HENSHAW: Offensive Nicknames
COHASSET MARINER
Cohasset, MA
May 10, 2007
COHASSET — Alas, another Indian has bitten the dust—by his own hand, you might say.
The Dedham High School Boosters Club has decided to accede to the demands of the Native Americans among us and retire the image of the angry Indian that has represented the schools athletic teams for at least the past 35 years.
"It's time for it to go," Anthony Mucciaccio told the Globe. "People say it's not right. It's not a very friendly or happy-looking Indian."
Not only that but the Boosters are thinking of dumping the school nickname, "Marauders," which, as our history books tell us, the Indians used to do when they weren't painting their faces, doing the war dance or attacking wagon trains.
A second Bay State League school, Natick High, recently voted to drop its nickname, "Redmen," in the face of protests from Native Americans, who don’t like to call themselves Indians and don’t like others to do it either.
The annual debate is about to get underway, I am told, over the use of the nickname Red Raiders by North Quincy High School and their cartoon mascot, Yakoo, who, they say, erroneously portrays them as warlike.
Unfortunately for the protesters, say the Friends of Yakoo, he is not an Indian at all, just a former student of Armenian descent named Allan Yakubian, clad in the national dress of Armenia—breechclout, feathers and tomahawk.
The sportsmanship committee of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association is contemplating urging all its member schools to drop any logos that may be taken as offensive by Native Americans or any other group.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has whittled the number of colleges using offensive nicknames down to 18, including the Florida State Seminoles, who have written notice from the Seminoles themselves that they don't mind being offended.
With all this hurley burley going on around them, it's strange no one has noticed that Braintree High School's Wamps are not nicknamed for a strange animal from the Amazon jungle but for a local Indian chief.
It was Josiah Wampatuck who sold the town to the white men. I don't know how much they paid for it but I hope the deal turned out better than the New York scam where Peter Minuit paid $24 for the island of Manhattan to a tribe that didn't even own it.
I was first attracted to this business of offensive nicknames about 15 years ago when there was agitation to change the nickname of the Frisco, Texas, High School from "the Coons" to something more presentable in mixed company.
The team was known as the Coons ever since a student offered his pet raccoon to them as a mascot, but who has time to explain that when you are in the throes of a Frisco locomotive.
But the one that topped them all was the nickname then used by the high school in Wahpeton, North Dakota.
It was "the Wops."
The offensive name is merely a logical reduction of the name of the town, which, incidentally, is Indian in origin.
Nevertheless the team is now known as "the Huskies."