And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Posted to FN by Robert Eurich This lengthy article dated March 29, 1999 covers a lot of ground "Move to Ban Indian Sports Mascots Gains Speed" http://web3.stlnet.com/postnet/news/wires.nsf/Sports/D9BDEB3403904DF78625674 300721796?OpenDocument By JONATHAN TILOVE@ c.1999 Newhouse News Service@ (UNDATED) Juan Reyna is a Cleveland Indian, but the only record he is compiling at Jacobs Field is an arrest record. Why? Because Reyna is not a baseball player but a genuine American Indian who lives in Cleveland. He has twice been arrested for protesting his hometown ballclub's appropriation of his ethnic identity for fun and profit; arrested, with others, for burning effigies of Chief Wahoo, the ballclub's bright red, big-toothed, big-nosed, madly grinning cartoon mascot, who the team's management insists should be seen as an icon of honor. Come the home opener, April 12, Reyna and his allies will be outside Jacobs Field once again. ``It's not about baseball,'' says Reyna, a Mexican Apache who heads a local group called the Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance. ``It's about racism.'' As a new baseball season begins, American Indian activists will renew their efforts to end the use of Indian names and images by sports teams. And while Cleveland's Indians and Atlanta's Braves seem unlikely to shed their Native American trappings any time soon, the long-standing campaign to rein in the use of Indian mascots in sports appears to be gaining traction. In recent years, scores of colleges and universities have shed their Indian names and symbols. St. Johns University in New York went from the Redmen to the Red Storm, Miami University of Ohio from the Redskins to the Red Hawks, Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma from the Redskins to the Crimson Storm. The Los Angeles and Dallas school systems have done away with Indian team names. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is due to decide shortly on a suit brought by American Indian activists to cancel federal protection for the Washington Redskins trademark because, activists say, it is patently offensive. A group of institutional investors -- the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility -- has persuaded the makers of Budweiser and Miller beers and Coca-Cola to stop using Chief Wahoo and his ilk in their advertising. Likewise, the Denny's restaurant chain has instructed its employees in the Cleveland area not to wear Wahoo at work. In the February Harvard Law Review, a third-year law student, Aaron Strider Colangelo, outlined a legal strategy that could be used to bring public accommodations civil rights suits against professional sports teams -- whether it's baseball's Braves or Indians, football's Redskins or Kansas City Chiefs, or hockey's Chicago Blackhawks. The heart of Colangelo's claim: ``The use of Indian team names and mascots denies American Indians the full and equal enjoyment of a place of public accommodation'' -- the stadium. And in early March, under the pressure of an unprecedented U.S. Justice Department civil rights inquiry, the Buncombe County, N.C., board of education voted to drop the use of ``Squaws'' as ``an expression of pride and school spirit'' for the girls' athletic teams at Erwin High School after it was informed that in some Indian languages ``squaw'' translates as ``vagina.'' (The board decided to keep ``Warriors'' for the boys' teams, as well as the school's 30-foot statue of an Indian, tomahawk in hand.) ``Nationally, it's almost like a brush fire, and Cleveland just has to be a part of it,'' says Reyna. ``Cleveland either has to come clean or look really stupid.'' But it will be a while before Cleveland finds itself alone. Despite recent changes, there remain literally thousands of school teams with Indian names in America. ``It's Indians and animals, that's basically it,'' says Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Indian who is president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization based in Washington. In Ohio alone, according to a national inventory compiled by the Detroit chapter of the American Indian Movement, there are 218 elementary schools, high schools and colleges with Indian mascots -- 122 Indians, 51 warriors, 21 redskins, 17 braves, 6 chiefs and one redmen. Massachusetts has 30; New Jersey, 71; New York, 161; and California, 181. It is a good bet that not a single one of these schools could change its name without a divisive and emotional fight. The Justice Department inquiry in North Carolina clearly raised the ante on the issue, and elicited the loudest howls of protest and mockery. It was, in the words of an editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal, a case of ``political correctness on crack.'' It is a sentiment echoed in Cleveland. <end excerpt> -- American Indian Sports Team Mascots http://www.geocities.com/~earnestman/1indexpage.htm "Little drops of rain wear away the greatest of stones." ++++++++++++++++++ End Racial Bigotry NOW! Schools By state: http;//www.tdi.net/ishgooda/racial/rachome.htm &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
