If the professional football team in the nation’s capital went by a name invoking any of the offensive terms associated with dominant, powerful, racial or ethnic groups in this country, how long would it go unchallenged?
It appears that the pressure to get the National Football League’s affiliate in Washington, D.C., to drop its racially coded name was heating up just as this year’s Native American Heritage Month gets under way. NFL officials met in late October with leaders of the Oneida nation, which had already amped up the campaign against the football team’s infamous name with radio ads and a symposium.
The controversy and the various arguments pro and con for retaining the name serve as a reminder that most of us know far too little about the indigenous people of this land. Ignorance perpetuates stereotypes and the practices that institutionalize names and words that are offensive to the people associated with them and to other justice-minded people. The antidote to ignorance is education.
To facilitate discussions about the history of Native Americans, respect for differences and inclusion, Diversebooks.net offers a number of books on native people that can serve as resources for discussions. Here are some selections from our publishers available at discount prices on our Website:
La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, by Patricia K. Galloway, $22.50 (List price: $25) University of Mississippi Press, June 2006, ISBN: 9781578069330, pp. 144 pages.
Little attention has been paid to the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle’s 1682 expedition into the Lower Mississippi Valley and even less to the reception his party received from the land’s original inhabitants that contributed to the invaders’ survival. This collection of essays by 13 scholars attempts to put LaSalle’s forays into context, examines the impact of French colonialism in the Southeast and adds detail about the new arrivals’ interactions with native people. This is a limited, signed, hand-numbered edition in clamshell box with limited, signed, hand-numbered print. It includes 120 color photographs and a chronology.
