The Redskins - 'Change The Name Back', Say Blackfeet Indians, 'It's A Question Of Honor'

The family of John Two Guns White Calf, the Blackfoot Indian who modeled for the Redskins logo but who saw it summarily removed and forgotten in the woke hysteria of the times (the team is not the Commanders). 

 

John Two Guns was proud to be chosen to be the image of the Redskins football team, for the logo symbolized heroism, courage, strength, and defiance.  The Indians of America - the Blackfeet, the Cherokee, Comanche, Apache, Piute and a thousand other tribes - had fought valiantly for the rights to their land, defending it against the better armed Union soldiers. 

White Wolf, a Comanche chief, was the most savage, bloody, brutal killer of whites the Union Army had ever seen. His approach was simple - rape, slaughter, behead, eviscerate any white settlers that squatted on Indian land, and no more would follow. 

Defending his land against foreign intruders, and as bloody a warrior as Genghis Khan, White Wolf knew that a purposeful barbarity would intimidate the enemy.  Just as Genghis Khan posted severed heads on roads leading to conquered villages, gruesome warnings to the next settlements in his sights, so did White Wolf use unconscionable savagery as a tool of war.  He knew that the Christian soldiers would see his tribal, animist, ferocity, understand that they were up against a frightening, unfathomable enemy with no moral restraint and would turn tail. 

 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail said:

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’

Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’. They were as imperialist and genocidal as the white settlers who eventually vanquished them.

When they first migrated to the great plains of the American South in the late 18th century from the Rocky Mountains, not only did they achieve dominance over the tribes there, they almost exterminated the Apache, among the greatest horse warriors in the world.

Who more American than White Wolf, Indians said?  He was fierce, valiant, patriotic, and a heroic defender of his tribal lands, no different than the United States defending itself against European and Asian aggressors. 

The savagery of President Franklin Roosevelt who authorized the firebombing of Dresden and incinerated thousands of civilians or the barbarity of his successor, Harry Truman who sanctioned the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the death of a hundred thousand Japanese were the same expression of self-defensive, territorial will as embodied by White Wolf. 

 

The family of John Two guns dismisses the notion that the term 'redskin' is a pejorative slur and cite this more relevant history:

1769: The first unchallenged use of the word “redskin” occurs when a British lieutenant colonel translates a letter from an Indian chief promising safe passage if the officer visited his tribe in the Upper Mississippi Valley.

“I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life,” Chief Mosquito said in his letter, according to a 2005 study by Ives Goddard, the Smithsonian’s senior linguist emeritus.

Aug. 22, 1812: At a Washington reception for several Native Americans, President James Madison refers to Indians as “red people” or “my red children,” prompting Little Osage Chief Sans Oreilles (No Ears) to voice his support for the administration: “I know the manners of the whites and the red skins.” Then, Sioux Chief French Crow also pledged loyalty: “I am a red-skin, but what I say is the truth, and notwithstanding I came a long way I am content, but wish to return from here.”

July 20, 1815: After tangling with famed explorer-turned-Missouri Territory Gov. William Clark, Meskwaki Chief Black Thunder gives a speech that was printed in the Western Journal in St. Louis. “I turn to all,” the chief is reported as saying, “red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me.” (The History News Network/Washington Post)

When the Redskins name was changed in 2020, the American cancel culture was at its height.  Everything that progressives considered outside received wisdom and was reflective of a sexist, racist, homophobic American past, had to be removed.  In a juggernaut of revisionism, school and street names were changed from those of Confederate heroes to minor historical characters 'of color'. Army base names were changed, Confederate statues toppled, free speech was censored and the use of any terms deemed antithetical to the social remake of a diverse, inclusive America was outlawed. 

As part of this revisionist hysteria, the Left went after all Indian names.  Nothing could have been more hypocritical, myopic, and self-interested.  The Indian names and logos were signs of courage and valor and that was why they emblazoned football helmets, jerseys, and promotional materials. To assume that this display was racist, hateful, and demeaning was idiotic, simpleminded, and wrong. 

The Cleveland Indians baseball team changed its name to the Guardians after Art Deco sculptures on a bridge over the Cuyahoga River

So the team changed its name from one symbolizing valor and courage to one of cultural irrelevance, of no national meaning, of remote mythological symbolism. 

