The Use of Native American Logos in Czech Ice Hockey

HC PlzenI was generally aware of the Czech fascination with American Indians, but I was caught by surprise when I encountered a trio of Native American musicians and dancers performing in resplendent tribal costumes on a street corner in downtown Prague during my first day in the city this past December. (See below.)

I was even more surprised to discover that the players of HC Skoda Pilsen (Plzen, in Czech), the reigning champion of the Czech Extraliga (the country’s highest Hockey League), wear an Indian head patch on their uniforms and are nicknamed the Pilsen Indians.

In addition to the logo, the Pilsen club also has a live mascot (presumably a Czech) who dresses liked a Plains Indian. Moreover, at the beginning of each season, an individual in the garb of an Indian shaman comes on to the ice in the club’s home arena and performs a good luck ritual on behalf of the team. The mascot and shaman can be seen here.

HC Skoda Pilsen is currently owned by former National Hockey League star (and Czech native) Martin Straka, who at age 40 also doubles as the team’s captain and star player. In Game 7 of last year’s Czech counterpart to the Stanley Cup playoffs, Pilsen defeated HC Kiln on a series-winning goal by Straka, allowing the club to claim its first ever Extraliga championship.

The team’s official video illustrates the seriousness with which the club takes its association with Native American imagery and the inspiration that it derives from what the team refers to as the” heroism” of the “Last Mohican” (a reference to the famous James Fennimore Cooper novel).

The Czech fascination with Native Americans dates back to the late 19th century when the Czech Republic was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Much of this fascination can be traced to the novels of German adventure writer Carl May (1842-1912).

Several of May’s novels were set in the American West, and these works were extremely popular throughout the entire German-speaking world. Inspired by James Fennimore Cooper and American painter George Catlin, May’s novels treat Native Americans much more sympathetically than the typical Hollywood or television western of the first half of the twentieth century.

May’s Indians were typically portrayed as noble savages who valiantly resisted the greed and rapaciousness of English-speaking settlers. The white protagonists in his novels were usually Americans of German descent who typically felt a kind of spiritual kinship to the Native Americans, a la Cooper’s Natty Bumpoo.

May was widely imitated by other German and Czech writers, and many of his novels were later made into films, which also incorporated the positive depiction of Native Americans. This tradition continued after the beginning of the Communist era, with the East German film industry in particular turning out dozen of “Osterns” (literally, “easterns”) which were set in the American west of the 19th century and depict Native Americans as the innocent victims of white racist capitalism.

These films were widely distributed behind the “Iron Curtain” and appear to have been especially popular in Czechoslovakia. A shortage of Native American actors in Eastern Europe led to the casting of swarthy Yugoslavs as the Indians, with one particularly popular actor, Gojko Mitic, eventually being made an honorary Sioux Indian after his films were shown to Native American audiences in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

The formal linkage of the Native American image with Pilsen ice hockey team in the Czech Republic is of recent vintage and dates only from 2010, but the city’s association with Native Americans dates back to the early 20th century. Indian head symbols have been associated with goods produced in Pilsen since at least 1915.

Their usage has been especially prominent in regard to the brewing of beer (the term pilsner is derived from Pilsen) and the production of Skoda automobiles. The current Skoda logo can be easily recognized as an adaptation of the profile of an Indian chief.

In fact, in 2010, the year that HC Skoda Pilsen adopted the Indian symbol and team name, the American Center of the United States Embassy in Prague featured an exhibit entitled, “The Story of the American Indian in Pilsen.” That exhibit focused upon the fascination with Native Americans on the part of the city’s residents and on the history of the attachment of the American Indian image with products produced in the city.

Moreover, Pilsen’s more recent history makes it especially inclined toward American symbols. According to Czech hockey fan and blogger (and Pilsen native), Lubos Motl, Pilsen considers itself the most “American” city in the Czech Republic, and the adoption of the insignia was intended to be, at least in part, a tribute to the United States.

According to Motl, the Pilsen insignia (pictured above) is a modified version of insignia of the United States Third Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, which liberated Pilsen and other parts of western Bohemia at the end of World War II.

