After a few weeks of heated discourse, the Washington Redskins eventually (read: finally) made the historic decision to change their name and logo. Of course, this decision came after intense pressure from powerful voices and companies, namely FedEx, who holds a stake in their stadium, and Nike, who pulled their merchandise from their e-commerce sites.
I I know a lot of people think this is silly, and just as many have sought out Native opinions that agree this is unimportant or that the name and imagery somehow actually honors Natives.
Surveys show that Natives who are connected to their tribes and communities are more likely to find it offensive or insulting, and that makes a lot of sense to me. (There’s an entire side debate about your “Native-ness”, and how much it qualifies depending on your knowledge of your tribe and roots, whether or not you do or have lived on your tribe’s reservation, etc, but I’m not going to get into that here).
The bigger problem we face is invisibility. About the only time Natives get any visibility or representation in the mainstream is when they are being used as a caricature or for aEsThEtIcS. Think: teepees as decorations at music festivals or for your dog, headdresses as glam accessories on the runway, and big, smiling red faces as sports logos. (A whole other side issue is explaining why a teepee isn’t just a tent, who headdresses were actually worn by and why, and the history of the racial slur “Redskin”).
When Natives are only “seen” as caricatures, it’s very disrespectful and undermining, for one, but it also contributes to invisibility, and the fact that a great deal of America literally does not know Native people still exist, especially if they don’t live near an Indian reservation. So many people think Natives are ancient and extinct. When you have no visibility, and nobody knows you exist, they don’t know that Natives are disproportionately impoverished in America. They don’t know that a great deal of tribal lands (of the land we still have) is uninhabitable. They don’t know that numerous reservations mirror developing countries, and access to water and electricity is not outright supplied or available. They don’t know that Native women are disproportionately murdered and missing, and no such database even exists to quantify just how many — the only demographic where no such database exists. They don’t know that Native people are so plagued with health conditions and addiction, and that the average age for my Tribe is 49 years old, 20 years fewer than in Iraq.
I really came to understand Native invisibility when I moved to Illinois, a state that forced out all Natives from their ancestral lands by gunpoint, and thus has no reservations.
As long as I have lived here, I very very rarely meet a Native person, and I am often presumed to be Mexican. Having grown up being called and calling myself “Indian”, I quickly learned that that is presumed to mean South Asian Indian, so I have switched to Native.
I always knew we were invisible here, but I didn’t realize just how invisible we were until about two years ago. I was guest lecturing at a university on the topic of “writing for culture and place”, and asked to speak about my culture and how it is reflected in my writing, and read some chapters from my unpublished manuscript.
Another professor had asked to join the lecture, because she had just taken her class to visit the Native museum and heard I was coming to speak about them. I was having a nice time reading and discussing with the class. They were asking me questions, joking around with me, and it was honestly enriching and a lot of fun. At some point, the guest professor got a really mortified look on her face, which made me super nervous. I kept wondering what I said, if my story selections were too sad or macabre, or if I was I coming off too weird or kooky. I was thinking, man, this woman must regret joining my lecture. I was literally sweating over it.
At the end of the class, she approached me to chat and thanked me for coming and having her and her class. She explained that a comment I had made (defiantly!) about people thinking Natives are extinct to. this. day. embarrassed her, because she was one of those people. It was big of her to tell me. She was clearly embarrassed by it, and I was selfishly grateful she relieved me of one thing I would definitely obsess about at 3 am, wondering why and how I may have made a fool of myself.
It left me wondering how she got through the museum without realizing Natives are still around, since I believed it included art by Natives around Chicago present day, but I was too stunned to say much of anything.
In summary, an entire teacher at a university came to hear me talk about Natives and my culture, and did not know that they are alive and kicking. When I say Native invisibility is real, believe me. When we say the mainstream images of Natives are harmful and hurt, believe us.
Tricia Renée Kucinski | Author 