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First, I’m not going to defend Savard’s use of “Indian,” and neither evidently are the Hawks. Even though you only need to go back to the Wild Tchoupitoulas‘ great eponymous album of the mid-70s to find those New Orleans Mardi Gras revelers referring to themselves proudly as “Indians,” and it’s still the American Indian Movement that drives so much work for equal rights, we should all have moved beyond Columbus’s bonehead appellation by now. Yet neither am I going to suggest he should have said “Native American.” Sorry, but well-intentioned though it may be, “Native American” is just plain wrong in that it doesn’t do linguistically what it intends to do. For instance, I can rightfully claim to be a native American, born in Pittsburgh, PA, and for that matter anyone born in Toronto or Sao Paolo could technically lay claim to being a native American as well. It’s about time we halted the usage claiming the entire Western hemisphere for U.S. residents alone, and for the same basic reasons — making language clear, making it mean what it says — we should discourage the use of “Native American.” I prefer “tribal American,” with an emphasis on identifying any individual’s tribal ancestry whenever possible. For instance, Chief Black Hawk was a Sauk warrior. But, hey, on this I’m just a lone voice in the linguistic universe arguing radical common sense. As for the Hawks, new team President John McDonough, a marketing genius, has made it clear he isn’t going near “Commit to the Indian,” even as individual fans have it printed on T-shirts that are selling like pretzels and beer at the United Center. But that doesn’t remove the team from the unwanted scrutiny brought on by all this, best illustrated by Carol Slezak’s column this week in the Sun-Times.
The Blackhawks are named after a person, just as the 1832 Black Hawk War is commonly cited as the only conflagration between American tribes and the U.S. government named after a single person, and in that, given the current environment, there is no precedent to knock the logo down. All tribal Americans can unite against Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians, but Florida State has negotiated with the Seminole tribe to maintain their Seminoles nickname, and the deal has been good for all concerned. There were no Illiniweks left to authorize the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Chief Illiniwek, but that mascot, along the way, had made the mistake of appropriating dance moves from an Oklahoma tribe that took offense to having a genuine ritual turned into halftime entertainment, and eventually the Chief had to go. As for Black Hawk, good luck finding a relation to claim misuse of a personal image.
