Blood Money: #NotYourRedskin

Image credit Mother Jones; all rights reserved.

So Dan Snyder thinks, once again, that he can redwash his way out of public criticism for his vicious racism.

Dan Snyder isn't backing down from continuing to use his team's embattled nickname. Now the Washington Redskins' owner is trying to change perception by making a public overture towards American Indians. 

Snyder announced the creation of the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, which will aim "to tackle the troubling realities facing so many tribes across our country."

The arrogance is breathtaking. Or, rather, it would be, except that Dan has shown us who he is over and over and over again.

This is a person who insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he knows better what one of the most noxious racial slurs that can be leveled at an Indian actually means. he insists that he's honoring us by calling us a term that was a tool of our ancestors' genocide. He even goes so far as to retain the services of a white man who, like Snyder and his fans, dresses up in redface, a race minstrel, to pretend that he's an "Indian chief" so that he can publicly "absolve" Dan of his racism. [No, I'm not suggesting he paid the minstrel, a fabulist, a liar, a very little man. I'm sure the attention and the adulation for his faux-Indian status were recompense enough.] Meanwhile, he and his minions smear a genuine Indian leader — one with enough of our traditional warrior spirit to take him on in as public a manner as possible — as "not Indian."

Dan, you have no right and no authority to do such a thing. No amount of blood money will wash away the stain of stain of your overweening racism. No amount of money will free you from your overriding obligation to do the right thing. You know, that one thing that you, comfortable and arrogant in your racism, continually refuse to do.

"I believe the Washington Redskins community should commit to making a real, lasting, positive impact on Native American quality of life — one tribe and one person at a time," Snyder wrote. "I know we won't be able to fix every problem. But we need to make an impact. And so I will take action." 

That won't include changing the Redskins name, which has been the target of intensified criticism by activist groups in recent months. 

Snyder opened the letter by saying he "believe(s) even more firmly" than he did several months ago "that our team name captures the best of who we are and who we can be, by staying true to our history and honoring the deep and enduring values our name represents." 

He also wrote he has been "encouraged by the thousands of fans across the country who support keeping the Redskins tradition alive."

Sorry; no. Three "tribal leaders" among 566 federally recognized tribes and all their members does not a mandate make. Any group will have its people who don't get it — and its sellouts. Those are phenomena that cross all demographic lines, including those of race.

And "fans?" Oh, you mean those other racists: The ones who dress up in redface at your team's games and do their fake war dances and their fake war chants and their fake tomahawk chops. The ones who turn every comment section of ever report on you and your multibillion-dollar enterprise's ongoing commitment to racism into a virtual sewer of racism and violence. Those fans.

Pro tip, Dan: They don't speak for Indians, either.

I realize that I'm just one lonely little voice here. Two, if you count our entire household — and it was Wings who brought this story to my attention last night and wanted me to write about it here. But I speak for the two of us when I say that I hope not a single Indian accepts so much as a red cent from Snyder's "foundation." 

In my language, Dan Snyder is a windigo, and what he's peddling here is simply more wétigo, more soul sickness. It's blood money, wrung from the scalps and skins of our ancestors who were massacred, lynched, and otherwise subject to this country's genocidal extermination policies.

We owe them — and our children, even unto the seventh generation — better than that.

And Dan: We are #NotYourRedksins.




Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.