Some teams like the Atlanta Braves refused to buckle under to the wave of woke censorship, and in a resolute defiance to the trend, encouraged their fans to do in unison the 'Tomahawk Chop', a movement imitating an Indian brave chopping off the head of an enemy.  Hundreds of other high school and college teams have similarly refused. 

The removal of the Redskins name not only dishonored Native Americans and deprived the team of an honorable, respectful image, it expunged the team's own history.  Names have meaning, and the history of the Redskins dating back to 1937 suddenly was disoriented if not dismissed.  Yes, of course the exploits of the team however called are on record, but depriving the team of its original name and the name under which championships were won was unconscionable. 

Arthur Grey Wolf Marshall, the grandson of White Wolf rebelled against the racial homogenization of his family, and wanted to return to his Indian roots.  He wanted to take scalps, send the white man fleeing in terror, restore the indigenous greatness of his tribal nation, and let it be known that Indians would never forget Andrew Jackson and the great white push westward. 

 

He let his hair grow and thatched it into a ponytail fastened with ancient cowrie beads.  His dress, his mannerisms, and his speech became more and more Comanche.  Tall and imposing in his fine-tooled boots and white Stetson, he was an impressive figure. 

He was sought out by liberal whites who, in the spirit of inclusivity and diversity, encouraged him to preside over ceremonies, awards, and official events.  Yet none of this took hold and in fact it rankled.  This coddling and liberal preferentiality was angering and petty.  He wanted to rediscover and resuscitate his true, warrior Indian spirit and not become some white boy's toy.  He wanted scalps!

The descendants of John Two Guns White Calf are more traditional and past Arthur Grey Wolf Marshall's recidivist anger.  While they appreciated the sentiment - they too admired White Wolf and his patriotic heroism - they have taken a more reasoned approach and have appealed to the President of the Unites States to exert his influence with the Redskins' current owners and have the name restored. 

The time may have come - wokism, revisionism, censure, and received wisdom are in retreat - but the damage may have already been done, the 'Commanders' have a new, younger fan base, and other more pressing national issues are before the country.  

Yet a victory here would be an important step forward in restoring a more coherent, respectful, and comprehensive approach to cultural decisions. 

Hail to the Redskins!!

Kinshasa, The Heart Of Darkness, And The Olduvai Gorge - Lions An Incidental Backdrop For A Widow Filling Time

Barbery Byfield was past the age of sexual conquest and even farther afield in her much later years when her only goal in life was filling time. 

She had been married to Harper Byfield for many years - a rather dour but successful marriage. They had remained together despite infidelities and irresponsibility, and when Harper died and Barbery suddenly found herself alone in a house which once had company but now was as empty and echoing as an abandoned church.  

'I wish there were bells to ring', she mused as she wandered from room to room wondering what to do with it all.  She wasn't about to rattle around the old museum, using each room in organized but purposeless fashion, her goal of filling space just as she was beginning to realize the importance of filling time. 

It had come to that, after all, a rather sad coda at the end of an active life.  Boardroom, playroom, bedroom...that last a sore point, since there were many bedrooms on both sides of the aisle, his and hers, with his jealousy intruding on her desire to escape from the barebones sex of their marriage...and many other 'inner rooms of the heart', as pulp romance novelist Emily Carver Blount described the secrets of the female heart. 

Barbery was no romantic and happened upon the Blount book by accident in the waiting room of her dentist; but it was one of a kind, a novel that jumped out of the genre and actually made sense.  Her inner rooms had indeed been neglected for so long that they were now musty and cold, but it was too late for any Mr. Right to open them. 

She was resigned to her age, her passed pull-date, and her consignment to routine.  At least Harper got her out of the house on occasion, the occasional evening at the Old Ebbitt Grill for martinis and oysters, the Edgar bar at the Mayflower (named for J. Edgar Hoover who used to go there late at night with his longtime lover, given a quiet table in the corner, and Kentucky Bourbon on the house), and the occasional weekend on the Bay, and now she was on her own.  

A woman of certitude, will, and ambition, she now found herself pondering the menu at the Four Seasons unable to decide between the veal hops and the flounder and was very angry at herself for her indecision.

