If you haven't read this marvelous (yes I am being sarcastic) opinion piece by Mike Jacobs, our beloved Editor of the Grand Forks Herald. I have posted his article from today addition of the Grand Forks Herald. Jacobs admits what we already knew, he is anti logo. Say it isn’t so. I also don’t believe him when he says that he isn't celebrating. Yeah, oh ok Mike! Again, I must ask myself why I am paying money for your miserable newspaper. That’s $15.75 a month that could be better spent on other things. It's not like we need to read your worthless opinion pieces, there are other media options available to us. The only reason I read the Herald anymore is because of the sports coverage. I am seriously thinking about canceling the paper for good.
The more I think about last week’s decision to retire UND’s nickname and logo, the more discouraged I become.
I’ve been opposed to use of “The Fighting Sioux” since students constructed grotesque snow sculptures that depicted Indian people to celebrate something called “King Kold Karnival” back in the 1960s — long before the days of political correctness. In the ’70s, the coffee shop in the Student Union used cups decorated with a caricature of “Sammy Sioux.” There were worse offenses against human dignity — including enthusiasts who did mock dances dressed in loin cloths and little more, whooping and hollering and pretending to be Indians — or what they thought represented Indians. Something similar happened a couple of years ago, when a sorority hosted a party with a cowboys-and-Indians theme.
Clearly, it seems to me, the nickname and logo have long encouraged thoughtless stereotyping of Indian people.
Over the years, I’ve taken quite a lot of heat for this point of view. In fact, I’d say that nothing I’ve written about in more than 30 years at the Herald has brought me so much abuse.
So I should be celebrating last week’s decision to end use of the nickname and logo.
But I’m not celebrating at all.
Instead, it seems to me that the decision only underscores the indifference that North Dakotans feel toward American Indian people.
It says that we just don’t care.
If we cared what Indian people thought, we would have engaged them in this discussion a long time ago — way before the current members of the Board of Higher Education took office.
But we didn’t.
If we cared, we would allow American Indian people to be heard on their own terms and in their own time.
But we won’t, if last week’s decision by the Board of Higher Education stands.
Indifference, more than any other thing, has produced the result that confronts us now.
The campaign against the Fighting Sioux nickname and logo began as a fight against racism, so the activists said.
It ends — if indeed it has ended — exposing racial attitudes in a way that doesn’t flatter the state nor — this must be said — critics of the nickname.
Critics of the nickname argued that there shouldn’t be votes in the state’s Indian communities. One letter published in the Herald last year argued that results of an election at Spirit Lake should be disregarded because Indian communities operate on consensus — even though tribal councils have been elected for more than a century, far longer than nations in which the United States has tried to build democracy (including such countries as Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Japan and Germany).
To suggest that Indian people shouldn’t be heard about such a straightforward issue is dismissive in a very disturbing way. It suggests that we white folk know better.
But of course we don’t.
The truth about North Dakota is that it is a rigidly segregated place, and most white North Dakotans like it that way.
Doubt it?
Have a look through the comments about Herald stories posted on our Web site.
Retaliation is a frequent theme. UND should end its programs for Indian students, for example.
And this despite the apparent truth that it is that white society that has failed to engage Indian people rather than the other way around.
So what’s the way out of this dilemma?
That’s far from clear.
In Indian country, both supporters and opponents of the nickname have indicated that they will never give up. Erich Longie, an opponent, said as much in a letter published on April 4, a week ago. Steve Fool Bear, a nickname supporter, said the same in a letter published Saturday in the Herald.
Their message is the same: Listen to us.
But of course that’s not what the Board of Higher Education — representing us white folks — wants to do, not then and not now.
It could be too late to save the nickname, which is a small thing after all, and of little consequence.
What we urgently need is to build a society here that includes all of us.
Are we really interested in that?
Frankly, in the last week any evidence that we really are has been mighty hard to find.[Grand Forks Herald written on 4-1-2010]
True, he is a liberal douche, but is arguing, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, that the SBoHE should have waited for definitive word from Standing Rock.