Unlike the rest of Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by the Russian Army, West Bohemia remained under United States control for most of 1945. After the Communist takeover in 1948, Pilsen’s ties to the United States were officially forgotten, but they have been enthusiastically revived since the Czech “Velvet Revolution” of 1988 ended Communist rule.

(One example of this revival of connections to the United States is the study-abroad program in Pilsen operated by Marquette Business School in conjunction with the University of West Bohemia.)

Finally, the similarity between the HC Skoda symbol and that of the Chicago Black Hawks is probably not coincidental. Although he never played for the Chicago team, HC Svoda owner Martin Straka’s 15-year career in the National Hockey League undoubtedly made him aware of the popularity of the Black Hawks Indian head logo and the sweater on which it is embossed. Furthermore, legendary goaltender Dominic Hasek, a Czech national hero, began his NHL career with the Black Hawks.

Finally, there is at least one other prominent European ice hockey team that uses a Native American logo — Frolunda HC of Gothenburg, Sweden. The Frolunda Indians play in the Swedish (Elite) Hockey League where they have three-time winners of the Le Mat trophy, which represents the championship of Swedish Hockey. Frolunda is also, year in and year out, the Swedish leader in live attendance. Their Native American logo can be seen here.

The Native American street performers mentioned in the opening paragraph are pictured below (photograph by Monica Walker):

Monica Walker Photo

 

 

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A Conceptual Approach to Advising High-Profile Clients

This blog post concludes the series on the Fantex, Inc. IPO by analyzing the need for competent, and honest, financial attorneys with respect to managing the wealth of high-profile clients.

It is hard to imagine that NFL running back Arian Foster received legal or financial counsel before signing his brand contract with Fantex. Under the terms of the agreement, Foster assigns 20 percent of his gross earnings to the company in return for a one-time payment of $10 million, intended to be raised through the company’s IPO. The contract remains effective indefinitely and grants Fantex the right to audit Foster’s finances. Moreover, the only earnings excluded from the 20 percent assignment provision are any movie and TV roles where Foster does not portray a football player, as well as any music that he produces or writes. The one-sidedness of this contract—and the fact that Foster actually signed it—shows that Foster’s advisors, if any, did not have his long term financial interests in mind.

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Why Is the Word “Redskin” so Offensive?

The debate over the appropriateness of Native American team names rages on. Whatever the propriety of generic Native American team names like Indians, Chiefs, Braves, or Warriors, or tribal names like Utes, Chippewas, or Seminoles, there seems to be a widespread belief that the term “Redskins” is especially offensive and insulting to Native Americans. How this perception came about is somewhat puzzling, as it appears to be of relatively recent origin.

There is little evidence that the perception of “redskin” as an inherently offensive term for Native American existed before the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. Traditionally, the word “redskin” was viewed as a synonym for Indian or Native American and did not carry the sort of negative connotations that have long attached to ethnic slurs like “chink,” “wetback,” “kike,” or “nigger.” Sportswriters covering teams with Indians nicknames during the first three quarters of the twentieth century routinely substituted “Redskins” for “Indians” or “Braves” in search of variety, and they apparently did so without being aware that this alternative word choice was more offensive than the original.

Although the name “Redskins” was earlier used by the Muskogee, Oklahoma, minor league baseball team and the Miami University of Ohio football team, the Redskins name is today primarily associated with the Washington team in the National Football League.

The team we now know as the Washington Redskins began its existence in 1932 as the Boston Braves. The name was changed to “Redskins” the following year. The new name was chosen in conjunction with the team’s relocation from Braves Park (named after Boston’s National League baseball team) to Fenway Park.

The name change was also consistent with team owner George Preston Marshall’s plan to market the team as one playing in the tradition of “Indian football.” (In the early 20th century, Native Americans were widely believed to be especially talented when it came to football, as borne out by the success of Indian college teams like Carlisle and Haskell and the Oorang Indians, an all-Indian NFL team from 1922 and 1923 which, like Carlisle a decade earlier, featured the great Indian athlete Jim Thorpe on its roster.)

Marshall’s plan for Indian football included hiring an “Indian” coach and several Native American Players, as well as adopting an Indian head logo and adorning all the players with war paint during games. This goal, of course, could have been accomplished just as easily had the team retained the name “Braves.” Moreover, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Marshall chose the name “Redskins” because he thought it was pejorative.

