From today's Lincoln, Neb. newspaper:<p>Readers of the sports pages may notice a change in the newspaper's style beginning today: We have stopped using the nickname "Redskins" to refer to the professional football team of the nation's capital. When we're reporting on that team, we'll call it Washington. <p>
We also have stopped printing logos for professional and college sports teams that use Native symbols -- ones that adopt imagery such as an arrowhead and ones that caricature Native culture. The Chief Wahoo logo of the Cleveland Indians, which we stopped using last summer, is an example of rank caricature. Instead, we'll use alternative logos that stay away from Native symbols.
Finally, we've decided to drop the stereotypical modifier "Fighting" when used with team nicknames such as Fighting Sioux or Fighting Illini. <p>We've made this decision out of respect for Native people. Plain and simple. <p>We will no longer use "Redskins" or "Skins" because it is a racial slur. It derives from an old, genocidal practice in this country of scalping Indians to earn a bounty.<p>*** Agree? Disagree? Too sensitive? Not sensitive enough?<p>I guess my first response would have been: How do the people who are supposedly being slurred feel about this? I've heard of scattered outrage in a handful of communities (but not in the ultra-liberal town of Port Townsend, Wash. -- in my paper's coverage area -- where the high-school team is called the Redskins. The town is so liberal that the mayor once tried to cancel the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of city council meetings in favor of selected readings from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," and often puts not-trade-in-Burma and nuclear-free-zone issues on the municipal agenda ... but the Redskins issue has drawn muted murmurs at best.).<p>What's missing here in this story --
http://www.journalstar.com/opinion.php?story_id=18103 -- is the perspective of everyday American Indians. I'm not certain the Native American Journalists Association is representative of them in politics or philosophy.)<p>And here's a side issue: "Native American," or "American Indian?" We cover five different tribes in our paper's coverage area, and we have consciously chosen "American Indian." What are the arguments for or against?