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Representation of Native Americans as "savage": Yesterday and…

- - - - These are clear examples of how detrimental the mascots of just this one baseball team is. These are real people NOT mascots.
    - - New studies have shown that "when participants completed an indirect – or implicit – stereotype measure, those who’d viewed the Native American mascots were more likely to associate warlike qualities with Native Americans."
        
        "Using the same implicit measures as our earlier study, residents of Cleveland were more likely to associate Native Americans with warlike traits than residents of Detroit and Miami." (Detroit, home of the Tigers, and Miami, which houses the Marlins, were used as control cities.)
      - Angle, Justin. “New Research Shows How Native American Mascots Reinforce Stereotypes.” The Conversation, 11 Sept. 2019, http://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-how-native-american-mascots-reinforce-stereotypes-63861.
      - Some teams have changed their original logos which depict physical men to just the names and Native American symbols. For example, the Braves now feature an ax and the Chiefs now feature an arrowhead for their logo. While this is a step in the right direction, it's not far enough. The names must be changed or else the stereotype of Native Americans as savages shall by implicitly re-enforced everyday by these major league teams.,
  - - - Just the name is deeply wrongful seeing as the word 'savage' was one of the original slurs against Native Americans. The entire perfume is labeled savage and the ads depict actors dressed in feathers and pelts while Johnny Depp is wandering the desert.
        
        “It’s an arrogant appropriation of imagery that is unimaginatively executed,” Hanay Geiogamah, a UCLA professor who is a member of the Kiowa tribe, told The Washington Post. “What offends me is that they so casually appropriate imagery like that and blend it together for their own purposes.”Geiogamah noted that “savage” is one of the original slurs used against Native Americans. “That’s more insulting than anything else,” he said. “This calls attention to the ongoing reality that the ad industry nationally and internationally still thinks they can appropriate American Indian imagery when they see fit."
      - The ad's spokesperson is none other than Johnny Depp who has had a peppered history of misrepresenting Native Americans in his depiction of a fictional Native American character named Tonto is the Lone Ranger.
        
        Native Appropriations Post on Johnny Depp as Tonto
        
        A tribal chairman, John Wauqua, "certified" Depp as an honorary citizen of the Comanche Nation, but his affiliation and ethnic claims have been heavily criticized by Native American scholars and the public as a whole.
    - - Just Another Pocahontas Fantasy Story: Critiquing Galliano
  - - - After the first sequence, the audiences are introduced to a different tribe of Native Americans, the Lakota Tribe, and are meant to fall in love with them because they help the main character. This aspect is extremely divisive, that some tribes are welcoming to the white man and thus are meant to be "good" while others are rightly protective and suspicious and meant to be "bad".
        
        Another striking scene in the movie is when the main love interest (Stands with a Fist) is injured, Dunbar (the main character) carries her to safety, but when they get back to her tribe she is dragged across the ground. The drastically different portrayal of how they treat women is once again another technique that depicts Native Americans as savages.
    - - While the movie was considered to be a success at bringing the Native American perspective into the light, it's also criticized heavily. “It took a white man to prove what Indians had been saying all along, Indians are human.”
    - - There are too many example to list of which Western films display Native Americans as savages that are meant to be killed in order to the righteous cowboy to win. In fact this is the entire narrative trope for Western films such as "The Indian Fighter".
- - - - Perhaps the most detrimental effects of this act was the land lost to the new white settlers moving West. Native Americans had been living in North America for centuries before Europeans arrived. Now the US government declared their proviso claims to the land void and forced them to acquiescence their homelands to white settlers.
      - Another key effect was the fact that now the land was to given to the "head of the family" and it was him who owned it. This enforced a capitalist system of land ownership that didn't previously exist within Native communities. It was a direct act of assimilation, the government forced Native communities to bend to their laws of landholding while also giving up pieces of their homeland.
        
        This shows that the US government thought their system was so much better than the pre-existing tribal system and ultimately didn't value Native American culture. It was an aggressive act of forced assimilation, basically saying that they wouldn't own any land if a "head of the family" wasn't chosen.
    - - For example, the homeland of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians in Dulac, Louisiana is shrinking massively due to the rerouting of the Mississippi River. Companies have rerouted, dug canals and drilled for oil in certain locations that has caused the flooding of the reservation where this tribe lives. “The U.S. Geological Survey said the larger Terrebonne Basin lost almost 30 percent of its land from 1932 to 2010.” And yet, nobody hears about how their homeland is being destroyed, perhaps it's because this stereotype of "unworthiness" still persists today.
  - - - Andrew Jackson, president at the time, was a staunch supporter of this act and was quick to put it into action. This forced many Native American tribes from their ancestral homelands West across the Mississippi River.
        
        Around 100,000 Native Americans were forced to relocate. westward under U.S. military coercion and many died en route. The trek of the Cherokee in 1838–39 became known as the infamous “Trail of Tears”. The Trail of Tears describes the march from the Southeastern United States all the way across the Mississippi River and into what the US government deemed "undesirable" land in the West that was given to the Native Americans.
  - - - During these centuries of conflict between Native Americans and European/US armies, the white soldiers were seen as heroic for killing the enemy. Native Americans presented obstacles to settlement and were seen as "savage" because of how different their culture was from what Europeans viewed as "civilized".
        
        The longevity of these wars constantly enforced the idea that Native Americans were the enemy and to be killed for the progress of America itself. Over 300 years this persisted and became a heavily enforced stereotype that we must work hard to break.
  - - - The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a government-backed institution that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents. Over the next years over 100 schools similar to the Carlisle school were instituted and began to destroy community and family ties, it was also dangerous here for the children because diseases such as tuberculosis and flu were deadly.
        
        The US government was running out of land to force the Native Americans onto, so they tried to eradicate them and their culture all together by forcing children into these schools. It was a terrible plan that caused these children to feel displaced and unwanted.
        
        The phrase "kill the Indian save the man" is extremely racist and purposefully attacked Native Americans and their culture. The schools forced children to un-learn their traditional values and ways of life, causing them to feel inferior. The phrase and schools as a whole presented Native Americans, and children no less, as "savages" that needed to be disciplined and taught the European ways.
- - - - Columbus Day has become a controversial holiday because of who it's celebrating and if we're celebrating Columbus, then aren't we celebrating his horrific actions? Some states and counties have passed legislation making the second Monday of October as Indigenous or Native Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day. "South Dakota's official holiday on this date is Native Americans' Day, while people in New Mexico, and Berkeley, California, celebrate Indigenous People's Day."
        
        The fact that these states have decided to change the name and entire purpose of the holiday goes to show how wrong Columbus Day is and I appreciate that it was changed to celebrate the people most affected by Columbus's grotesque actions.
      - Columbus murdered thousands of indigenous people under the excuse of self defense or merely just to hold power over them and to gain land. In the journals he wrote and brought back to Italy he described the indigenous people he found as "child-like", "willing to work" and "uncivilized savages". Being one of the first Europeans to encounter the indigenous people of North America, his perceptions of them were highly influential.
      - “Columbus Day in the United States.” Timeanddate.com, https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/columbus-day.