File this one in the folder marked ?reasons to stop talking about symbolic irrelevancies and focus on real issues that worry many real people?:
Ninety percent of American Indians say the name Washington Redskins does not offend them, according to a new national survey.
Only 9 percent of polled Indians say they find the name of Washington’s professional football team “offensive,” according to the results of the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey. The other 1 percent did not respond.
Some Indian activists, by the way, reject these and other poll findings about such topics by suggesting that many poll respondents wrongly consider themselves to be ?Native Americans? just because they were born in America. First, it?s obvious from the relative percentages that the bulk of respondents are not making that ?mistake.? More importantly, that isn?t a mistake.
This all becomes an argument for using the umbrella term ?American Indian? rather than Native American in such situations, as the former is likely to generate somewhat less confusion and is, as far as I know, still the term more generally used by Indians themselves to designate the general racial or ethnic category. In reality, individuals tend to identify with specific tribes or peoples, such as our own Cherokees and Lumbees do in North Carolina, just as virtually no one considers himself to be a ?European American? or ?Asian? but might well say he is of Polish extraction or Irish ancestry or Chinese-American.
Time to get over all this fretful and hyper-sensitive wordplay, I think ? as do, apparently, most American Indians.
