Letter to the Editor
Foster's Daily Democrat
Monday, August 14, 2006

Fight continues to drop Raider logo

To the editor:

In Stephen Bowley's recent letter he claimed that Native Americans are "doing very well."

Recent census data states that a quarter of all American Indians and Alaska natives live below the poverty line, more than twice the national rate. The average life expectancy of Native American males is 45 years. The teen suicide rate among native people is several times higher than the national average. Mr. Bowley doesn't know what he's talking about.

So many people in this debate like to trot out the 'politically correct' cliché.

Barbara Munson, an Oneida from Wisconsin, has written that using this term to describe the attempts of concerned Native American parents, educators and leaders to remove stereotypes from the public schools "trivializes a survival issue. Stereotypes, ignorance, silent inaction, and even naive innocence damage and destroy individual lives and whole cultures."

Russell Means of the American Indian Movement said in 1969 that if sports teams called themselves "the Blacks" or "the Jews" and had as their logo a grotesque ethnic stereotype, there would be "rioting in the streets."

The people who "settled and civilized New England" raped the land and killed its original inhabitants. Our so-called founding fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, described the people who fought for their land, their homes, and their families for four centuries as "merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Author David E. Stannard calls the period between 1492 and 1890, in which 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas was decimated, the "American Holocaust." Government programs like [the Dawes Act of 1887], the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs and its relocation and termination policies of the 1950s, and the forced sterilization of women on reservations has perpetuated the mistreatment and subjugation of Indian people.

Today, the white man treats Indians as relics of the past; we name our sports teams Indians, Braves, Warriors, and Red Raiders. These nicknames and their logos and associated merchandise are dishonorable trophies of conquest. This fight will continue until Spaulding finds another name for its sports teams.

Pete Sanfaçon
Framingham, Massachusetts