By Mark Trahant
Sometimes I look at my son and know for certain that he will spill his drink. There might not even be a good reason: His cup is sitting on a table, right where it's supposed to be, and he's busy eating. Nothing is out of the ordinary - at least not yet. Still I know that we will be cleaning up a mess in a few minutes. He will spill that drink.
Every once in a while there's a public policy issue that we know will spill into our discourse and create a mess, too. We know what will happen - and yet seem powerless to do anything differently.
Take the controversy over mascots and American Indian names. I believe, deeply, that in ten, twenty or perhaps fifty years, this whole thing will be forgotten because it's inevitable that offensive names will disappear. They'll just fade away, one by one, and future historians will wonder what this mess was all about (and why we didn't move quicker to clean it up).
That day might come sooner than you think.
The California Legislature is considering a law that would ban the use of mascots by schools in this state. In one action dozens of names could disappear from our sports pages, school halls, shirts, uniforms and our conversation. On the other side of the ledger, fewer and fewer professional teams will cling to the way it was.
I remember a visit a few years ago to a beautiful community in Oregon's Wallowa Valley. The Wallowa Valley is the Nez Perce Chief Joseph's original home - a place so beautiful he defied the U.S. authority in an attempt to stay.
More than a century later that same community was still debating the appropriateness of an Indian; this time an image. The local school was trying to change its mascot, "The Savages," to something else. What was so striking about being there when the debate was occurring was that "Savages" seemed over the top; an inevitable change because its very use went beyond any standard of civility.
So the school board ordered the name removed. And, in a small town, some cheered and others jeered. The jeerers, though, would not give up and they forced the school board to change back to the name "Savage." But even that could not pass the smell test. The link between "Savages" and Native Americans was broken; the Savage now refers to something else. Something different. Something inevitable.
I think this is the reason that newspapers such as The Oregonian or the Minneapolis Star-Tribune no longer use these mascot names. Or why one day such names will no longer receive trademark protection.
As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said a year ago: "Children at the elementary and secondary levels usually have no choice about which school they attend." Ergo, if the name is offensive, a young person still must go to that school. In the end that's why schools will drop the troubling mascots.
This is the logic at work in California. And, I believe, community by community until this issue is resolved. It makes so little sense to promote unappealing stereotypes in a new century. No matter what arguments are advanced the truth is that clinging to funny mascots does not promote what we claim as our national character. The names are not fair - and one by one will go away.
Then some day far off in the future, some of us will wonder why there was even a fight.
We hope it will be an easy mess to clean up.
Mark N. Trahant is chairman of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. He lives in Fort Hall, Idaho.
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