Washington Redskins Appropriation Of Native American Culture

In the collective effort of the American masses to become increasingly politically correct and sensitive of human rights, there has been much debate regarding the Washington Redskins appropriation of Native American culture in their team name and logo. Other sports teams Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs also use race and ethnicity derived iconography that some believe also belittles the sordid legacy of the near extermination of American Indians by white colonist-invaders. However, the Redskins seem to garner more attention and controversy in recent times due to the interesting decision of the US Patent and Trademark office to revoke the Redskins’ team name. According to MSNBC reports, “The United States Patent and Trademark Office…cancelled

Psychologist Carl Jung pioneered theories on archetypes and archetypal symbolic language that is recognized across cultures by the social collective through images and experiences similarly recognizable and transcendent of race, language, and culture. Indeed, someone with no awareness of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II, might see a six pointed star on the front of a blue-and-white striped t-shirt as having no significance, or as being “just a t-shirt.” Yet for someone of Jewish heritage, the sight would have a terribly poignant resonance, a cultural memory of oppression attached. Such may be the case for Native Americans and their perception of the Washington Redskins’ team name and Brand symbols. For those who have inherited the Native American history of inhuman savagery at the hands of Europeans and early white Americans—including slaughter, servitude, displacement, forced relocation, and flagrant theft and desecration of their entire land—the somber face of the painted Chief on Redskin helmets may be a painful reminder of the stoic faces of their ancestral tribal fathers who tried to calmly and civilly exchange with the strange European invaders and unknowingly handed their entire race into the ravaging and raging clutches of irreverent, blood-land-and-gold-thirsty colonizers. The term Redskin may indeed evoke images of their Native tribal ancestors’ red blood spilled into the shamed earth that was once exclusively their paradise. Their collective subconscious, through the generations, retains and re-members these shattered and shattering memories—the Native Americans scarcely left alive today must condescend to marginal and invisible lives where their race has been so near-completely wiped out that many Americans forget they even exist and, indeed, they become