone cold pitch!

So, after all the murder and mayhem, the game officials make one very simple request, that our girl and the one person she hadn’t put under the turf should actually play off one final round. You would think the least she could have done is to grant this one simple request, what with a whole nation watching and the fate of the hungry poor hanging in the balance!

How does little miss Ever-mean react? She threatens to poison herself instead.

You have to wonder, what the hell is she afraid of? It’s just a contest! Can’t she just play one round of this game after all that’s happened? Couldn’t she just give the audience just a little taste of the contest they were supposed to be watching all along?

You would think that wouldn’t be too much to ask. But no. With a single injured opponent, this girl STILL wouldn’t step up and give it a go. Instead, she gets out some poison berries, cons the other contestant into some sort of suicide pact, and gets ready to Jim Jones the whole affair.

The Hungry are Still Hungry
Bet on it!

And do you know how the people behind the games respond to this pathetic display of passive-aggressive manipulation? They give-in. they totally give-in! In some typical lefty-liberal display of everybody-wins nonsense, the fools declare a shared victory, thus depriving a whole nation of viewers of the chance to watch even one, JUST ONE, actual game.

I can only assume the hungry didn’t get their donations!

Damned Dirty Ditch!

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