“Questionable Naming Rights” by Mike Wise, appearing in The Washington Post, attempts to prove that the name of Washington’s football team is racist. However, the author is guided solely by his personal emotions. He does attempt to document his reasoning, yet, he uses sources that have already been thoroughly discredited.

The most disturbing part is, the Redskins annually present data rationalizing their callous insistence on keeping the name … . On Page 272 of the team’s media guide, readers are even given a Reader’s Digest version of where the term came from. “The term redskin . . . was inspired not by their natural complexion but by their fondness for vermillion makeup.”

However, long before the advent of “Reader’s Digest”, in 1634, while travelling up the Chesapeake Bay to settle the new colony of Maryland, Father Andrew White observed the natives and wrote in his journal:

“The natives are of tall and comely stature, of a skin by nature somewhat tawny, which they make more hideous by daubing, for the most part, with red paint mixed with oil, to keep away the mosquitoes … .” (Redskins of 1634)

Lonestar Dietz Then Mr. Wise writes that because “The Baltimore Sun” recently claimed that the first Redskins coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, “was a white man who was convicted of misrepresenting his [Indian] identity on military draft documents … there was no American Indian for which the team was named, just a perpetuated stereotype of the time.” This is illogical, for everyone believed Dietz to be the son of a full-blood Sioux Indian woman, he looks Indian in the picture here and he believed he was Indian. If he could now be proven not to have had Indian blood, what difference would that make to the actions of those in the past who believed that he did? He had played tackle at Carlisle Indian School of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and when he became coach of the Redskins he brought a number of Indian players with him to the new team. They even wore war paint and Indian bonnets at games.

Unfortunately, Mike Wise, cannot control his emotional impulses and wanders off into La-La land claiming that “Europeans introduced commercial scalping to North America“. Come on now - and what was the “commercial” use for the bloody scalps?

“When they started paying bounties for Indian bodies and Indian skulls as proof of an Indian kill, the trappers and mercenaries would come in with wagons full of men, women and children’s bodies and with gunny sacks of heads. It became a transportation and storage problem, so bounty payers began to pay for scalps in lieu of skulls and bloody red skins in lieu of bodies.”

It is quite unfortunate that so many people have accepted concocted stories such as that above, that the word “redskin“, in use since at least 1699, comes from the white man paying bounties for Indian scalps, which did not happen until more than fifty years later, when the British government first offered bounties for scalps during the French and Indian War. Fortunately, “WaPo” of today, has an erudite and researched article on this same subject: “A Linguist’s Alternative History of ‘Redskin’ - Term Did Not Begin as Insult, Smithsonian Scholar Says“. Also, here is material on the short-lived practice of the British paying for Indian scalps - Scalping During the French and Indian War.

Redskins and Warpaint

Redskins of 1634

The Redskin Bard, ~ Simon Pokagon

No Little Indian Boys

Chief Osceola Rides

Tracked at Michelle Malkin, Post Watch, The Political Teen and Dust My Broom.

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