Native Mascots: Really, Still?

All My Relations Podcast

Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane

Native, Documentary, Pop Culture, Contemporary Native American Culture, Relationships, Society, Indigenous, Native American, Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2019

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2018 there are still over 2000 schools and professional sports teams with Native mascots, despite decades of activism and academic research demonstrating the harms of these images. Today Matika and Adrienne are in conversation with Amanda Blackhorse, Navajo social worker and mother, who was the lead plaintiff in the supreme court case against the Washington Redsk*ns, and Stephanie Fryberg, who is the top psychological researcher on these issues and has demonstrated through lab experiments ...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome friends and relatives. We're so happy to have you here with us today and tuning back
0:05.2	into this next episode of All My Relations. And today we are in the presence of greatness.
0:11.2	Matika and I are so excited to have these warrior women, scholars, sisters here with us.
0:17.8	Our mentors are idols to talk about the issue of Indian mascots.
0:24.3	So Dr. Keen, I thought maybe we could just take a moment to talk about the history of the
0:31.1	R-word and why this term is so offensive to so many of our people. Well, I think there is
0:39.8	descent within the scholarly community about like when the R-word was first used to refer to native
0:46.6	folks, it definitely is a word that throughout history was used in a derogatory and negative way
0:53.4	towards native peoples. There are some folks who say that it initially was used to refer to the
1:00.5	actual scalps of native peoples. There are plenty of ads and newspaper articles that from the 1800s
1:06.8	that refer to native peoples by the R-word, never in a positive way. It's one of those words
1:13.1	that has evolved throughout history regardless of its initial use or origin to definitely mean a racist
1:21.8	phrase towards native peoples. It's not a positive term by any means to the point that most
1:29.2	of my friends who are native won't even say the word. And I know a lot of us feel that way that
1:34.4	it really is a racial slur. Absolutely. I can't say in my own life that anybody has ever used
1:44.9	that term towards me in a loving way. I can't even, I'm trying to picture what that sentence
1:52.5	would sound like and I can't even picture that. And you know what else is that? It's not a term that
2:00.2	I think is that we've like taken back and have like popularized into contemporary culture and
2:07.6	changed its meaning to mean something other than you know a word that has a very deep
2:14.6	ugly racial slur attached to it and it's not used in any other way. And you know if somebody was
2:21.1	to walk up to me and call me the R-word those would be fighting words. Yeah. I often think of like
2:29.0	supporters of the word who seem to think that it's not a problem. In articles when they're quoted
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.