No simple answers for big debate

By FAITH MOLDAN - Bigfork Eagle

Every Thursday I scan the other newspapers on our stand by the front desk of our office. Something caught my eye in the Lake County Leader two weeks ago.

It's really nothing specific to the Leader's coverage area. I've seen mention of it in other publications and some news broadcasts as well. The debate as to whether Native American mascots and team names are derogatory spans the United States. It even touches back to where I grew up.

Sleepy Eye, Minn. is named after a Sioux Indian Chief. His Sioux name was Ish-tak-ha-ba, which I'm pretty sure did not exactly translate into Sleepy Eye, but his drooping eye lid stuck him with that name for eternity.

Sleepy Eye does not rest on a reservation. The nearest one is about 30 or 40 miles away. There are few Native Americans that still live in town. The public high school's mascot is the Indian, and as far as I know there have been no, or very few, complaints about that fact.

I think that is because the image that goes along with the name is a figure of Chief Sleepy Eye. It's not cartoony in any manner, unlike the Cleveland Indian's Chief Wahoo logo. That logo shows a grinning, goofy looking red-skinned Indian with a headband and feather. I've had a problem with that word, redskin, for about two years now. I'd heard it so many times before, but not until I took a Native American Literature course in college did I learn the history behind the word.

As a part of the course's final paper, I did research on the use of Native American mascots used in sports. It was then that I learned that redskin referenced the killing of Native Americans and their bloodied skin. That's not something I'd want to cheer for or support no matter how good the team is or how much history the team has with the name and logo.

One of my first questions when I read about the dispute over the Ronan High School's use of the Chiefs and Maidens names and the "flying R" logo was whether or not there is sufficient education and mention of Native American history at the school. Do the students, whether they be white, black, asian or Native American, know about the native people that lived off of the Flathead and Mission vallies so many years before white settlers came to the area?

It's so easy to dress a person up in a headdress, to do the tomahawk chop and other activities that most people would recognize as referencing Native Americans. That does nothing though to educate people on what the feathers in the headdress represent and that the tomahawk chop has nothing really to do with Native American culture.

The University of North Dakota has used the name the fighting Sioux for years, and the school's most recent logo redesigns was completed by a Native Amercian artist. I think myself, along with many other people, thought that the inclusion of someone who knew the culture and history of the people referenced in the teams' name. But many people are still in a tizzy about the Fighting Sioux name.

Other sports teams and schools have mascots and logos that portray different caucassian ethnicities, but none of them portray them in a bad or derogatory way. There are no "Drunk Irishmen" or the like. What would a white person think if at a sporting event someone in a costume of a white businessman came out to pep up the crowd and ran around with a brief case and wearing a tie? It just wouldn't make sense, just as the use and portrayal of Native Americans in a derogatory fashion doesn't make sense to me and many other people.

Some teams and schools should change their mascots and names in my opion, while others need only to make changes such as adding more education for their fans and schools to pay respect to a beautiful culture and important history.