Truthfully, neither the Redskins flag, nor the museum accurately represents the Native Americans. While an entire museum has a pretty substantial advantage over the one image on a flag it is still flawed because in my opinion, not telling the complete truth about a situation is really not all that different from lying about it. The flag is not accurate or acceptable because it is a mascot for a sports team. A mascot is intended to be as vicious, tough, and violent. Therefore, using the Native American with a feather headdress and angry look on his face in supposed to represent these three qualities. Depicting the Native Americans as violent and using the most stereotypical object (a feather) to categorize this group of people is definitely the least acceptable representation of the two. In fact, the name Red-Skin is not exactly entirely acceptable either and seems a lot more offensive than “Native American.”
Photo Credit: Redskins4ever.com
Aditi, I agree with the points you made about the way Native Americans are represented as mascots in American sport teams. Your comments made me consider why Trojans,” “Spartans” and “Vikings” are popular sports team names that pick out groups according to nationality, race or ethnicity, but these are also fundamentally different from Indian mascots.
ReplyDeleteWhen reviewing the points you made in contrast to Indians, a Viking mascot does not depict existing peoples and cannot, therefore, affect the lives of those they depict. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Boston Celtics actually are examples of sports teams whose names and images depict an existing racial or ethnic group, but even these are significantly different from the cases of Indian mascots. The Celtics play in a city with a large Irish population, the Fighting Irish represent a university established and largely populated by Irish people. According to my knowledge there is no such Indian mascot that was similarly devised by Indian persons.
Furthermore, the depiction of an Native America that your logo demonstrated shows the extreme violent and negative behavior of of an "Indian" that is historically false and culturally disrespectful.