So... why were they called the Redskins in the first place?

(Illustration courtesy of Florian Nicolle)

As of Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, the pro football team in Washington is known as the Redskins. But I imagine that by Oct. 11, 2023, they'll be known as the Redtails, or the Redhawks, or the Warriors, or the Wombats, or by some other nickname that's as of now inconceivable. But I can predict with relative certainty that the name is going to change, and sooner rather than later. After all, the literal definition of the word "redskin" is characterized in the Webster's Dictionary as a "usually offensive" term for Native Americans. The Free Dictionary calls it "disparaging;" the Learner's Dictionary calls it "very offensive and should be avoided;" in the Oxford English Dictionary, it's "dated offensive."

Redskins owner Dan Snyder can try all he wants to spin "Redskins" as some sort of noble tribute to the American Indians of old. But really, there's only so much longer this farce can continue when the most impartial judges of the English language, the dictionaries, all universally decry the term as racist and offensive. And sure, there are polls that come out every once in a while showing that Native Americans overall aren't all that bothered with the name; a 2004 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy center stated that 91% of Native Americans found the Redskins nickname "acceptable." But really... this is a sports team we're talking about. Even if only a small percentage of the public is verbally disgusted with the name Redskins, is the name really so precious that it means utterly disregarding those who do find it offensive, who, truth be told, have a rather clear justification to be upset by it? Is this nickname, which every dictionary under the sun calls "offensive," really so important that it's worth the franchise being embroiled in this nickname controversy from now until the end of time?

And what about that nickname? The more I looked into the word "redskin," which is so clearly inappropriate -- the same way it'd be inappropriate to call a team the "New York Blackfaces" and have a Sambo doll as its logo -- I started to ask myself: why exactly are they named the Redskins in the first place? Was the nickname originally intended to be respectful, only to be muddled in recent years as political correctness caught up to it? Or has it always been out of place?

The answer is an interesting one. In 1932, the Redskins first came into existence as the "Braves" (another Native American-derived nickname) and they played in Boston, Massachusetts. However, there was a already a baseball team known as the "Boston Braves" (who are today's Atlanta Braves), so the team elected to switch to another Indian team-name: the Redskins. The reasoning, supposedly, was that they had an American Indian coach at the time named William Henry Dietz, better known as "Lone Star Dietz," and that they switched to the name Redskins in his honor.

Where it gets curious is whether or not he was Native American at all. In his biographies, Dietz is described as having a German father and a Sioux mother; when he was young, he had gone to an Indian industrial school that had the name "Redskins," which got carried over to the NFL team when Braves owner George Preston Marshall elected to name it after him. However, in a series of articles for Indian Country Today, Linda Waggoner found, after extensively researching Dietz' lineage, that Dietz had fabricated his ancestry, down to the story of how he got his name and who he was related to -- supposedly a man named "James One Star." Waggoner concluded that in all likeliness, Dietz lived his life masquerading as an American Indian and got away with it because he looked like one.

"I think down at his base, he was an actor," Waggoner told the Baltimore Sun in an interview. "He was a very talented person, and he found ways to be loved and admired, and part of it was to create this persona."

For the sake of fairness, I'll also note that Tom Benjey, who published a book in 2006 called Keep A-Goin': The Life of Lone Star Dietz, disagreed with many of her points, with his central claim being that there were enough unknown gaps in Dietz' life that it's impossible to disprove whether he was an American Indian or not. "I don't think there's really any doubt that he was convinced," Benjey said in the same Baltimore Sun article. "White people at that time had no reason to take on an Indian identity. He would've had a whole lot easier life if he didn't. ... To me, the central point with the naming issue is that Marshall thought he was Indian. Whether he was or not, maybe that doesn't matter so much."

Maybe that was true at the time. And maybe back in 1933, "Redskins" was really intended to be an appropriate tribute to a Native American. But times change, and even if Dietz was truly a descendant of the Sioux tribe, that tenuous linkage is an extremely flimsy reason to stick with the name 80 years later. After all, so much has changed in the eight decades since the Redskins first launched onto the scene. Back then, it was still acceptable to portray Native Americans as brutal savages who many years ago had threatened the sanctity of the White Man as He peacefully arrived on the U.S. shores from Europe. Nowadays, we recognize that characterization to be a shameful hoax -- that in reality, it was the White Man that invaded the peaceful Native Americans and nearly wiped them off the face of the Earth by murdering them.

In 2013, it's very hard to justify the name "Redskins," least of all because the name itself appears to have been built on a lie. The United States should do everything it can to appease the Native American people after all they've been through for so many years. The very least Dan Snyder can do, as a show of good faith, is to change the name, if only to appeal to the 9% of offended Native Americans who have every reason in the world to feel that the slur is an unsuitable name for a local sports team -- let alone the primary sports team of the nation's capital.

And with any luck, by the time it's 2023, the Washington football team won't be the "Redskins" at all.