'Why not a Danube cruise?', said a friend and former Vassar classmate also recently widowed and already an experienced traveler.  'The Harvard one is good, but so is Southern Comfort, a Lindblad cruise of the Mediterranean.  Smart docents, good food, interesting people';  but for Barbery that would be the last straw - a depressing, floating widow's walk with each widow pacing the deck like the old whaling wives of Nantucket waiting for their husbands' ships to come in.

As time went on and the NY Times crossword puzzle became tedious, her excursions to the East Wing and the Corcoran dutiful and boring, and her walks along the C&O Canal only vaguely reminiscent of real woodsy outings, she reconsidered the cruise idea, but refused to consider the Danube or the Rhine, cattle-car excursions with their stops at the most ordinary and predictable places. 

No, if she was going to travel, there had to be some oomph in it, and when she saw a brochure about a trip to the African savannah, she thought she might have something.  Wild animals held no particular interest for her.  She had always been inattentive at the zoo when taken by her parents as a young girl.  It smelled bad.  The animals never did anything, and there was nothing to eat.  She could take them or leave them and accepted them and zoos as part of her education,.  So an excursion to Africa just to see them? 'I don't think so'. 

 

But Africa is not a neutral place and raises interest and passions in all comers. Barbery's graduate school classmate and former World Bank senior official was on one side of the fence.  Africa was a pestilential shithole, a tribal, primitive, lawless, and corrupt place he was glad to leave. Her progressive friends said going there was a transformational experience, seeing the black man, the heir to humanity's original creation, a sensitive, highly evolved being attuned to the forest environment from which he came. And the few acquaintances who knew Africa only through the filter of tooth and claw couldn't stop themselves from singing the praises of the plains, the veldt, and nature wild. 

The travel agency whose brochure Barbery saw was 'an alternate site' which catered to the adventurer, the path less travelled, those with the spirit of Burton, Mungo Park and Rene de Chaillu, those willing to take a chance in the Dark Continent and to 'see its secrets revealed.'

'What have I got to lose?', Barbery asked and proceeded to sign up for the trip.

The trip would be a mix of urban and rural - the 'real' Africa said the brochure, Kinshasa, a river trip up the Congo, Nairobi, with a final three days at the world-famous Treetops Lodge. 

The trip began in London where the tour was to meet at Gatwick, not Heathrow, and the flight was not a non-stop but due to fuel considerations and union rules would make a short stop in the Azores and then proceed to Kinshasa.   The plane was a reconditioned 737 with passenger instructions written in Arabic, and old Sudanese Airlines boarding passes in the seat pockets.  There were two crew members who had been seconded from Sudan until the tour company could recruit and train their own staff. 

Kinshasa was a nightmare.  The airport was a chaotic, malarial, miasma. Touts, hawkers, cab drivers, facilitators, and fixers shouted for attention, bullying their way to the arriving passengers, grabbing hand luggage, promising safe passage through immigration, customs, and security, shoving, pushing, clearing a path forward through sprawling families, tethered goats, guards with automatic rifles, and inoperative luggage carousels. 

The tour agency Kinshasa man who was to meet them had been detained by airport police and could be seen, handcuffed and cossetted behind the glass partition between the arrival lounge and the outside concourse, his hand-painted sign, N'GOMO TOURS, ripped and held like a standard by one of his police handlers. 

The hotel Far Horizons was a fleabag, an old wooden three story structure built over a sewage drainage canal and on the commercial street beside it.  The rooms were airless, windowless, and unairconditioned, the bed linens grey and unwashed, and the locks on the doors had long ago been broken off.  

There was nowhere to turn, not one European in sight, the N'Gomo tour representative, released from custody in time to rescue the group and take them to the hotel in an old Bluebird school bus, had disappeared.  They were alone, desperate, frightened, and anxious. 

'I am here', said Alphonse, the tour guide who appeared in the lobby early the next morning, 'and off we go'. 

The passengers huddled on the foredeck of the steamer as it made its way up through the choking tangle of water hyacinths, its 1960s-era diesel hammering away, smoke belching out of the single stack amidships.  It was Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen all over again, and for all intents and purposes they were heading into the heart of darkness. 

