Indian Mascots You 're Out !

The dispute over whether Native American mascots should be used as a team symbol dates back to the 1970’s (Price 2). People differ on the basic issue, but there is a more important underlying principle. It is

The year is 1991.  The Atlanta Braves had just completed their first trip to the Fall Classic in four decades, and the Washington Redskins were undefeated, well on their way to their third Super Bowl title.  All across the eastern seaboard, sports fans were tasting success - while American Indians were in an uproar.  This year witnessed the peak of the protests over the use of mascots with American Indian themes.  With two of the major professional sports teams in question making front-page news across the country, many of us heard American Indians' complaints for the first time.  Suddenly, thanks to the cries of thousands of demonstrators, the names of many Americans' favorite teams had become synonymous with "nigger."

There has been many controversy with teams using Native American name for mascots and has become a major issue in today’s society. Many have viewed the Washington Redskins as honor for Native Americans, others see it racist, insensitive, and demeaning. Woods (2016) claims that “the complaint is that the use of stereotypical team names, mascots, and logos perpetuates an ideology that dehumanizes and demeans the cultures of Native Americans” (p. 298). Since the issue arise, many scholars, journalists and leaders have joined the battle to ensure that each team will eliminate the nicknames since it is considered abusive or hostile. It may take time but the trend is growing. More than 1,400 professional, collegiate,

A very sensitive subject and tough question that has been asked since the early 1900's is, should controversial sports mascots be replaced with mascots that are not offensive. It is a topic that continues even today as people protest against what they believe is stereotypical sport mascots. In the article, Controversial Sports Mascots Be Replaced, the authors of each article discusses how certain groups of people, specifically Native Americans, believe certain mascots are offensive and should from sport team names. The author attempts to create sympathy within the reader by sharing a story from is youth that tells how his mom was displeased with a hat he wore home that had a Chief wahoo on it. He told how his mom "jerked his hat off and threw it in the trash" because "she had been fighting against Indian stereotypes all her life."

The American Indian Sports mascots is a prime example of dysconscious racism. As a result, Native Americans have to endure mental and physical suffering daily. The first step to eradicating the offensive sports mascots is to mobilize the opposed of the racist mascots and ensure the voices are heard on mainstream media. The public will start to see how appalling it would be to keep American Indian Sports mascots, correspondingly gaining the attention of team owners, which will result in a more favorable chance of removing the

The lack of accurate representation of Native Americans in our everyday lives has left members of society without more than a stereotype to draw from when thinking about characteristics of Native Americans. Native Americans have “relative invisibility” in mainstream media and this lets the few inaccurate portrayals, such as a sports team’s mascot, have an overwhelming amount of power in forming stereotypes (Fryberg, Markus, Oyserman, Stone, 2008, pg. 208). Many members of society have a very narrow view of what they understand a Native American to look, dress, and act. These ideas mostly come from what they see in media through the caricatures used as mascots, childhood cartoons, and similar

Issue of whether to keep Mascots in schools or not, started in late 1970’s and from then this debate is going on. Most of the schools have Indian Mascots in place for half a century and suddenly it become problem to use Indian Mascots. Over 500 Native American organizations also announced their support for the removal of those mascots and over 1200 schools across the United States have changed the name of their sports teams and some school refused to play with those schools using Indian mascots. But some school still think that using mascots are just paying homage to the Native peoples and it’s just another group claiming to be offended. Sports teams used those mascots to promote their team’s athletic powers, like wolf, lion and eagle

Paola Reynua History 1301 September 28, 2016 In the article “Racism American Style and Resistance to Change: Art Education's Role in the Indian Mascot Issue” states how the author, Elizabeth M. De La Cruz, was happy and excited to attend to the University of Illinois. She was full of dreams with her expectations high about that university, but as soon as she arrived there everything was the opposite. Native Americans were using a tradition of Indians for their Mascot but not only that also a white male interpreted and Indian on one of their football games. She couldn't believe this was happening, if Americans love their Indians to death, how they could be using them as a mascot and also how Indians were just ignorant about all this