ReplyDeleteI am highly insulted by Mike Jacob's article.
ReplyDeleteIn paragraph 27, Mr. Jacobs refers to "us white folks". In doing so, he groups himself with those of us having reasonable intelligence and judgment. His stereotype of "us white folks" would make a reader assume all Caucasian Americans are like him, when in reality we aren't bleeding heart idiots at all.
I await an apology from Mr. Jacobs on his racist stereotype of my people.
Shame on you, Mike. Your left-wing racist spewing has no place in our diverse America.
I've read most of the comments made by supporters of the race-based nicknames during the last five years in newspapers across North Dakota. The lack of awareness nickname supporters have demonstrated in regard to this important education civil rights matter has been mind-boggling! Most are highly uninformed about racial stereotyping and the harmful effects. Most haven't bothered to spend a couple of hours on the internet doing research, at indianmascots.com or aistm.org, for example. Most of what they know about American Indians and their various cultures is very limited, often limited to stereotypes, which is probably why they have no problem supporting racial stereotyping by supporting race-based athletic identities like "Fighting Sioux". Most nickname supporters have never heard of Dr. Stephanie Fryberg, and even fewer have read the research she has published on the psychological effects on Euro-Americans and American Indians from exposure to the race-based iconography. Few nickname supporters are aware that research shows that those American Indians who tell schools that they support the use of race-based athletic nicknames are actually the “greatest victims” because American Indians say they support the use of race-based athletic nicknames suffer a greater decrease in self-esteem than that of American Indians who oppose race-based athletic nicknames.
ReplyDeleteMost nickname supporters claim to respect the Sioux people, but if you ask them to tell you how many federally recognized Sioux tribes there are in the United States, they hesitate, start to stammer, and turn red when they realize that they will expose their ignorance of the Sioux if they were to answer. If you ask them to describe the difference between the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota, they freak out from the stress and embarrassment of being exposed as someone whose interest in the Sioux people extends only to how it impacts their ability to continue engaging in identity theft and cultural misappropriation by their use of a race-based “Fighting Sioux” athletic nickname and logo. Then they turn even redder when you ask them if they know how many federally recognized tribes there are besides the Sioux, and they typically try to divert the conversation in order to avoid answering in order to not embarrass themselves even more. If they aren’t face-to-face but protected behind the anonymity they hide behind on the internet, these individuals often start Googling to try to find the answer. (Have you started your Googling yet?)
Yes, it’s time for the state of North Dakota to try to regain the loss in reputation it has incurred by their ill-advised attempts to keep using a race-based nickname. Many people around the United States feel disdain for the state and residents of North Dakota, the University, and its graduates because they have displayed so much racial insensitivity, especially during the last five years.
I have talked to numerous people in business across the U.S. who have told me that when they interview a job applicant from UND, they ask them if they supported or opposed use of the “Fighting Sioux” nickname, and they won’t hire anyone who supported the nickname because that answer is a good leading indicator that that applicant is very likely racially insensitive and therefore wouldn’t be a good employment risk. They find a different reason to tell them they lost the job, such as that someone else was more qualified, so they never knew that they have been labeled as a bigot because they supported retaining the “Fighting Sioux” nickname.
Yeah oh, ok Gunderso or what ever your name is. Yeah, that's why Rockwell Collin in Cedar Rapids, Iowa hires hundreds of UND grads.
ReplyDeleteNice try, swing and a miss... My Two degrees from UND weren't an a problem at all when I was joining the real world after graduation.
Yawn! It's the same old crap that I listened to when I was studying sociology at UND, back in the late 1990's... We have the self appointed social elites and then we have the rest of us.
I'd like to know if Gunderso also has made these same comments at those who attend Florida State Univeristy or any of the other schools that the NCAA has on the list of "abusive nicknames"?
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget that FSU has someone dressed up in costume (which is authentic), riding around on a horse and the students do a "war chant".
But apparently FSU grads have an open invitation to apply to your friends' companies because their nickname is OK, while UND's is not.
I mean, that's what you're saying, right?