https://www.resetera.com/posts/6465265/Oh this is not an unintentional idea. Mascotizing and mythologizing Native Americans should be understood as an essential component of their erasure. Notice how many whites defend shit like Wahoo and the Washington team name as "honoring" Native Americans. The reason they do this is that it creates a facade of respect and romanticization of Native cultures that allows them to pass into a romantic history of the American West rather than to exist in the present as an actual people who have experienced historic suffering. The Cleveland name change happened around 1915 as a part of a much broader conscious and subconscious cultural effort to control and bury the legacy of native tribes while pretending to honor them. Remember that this is only 20 or so years after Wounded Knee, but also a long time after the Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Erie had largely been forcefully removed from the Ohio Valley. Part of the cultural project is to pass these tribes into myth, another part is to conflate them all into one amorphous category of "Indian" without recognizing cultural tribal distinctions. How many of the fuckheads in this video could name a tribe beyond maybe the Sioux? How many know the tribes indigenous to Ohio? My point here is not just to spotlight how ignorant they are, but to recognize that they are ignorant because of the cultural project to erase and mythologize indigenous people.
I'll put it to you another way: if you live in America, how many streets, towns, or state names that you live in or around are actually native terms or tribe names? I grew up in Boulder Colorado just off of Arapaho Avenue. White people name shit after tribes under the guise of "honoring" them, but in fact it's a way to embed native names and words in a landscape that gets largely ignored as we push relentlessly towards the future. How many people think about the Illini when they go to Illinois? The Wampanoag Massachusett when they go to Boston? We bury these people in ubiquity and mundanity by hammering their names into meaningless designators without connecting them to any actual cultural context or historical reality. This is intentional.
What do I mean by this is intentional? I was in the state archives at Cheyenne, Wyoming a few years ago and I was skimming through their newspapers celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the town (this is 1892, 2 years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee). The editor's column celebrated the founding of the town with these words: "We celebrate the founding of our great city, which we have named for the savage peoples whom we righteously conquered to attain this land, that they may pass into the dust of history and that we may look on to a glorious future." I will never forget that language because it echoes a fundamental truth in American naming practices: we name them so that we might forget them. If you are American you are surrounded by things named in other languages which have become so ubiquitous and meaningless that it all bleeds together. Even if you have sympathy for the plight of indigenous peoples past and present, our nation's culture has been constructed to encourage you to conflate and forget them.
The name of this team is offensive not merely in its lazy brand of casual racism which paints over real living people, it's dangerous because of the larger historical project of conflation and amnesia that it participates in.
Damn.
This is the best post I've read all year on this site.
Well said and thank you for posting this.
Guess the first cuck to fucking rep that post? Labor!
That thread went from mildly amusing to annoying to fetishizing. I don't want you fucks "acting" as upset as you can just present yourself as the most virtuous and "woke." I don't get how the black people of ERA can tolerate white boys that get so offended on their behalf. This just makes me embarrassed for them and conflicted between hiding under my chair or telling them to "stay in their own lane."
Fuck this guy for sure,
But saying "I love Chief Wahoo," is not literally genocide or the erasure of genocide. I support those protesters who want the total elimination of Wahoo but I disagree with it. I've never actually met an indian that disliked Chief Wahoo. On the Rez they wear his cap to show native pride. I'm sure its different for those mound builders up there but that just me.
I could be posting the daily shit of water rights, coal plants, uranium waste that I work by filing, scanning, and confirming documents to better the lives of my people and relatives and ERA fucks wouldn't give a shit because it's not as cause célèbre enough for them to care. This is Ashton Kutcher protesting sex trafficking level of "Look at me!"