(It is not at all clear why anyone would name a team using a non-ironic ethnic slur, since to do so would be to impute supposedly unfavorable characteristics to one’s own players.)

Most likely, the name Redskins was chosen because it fit with Marshall’s plan to revive Indian football and because of the name’s similarity to Red Sox, in whose park the team was now playing. (The name “Indians” was apparently reserved for the NFL’s on again-off again Cleveland team.)

While one could argue that Marshall’s planned use of Native American imagery was a misappropriation of Native American cultural property, such an argument would apply whether the team was called the Braves or Redskins.

The historical record, in fact, shows that before the 20th century Native Americans frequently used the adjective “red” in reference to themselves and that the term “redskin” may have originated as a literal translation of a Native American term used to differentiate Indians from other Americans.

Moreover, widely used English language dictionaries in use as recently as the 1950’s and 1960’s reflect no acknowledgement that the term “redskin” was understood as disparaging to Native Americans.

For example, the 1952 edition of the Universal Dictionary of the English Language, described “redskin” as a “Native American Indian, a Red Man” (p. 981), but makes no reference to the word being offensive. The American College Dictionary (1956 ed., p. 1016); The Grosset Webster Dictionary (1957 ed., p. 1016); and Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged 2nd Edition (1957 ed., p. 2088) all define “redskin” as a “North American Indian,” again, with no indication that the term was considered offensive. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the American Language (1969 ed., p. 1092), produced more than a decade later, the same definition is given, but with the qualification that the term is “informal” (which may be a recognition that “redskin” was passing out of everyday usage by the end of the 1960’s).

In fact, it was not until the 1983 editions of Webster’s Third International Dictionary and Collegiate Dictionary, 9th Edition that the Miriam Webster Company, the country’s leading publisher of “serious” dictionaries, added the cautionary phrase “usually taken to be offensive,” to its previous definition of “redskin,” which was simply “A North American Indian.”

In contrast, the same dictionaries from the 1950’s and 1960’s clearly indicate that the word “nigger” is understood to be offensive and derogatory. The comments so indicating range from “colloquial, contemptuous” (Universal Dictionary, p. 774) and “offensive” (American College Dictionary p. 820) to “substandard, now chiefly contemptuously” (Webster’s New International, p. 1651) and “vulgar” (American Heritage Dictionary p. 887). The Grosset-Webster Dictionary omitted the word altogether, presumably because it was in such bad taste.

While it is, of course, easy to find examples of pre-1980’s writings that disparage Native Americans while referring to them as Redskins (like Earl Emmons’ 1915 Redskin Rimes), it is even easier to find similar examples from the same era that use the word Indian while making derogatory comments (most famously, Gen. Philip Sheridan’s much repeated observation that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”). Before the 1970’s, if not the 1980’s, there was a clear consensus that the word “redskin” was simply a synonym for “North American Indian” and was not widely recognized as a particularly offensive label.

In contrast, more recent dictionaries clearly identify the term “redskin” as disparaging. The Online Oxford Dictionary describes it as “dated and offensive.” Similarly, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary identifies it as “usually offensive,” while the online Thefreedictionary defines it as “used as a disparaging term for a Native American,” and further classifies the term as “offensive slang.”

So what caused the meaning of the word Redskin to change when it did? Why did it become clearly offensive in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s, when it has not been perceived in that way earlier in the century?

First of all, the meanings of descriptive adjectives, especially those with racial or ethnic connotations, do change over time. In my childhood, spent in the rural South during the final years of the Jim Crow era, we were taught that African-Americans preferred to be called “colored” or “Negroes,” and that to refer to such a person as “black” to his or her face would be insulting. I think this belief was generally held throughout the United States in the late 1950’s, and accurately expressed the views of most African-Americans as well (re: Negro College Fund and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

However, a decade later “black” had become the descriptor of choice for African-Americans, while “colored” and “Negro” had been cast into a linguistic dustbin. What was proper in 1959 had become awkward and unacceptable by 1969.

Moreover, beginning in the late 1960’s, the American Indian Movement and other Native American organizations began what turned out to be a largely successful campaign to convince other Americans that most of the stereotypical images of Native Americans in American popular culture were wildly inaccurate and insulting.

