Bowing to the hue and cry of historical revisionists, the owners of the former Cleveland Indians baseball team changed their name to the Guardians, an innocuous, meaningless name referring to an Art Deco bridge over the Cuyahoga River.
Fans were outraged. No city names their team after losers, has-beens, or the defeated. On the contrary the name 'Indians' reflected the valor, courage, and strength of native Americans, and so it should remain as a reference to the proud tribes that preceded European colonization and fought valiantly to defend their lands and their rights.
However the owners capitulated and removed, expunged, and tossed aside any and all references to them. A blatant, politically motivated, ignorant decision and, said most observers, an insult to all native Americans.
The Washington Redskins owners fell to the same reformist guillotine, and changed the storied name of the team to the Commanders, a name like the Guardians which was historically and culturally meaningless - a bland, offend-none name that branded the team as a nothing, an extrusion, a smash-mouth group of eleven and nothing more.
However, the origin of the word ‘redskins’ came from native Americans themselves, as David Skinner of Slate recounts:
In 2005, the Indian language scholar Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution published a remarkable and consequential study of redskin's early history. His findings shifted the dates for the word's first appearance in print by more than a century and shed an awkward light on the contemporary debate. Goddard found, in summary, that "the actual origin of the word is entirely benign."
Redskin, he learned, had not emerged first in English or any European language. The English term, in fact, derived from Native American phrases involving the color red in combination with terms for flesh, skin, and man. These phrases were part of a racial vocabulary that Indians often used to designate themselves in opposition to others whom they (like the Europeans) called black, white, and so on.
The first unchallenged use of the word “redskin” occurs when a British lieutenant colonel translates a letter from an Indian chief promising safe passage if the officer visited his tribe in the Upper Mississippi Valley.
“I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life,” Chief Mosquito said in his letter, according to a 2005 study by Ives Goddard, the Smithsonian’s senior linguist emeritus.
In August, 1812, at a Washington reception for several Native Americans, President James Madison refers to Indians as “red people” or “my red children,” prompting Little Osage Chief Sans Oreilles (No Ears) to voice his support for the administration: “I know the manners of the whites and the red skins.” Then, Sioux Chief French Crow also pledged loyalty: “I am a red-skin, but what I say is the truth, and notwithstanding I came a long way I am content, but wish to return from here.”
On July 20, 1815, after tangling with famed explorer-turned-Missouri Territory Gov. William Clark, Meskwaki Chief Black Thunder gives a speech that was printed in the Western Journal in St. Louis. “I turn to all,” the chief is reported as saying, “red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me.”
The use of ‘redskin’, then, should not be offensive; and combined with the heroic image of the team – a noble Indian – there should never have been any furor in the first place.
The team's owners could have saved the honor accorded to American Indians and kept a remembrance of the native nationalism, pride, and defiant militancy of the indigenous tribes of America. They did not, another victim of the rabid revisionism of the Left which has not stopped at American Indians.
Their scythe has cut down any and all references to the antebellum and Civil War South. If their slash-and-burn destruction is complete a whole period of American history will be wiped out. No one will know what circumstances caused the conflict or what were its consequences.
There were many in Washington who did not want to discard the storied heritage of the American Indian, toss it aside as though it meant nothing; and more to the point, to retain the image of strength, honor, and a militant defense of territory and nationhood. Someone suggested that the team be renamed the White Wolves in honor of one of the most feared Indian chiefs in American history.
White Wolf was was a true American hero, defending his land against foreign intruders, brilliant chieftain, and as bloody a warrior as Genghis Khan. White Wolf knew that a purposeful barbarity would intimidate the enemy. Just as Genghis Khan posted severed heads on roads leading to conquered villages, gruesome warnings to the next settlements in his sights, so did White Wolf use unconscionable savagery as a tool of war. He knew that the Christian soldiers would see his tribal, animist, ferocity, understand that they were up against a frightening, unfathomable enemy with no moral restraint and would turn tail.
Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail, said:
S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’
He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.
‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’
‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’
Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’. They were as imperialist and genocidal as the white settlers who eventually vanquished them.
When they first migrated to the great plains of the American South in the late 18th century from the Rocky Mountains, not only did they achieve dominance over the tribes there, they almost exterminated the Apache, among the greatest horse warriors in the world.
Of course they killed many white people; and as Smithsonian scholar Ives reports, they were far bloodier than their ‘civilized’ oppressors. The Comanches knew – just like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram know – that savage brutality is a weapon of war, meant to frighten, intimidate, and terrorize. So if the teams owners wanted to raise White Wolf to preeminence and a position of honor and respect, he would have to recognize the Chief’s bloody credentials. And so it should be, for it would counter the prevailing assumption of native American victimhood and the predatory inhumanity of white invaders.
There are many tribes that rival the Comanches for savagery – the Cheyenne, Apache, and Blackfeet to name just a few. The Apache were especially known for their raids on white settlements from which they abducted women and enslaved children. The Apache would also have been a good choice for the name to replace the ‘Redskins’.
Sarah Parker Fields, granddaughter of Quanah Parker, 'White Wolf', Comanche Chief who wrought fear in every Union soldier who crossed his land was proud of her Native American heritage and fought hard for recognition of Indian valor and against the imposition of the insulting claim of victimhood.
Her grandfather and other tribal chieftains were far more deserving of recognition than the black man, servile and complaisant from the very beginning to the end. Mandingo, Yoruba, and Igbo were taken as slaves by tribal victors, sold to Arab middlemen who in turn sold them to Portuguese and English traders. Sold on the block in Savannah and Charleston, these Africans were bred for strength and reproductivity, dismissed, and disregarded.
White Wolf and Comanche, Apache, and Piute chieftains were proud, rebellious, militantly defiant warriors who refused to be subjugated and fought with terrible ferocity against the Union Army, mercenaries, and white settlers. Although they were outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered by the invading armies of the east, the fought the good fight. T
he American Indian was noble, proud, and dignified. His savagery, condemned by the white soldiers crossing his land, was to him nothing of the sort. There was no such thing as 'savagery', a term implying amorality, primitivism, and an unevolved cultural core. Savagery was no more than a legitimate expression of honor.
Most Native Americans wanted nothing to do with the neutering of their ancestors, reducing them to 'people of color' and linking them with black slaves, gay men, and transgender women. They saw white liberal hysteria as destructive, the last straw, the final burial of the American Indian's storied past. They were nonplussed at the removal of Indian icons, mascots, and images - another attempt to remove them from sight, to marginalize them in a baldly transparent and politically venal program of 'inclusivity'. Indians were once again being railroaded by the white man, corralled, and forced into cultural isolation and reservation.
Their time has come. The age of historical revisionism in America is happily coming to an end. The Native American will be restored - in name, image, and reputation - as an icon of American history, a symbol of bravery, patriotism, and militant defense of territory and natural rights.
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