Engine trouble, a stop or two at village outposts, manioc and monkey meat ('Our traditional, local cuisine'), and bitten alive, was the routine; and no group of travelers was more happy than Barbery and her fellows when they returned to Kinshasa. 

For most World Bank officials Lagos and Kinshasa were considered to be the very worst places in all of Africa. Like the N'gomo Tours passengers, all arrivals are met at the airport, accosted, harassed, intimidated, and bullied; and the only survivors were diplomats met by embassy armed guards and carried off in armored convoys. 

Little did the credulous and naive Barbery know of this, and so desperate was she to shift her life into another gear and travel down unexplored roads, meet unusual people, and experience life in the raw, that she found herself in the hands of a fly-by-night, sham agency, in one of the most pestilential hellholes on earth, and with no sign of respite or relief. 

She looked up at the wall-sized poster of the Chief of the Congolese Armed forces pasted high on the riverport customs house where they landed and began to cry. 

Somehow they made it to Nairobi and were settled in a new cement block hotel in the center of town.  The N'gomo guide told them that they were not to go out of the hotel for any reason, for gangs of Sudanese ex-combatants, Houthi gunrunners, and common carjackers and kidnappers ruled the streets at night. The sound of gunfire, sirens, and shouts from every direction kept them awake all night. 

Thinking that a tour-ending stay at the Treetops Lodge, one of Africa's famous wildlife preserve hotels, would be the place retained in the group's memory more than any of the other more challenging parts of the tour, they arranged through tribal connections and dash, a few rooms in the new, yet unfinished wing. The annex was an afterthought, a kind of Quonset hut/trailer park, and management had already decided to tear it down as unproductive, and so the tour spent another uncomfortable, hot, stifling, and mosquito-ridden night. 

Despite Barbery's indifference to wild animals, she delighted in the giraffes, wildebeests, antelope, elephants and tigers they saw on the Serengeti. She still didn't care about them per se, but it was all so clean and pristine, a Disneyland theme park preserved and isolated from the 'real' Africa.

'So, how was it?', asked her Vassar classmate, a well-turned out Georgetown matron used to Nantucket and St. Bart's and had never given even an idle thought to setting foot in the jungle. 

'Were the black people there anything like ours here?'

What more was there to say?

Competition vs The Collective - Darwin vs Marx, And There Still Is A Doubt?

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved 

 

A rule of Natural Law, said Darwin - an incontrovertible, irremediable fact of animal life.  Competition, Survival of the Fittest, the natural order of winnowing, sorting, vetting, sussing to assure that only the strongest, most intelligent, capable, healthy, and agile will continue to people the earth. 

It seems hard to believe that there are many who reject Darwinism, and insist that the nature we share with the animals - ferociously aggressive, territorial, self-interested, and self-defensive - is not innate, hardwired from birth, a legacy of our descendance from the first living organisms all fighting for purchase, advantage and superiority. 

We are above all that, progressives say. Life has made us into kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, and tolerant beings.  We are not only far from our earliest animal ancestors, we are well on the way to a Utopia, a world were our best instincts, inspiration, and spiritual essences will become universal. 

There has not been a scintilla of evidence for this idealism.  War has been the most central, perpetual, and universal expression of human society since the Paleolithic. The first Homo Sapiens battered each other with clubs and animal jawbones right from the start.  They were suspicious of The Other, the outsider, the interloper; and well before The Unknown had a chance to raid, war parties were sent out to kill, to slaughter, and to leave not one trace of life. 

From these small, tribal, territorial fights came larger, more well-organized, armed, and led forces.  Then battalions, phalanxes, legions, and armies and the carnage continued but on a grand scale.  Wars were fought for decades, were constant, and became a part of civilized life.  The wealthier a group became, the more defiantly it had to defend itself. More commonly armed forces left their castles, redoubts, and military fortifications to engage the enemy in a first preemptive strike. 

Wars of conquest were part of the evolution of the civilized world. Access to land and sea routes to secure trade were not agreed upon by codicil and contract, but taken.  Wealth was appropriated, slaves were taken, territory occupied. 

Genghis Khan and his 50,000 Turkic and Mongol horsemen never stopped once as they marauded over vast lands from Asia to Europe, leaving a trail of devastation and establishing one of history's most extensive and impressive empires. 