No art form contained more insulting images than the traditional American western. The 1970’s came at the end of an era in which the “Western” had been one of the dominant genres of American film, television, and popular literature. In westerns, the term “redskins” was regularly used in reference to nomadic plains Indians who were usually portrayed as “on the warpath.”

This repeated association of “redskins” with Indians of the American west in the post-Civil War era probably helped create an impression that a “redskin” was not just any Indian, but one that was particularly “savage.” As the notion that Native Americans were “savages” became increasingly untenable in the 1979’s and 1980’s, the word “redskin,” now increasing associated with the Indians portrayed in Westerns, may have lost its original generic qualities.

A second explanation comes from the fact the word “redskin” obviously uses a color to describe an ethnic group. While “black” and “white” became, somewhat ironically, the terms of choice identifying Negroes and Caucasians in the 1960’s, in the same era the practice of referring to Asians as “yellow” became verboten. Presumably, this stemmed from a belief that the use of the “yellow” label (as in “yellow peril”) was a manifestation of anti-Asian racism. Social pressure to drop “yellow” references did not affect the use of the terms “black” and “white,” but it may have had some impact on public attitudes toward defining Native Americans as “red.”

Finally, there is something slightly disparaging about the “skins” component of the word “redskins.” “Skins” can connote images of animal skins cut away from the body by fur hunters. While there is absolutely no basis to the frequently (and irresponsibly) repeated claim that the term “Redskins” once referred to the hides of Native Americans which could be exchanged for a bounty, there is something a little unpleasant about the similarity between “coonskin,” “deerskin” and “redskin.”

Also, in contemporary slang at least, “skins” has a number of negative connotations. The term refers to cigarette wrapping papers and, through an extension of image, it also refers to aimless teens that smoke, use drugs, and are sexually promiscuous. This secondary meaning may also give the word “redskin” unpleasant associations in our own time.

So, while it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the meaning of “redskin” moved from innocuous to offensive, there is little reason to doubt that the general meaning of the term has changed (although polling data suggests that Native Americans are divided as to whether the use of the name Redskins by the Washington team is offensive). Moreover, the question of whether a business should be required to change its long-standing name because the meaning of one of the component terms has changed is a complicated question.

(A growing sensitivity to the representation of African-Americans in popular culture may have led to the cancellation of the Amos ‘n Andy television show, but Uncle Ben’s Rice and Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix are still on the market and still using versions of their traditional symbols.)

However, notwithstanding the changing meaning of the word “redskin,” there are other reasons to criticize the use of Native American imagery by George Preston Marshall’s football team. The real issue is not the choice of an “offensive” team name; the real issue is one regarding the boundaries of the right to appropriate someone else’s cultural property.

Before Marshall, teams that used Native-American team names rarely made much of an effort to exploit the Indian connection, unless the team was made up of Native American players. For Marshall, choosing a Native American name was only a start.

Even though the experiment with the war paint, the Indian players, the Indian coach (who, unbeknownst to Marshall, turned out not to be a real Native American) lasted only a couple of years, Marshall eventually realized that it wasn’t necessary to have real Indians to capitalize on the Native American connection. He retained the Indian imagery and expanded it to include a marching band wearing Indian headdresses, cheerleaders decked out in Indian princess costumes, and a fight song that was originally written in pidgin English and set to what were supposedly Indian rhythms.

No sports team had ever before attempted to exploit the use of Indian imagery on such a scale, but, after Marshall’s Redskins became popular, such features were widely imitated. Once he moved the team to Washington in 1937, the neo-Confederate Marshall further complicated the imagery by declaring the Redskins to be Dixie’s team. (In Marshall’s mind, the two groups, Indians and Confederates, were linked. His home town, Romney, West Virginia, is the location of an ancient burial mound that was turned into a Confederate cemetery during the Civil War.)

The real question regarding the Washington Redskins is whether or not non-Indian sports teams should have the right to exploit the cultural symbols of Native Americans. If they do not, then the Washington Redskins should become should change their name and imagery.

Of course, cultural property is notoriously difficult to define, and it not clear what the consequences would be were we to recognize even an informal proprietary on the parts of groups to their own cultural property. But that is the real issue involved in the Redskins controversy, not the meaning of the word “Redskin.”

 

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