The dispute over whether Native American mascots should be used as a team symbol dates back to the 1970’s (Price 2). There are those who are passionately against Native American mascots. These advocators insist that Native American mascots are degrading to

     Many people do not consider themselves supporting Native American mascots that depict them in a bad manner. But when people walk around with a Atlanta Braves shirt on with a Indian with a tomahawk in his hand, it is degrading to the Indians. It is stereotyping them. School mascots and Sports team’s mascots are named after groups of people for no reason known. Notre Dame was founded by Irish Catholics, but their sports team was named the Fighting Irish. The name Fighting Irish has nothing to do with the Irish Catholics, it depicts them in a wrong way.(Price, 3). Team names can be changed to similar names that do not depict certain groups of people. Like the Redskins can be called the Red Hawks or the

Roppolo insists, “The real problem with the kind of dysconscous, symbolic, abstract racism that is perpetuated today by sports mascots… is that it enables very real, very concrete, and very conscious acts of violent racism that American Indian people still face in this country and this hemisphere on a daily basis”(228). This demonstrates how the mascot does have a detrimental impact towards Native Americans. People who are subjected to seeing Native Americans through these mascots already have fallacious perceptions of what Native Americans behave like. Due to this, people will start to react accordingly to how they feel the Native Americans are supposed to act due to the distorted stereotypes that are presented to the public. People do not even realize that they are acting this way towards Native Americans, because Roppolo claims that Americans have gotten used to being racist towards Native Americans for so long that it is now invisible, aka dysconscious racism(226). People do not realize that it is ingrained in them, so when they come into contact with a Native American they may perceive the situation different than what actually happened. Roppolo justified this by going on to add, “One young man had his brother nearly beaten to death - his skull cracked open, not just cracked - when several bouncers at a local nightclub had to control his ‘rowdy’

Almost everybody loves going to sporting events and seeing all the excited fans as well as the energized mascots. There has been quite a variety of mascots and logos seen in schools whether it be high schools or colleges and in professional leagues. According to a search done by an ESPN FiveThirtyEight reporter through a database known as MascotDB, out of the 42,624 teams in the database at the time there were 2,129 sports teams that have reference to Native Americans (Munguia). That’s about a five percent of all mascots while Native American only make up roughly two percent of the population of the United States in 2014 (US Census). There has been much debate and controversy around mascots and team names that reference Native American throughout the years and gaining more attention especially with the most public debate regarding National

Many races are unjustly victimized, but Native American cultures are more misunderstood and degraded than any other race. College and high school mascots sometimes depict images of Native Americans and have names loosely based on Native American descent, but these are often not based on actual Native American history, so instead of honoring Native Americans, they are being ridiculed. According to the article Warriors Survive Attack, by Cathy Murillo (2009) some “members of the Carpentaria community defended Native American mascot icons as honoring Chumash tradition and the spirit of American Indian Warriors in U.S. history and others claimed that the images were racist stereotypes” (Murillo, 2009). If people do not attempt to understand

This piece demonstrates the importance of Native American art on modern day life. The Seahawks, after seven years, were able to become one of the best teams in football. Although many may see this as giving homage to Native American culture, at first, I saw this as cultural appropriation. This transformative mask illustrated stories of Native American chiefs and their ancestors. It is tragic how an important aspect of Native American culture has been trivialized to fit a sports team. This mask was used to show supernatural encounters and was an integral part of ceremonial dances. Regardless of good intentions, the legacy of Native Americans has been popularized and tainted by our cultural

Historically, Native Americans are the weakest minority economically and politically in the United States. Unlike African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans, the indigenous-American population has received very little political power and even less economic status than they had in the 1950’s. The use of the image of Native Americans, tribal names and images, though romanticized as great chiefs and warriors in the sports arena, are none-the-less being exploited to the great monetary gain of the franchisee but not to the financial or psychological reward of the people whom