Europe was always at war, with sides and alliances changing but with the same territorial intent.  No kingdom, dynasty, shogunate, or empire was ever stagnant, settled, complacent, and satisfied. 

This survival instinct - the innate, inherent, permanent, and central feature of human nature - can be seen up and down the phylogenetic scale.  Every time there is more than one individual, there will be a fight for dominance.  Siblings fight for parental favor and attention.  Husbands and wives fight for parity.  Civil societies vie for prominence. City states, regions, nations, and international alliances either fight, prepare to fight, or if defeated reorganize to fight again. 

The Taiping Rebellion cost 30 million lives.  The Ming-Qing War, 25 million. The Thirty Years War, 10 million., the Hundred Years War, 5 million.   Modern wars have been even more deadly - WWII resulted in 85 million dead, WWI 20 million dead. 

The Twentieth Century was the most deadly in all of history.  Evolution toward a more compassionate, considerate, peaceful world? Hardly. 

Communism, the brainchild of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and put into brutal practice by Stalin and Mao, was one of the darkest period of subjugation, oppression, and persistent brutality, all in the name of equality that the world has ever seen.  Individualism, private enterprise, and opportunity - the bywords of human society since the age of cowrie beads and barter and the commercial expression of human nature - were deemed anti-social and dangerous, threats to the establishment of a universal communist regime.  Gulags, prison cells, and summary executions were carried out in communism's name. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the social economist and historian Francis Fukuyama declared 'the end of history - the world without the perennial threat of nuclear war and without the hegemonic communist empire, the world would be at peace. 

How wrong could Fukuyama have been?  Once the Soviet Union and its client states were disassembled, minor wars began.  The Balkan wars were just one example, and Islamic jihad became international. 

One could only conclude that war, violence, territorialism, nationalist ambition, and hegemony were here to stay.  Even a cursory glance at history would confirm this assumption. 

Yet, progressivism, the post-Soviet commitment to socialism, has become a political force in America and Europe.  Although recent conservative victories in the United States, France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Eastern Europe have challenged socialists and pushed back on their Marxist-Leninist opportunism, the Left has not lost its voice, and is more committed than ever to a remaking of European and American society in the image of Soviet utopianism. 

American progressives insist that human society can progress towards a more verdant, peaceful, consensual, and considerate one.  Biology does not determine destiny, they say, for given man's infinite capacity for good, and the willingness of human collectives to work together for a better world, any residual Darwinian traits will disappear. 

In America the creation of a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive society will provide the foundation for the universal values of good which will lead to utopia.  Black and white, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight will all live harmoniously in a world which values difference; and when wealth has been redistributed so that there are no longer rich and poor, the goal of a perfect world will be reached. 

These progressives, however, refuse to respect the lessons of history.  America is now more than ever a divided, divisive, and increasingly intemperate and intolerant place because of this forced, engineered social experiment. A country without a mutually accepted ethos, a set of universally respected codes of morality and ethnics, and a patriotism borne of genuine subscription to these principles will come apart and cannot survive. 

Affirmative action - an important piece of the socialist concept of communal harmony - has forced long-suppressed racial suspicion into the open.  Black students from the inner city are simply not up to academic par, and when they take places from more deserving applicants and then taunt, object, and flaunt their blackness in the face of those whites who ignorantly sponsored them, the populace becomes angry, resentful, and hostile. The waves of unwanted illegal immigration is no different.  Forced diversity is far worse than no diversity at all. 

 

Socialism dies hard because idealism dies hard.  It is not easy to accept the fact that we are still basically animals, and that in the few thousand years since the emergence of homo sapiens, we remain as savage, uncivilized, and territorial as our animal forbears.  It is more comforting to believe that human beings can overcome the residual competitiveness within us and march to a different drummer; that progress is actually possible, that a better world is in fact possible. 

Darwinists are far more settled, for the universality and immutability of the idea reduces the anxiety suffered by social reformists.  Life is as it is and will always be, a lot of nasty, unpleasant bits but all there is, so better enjoy it.  We have not been given the choice to be born into a morally vacant world, but those who see the possibility of competitive advantage make the most out of being dealt a bad hand.