Subject: Is the UTC Mascot - R a c i s t ?
To: Phil Thach
From: tom kunesh
Date: 4/7/94 10:48:38 AM
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Same as it ever was.

tk> =- Is the UTC Mascot -= =- R a c i s t ? -=
tk> Does "Chief Moccanooga" -Celebrate- Chattanooga's Native Heritage or
tk> -Denigrate- Native Americans?
PT> Beats the hell out of me man. Is the tomahawk chop a racist thing or
PT> does it celebrate Native Heritage?

racist.

PT> I doubt either one 'celebrates' NA heritage.

i agree.

PT> I'd say both could easily be taken as offinsive to NA folks.

me too. but then, i've met some who weren't offended at all and were rather proud. then again, there are blacks who aren't offended by Michael Jackson's plastic surgery. ;)

PT> But should they be? And if they should, should those 'mascots' be
PT> changed? What is a mascot? Let's see, the little TSR dictionary Keevah
PT> sent me years ago that still resides in my autoexec.bat says a mascot
PT> is a person, animal or object believed to bring good luck. Didn't say
PT> anything there about race. Should all chickens be offended by the
PT> antics of the San Dieago chicken? You tell me..

okay, i will. let's take that definition. in Minnesota the football team is the Vikings - proud, unconquered warrior race of Scandinavia, and Minnesota has the arctic feel of the place and many Scandinavian-Americans living there. then there's the Twins - another powerful mythical image. kewl. the Yankees - proud winners of the War Between the States. ... and i imagine that somewhere there's a team called the Rebels (or is there?) that celebrates the proud, unconquered heritage of the South. ... then there's the Padres and the Pirates and the Cowboys and the Dolphins (?!) ... whites choosing white cultural items to celebrate white thangs that were powerful and -un-conquered.

here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, there were concentration camps to hold the Cherokee as they were rounded up and the land racially cleansed for white settlers. the Cherokee were the whites' enemy, and President Andrew Jackson knew it and refused to enforce a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokee, and instead sent federal troops to help in the Final Solution. the Cherokee were attacked, marched away at bayonet point, and removed to "Indian Territory" to be out of the whites' way. the Cherokee are historically a conquered enemy people of the whites, and absent from Chattanooga for 150 years since the euphemistic "Removal" of 1838.
now the white university in a city known for its role in the racial cleansing of the Cherokee from their native lands dreams up a fictional image of those conquered people for use as a mascot - "to bring good luck" ? like the luck the Cherokee had in 1838? or the luck the whites had over the Cherokee in 1838? what kind of luck can a representative of a defeated people bring to the victors? like carrying the heads of the enemy around on spearpoints ... reveling in their old illegal victory. rubbing it in.

there's another way of looking at it, too ...
in 1588 Catholic Spain sent an armada to attack Protestant London in order to place Felipe II on the thrown and to relieve Catholic Ireland of its english oppressors. but storms and an upwind english fleet sent the spanish fleet sailing northwards into even more severe storms and ultimately shipwrecks on the scottish and, moreso, irish coasts. the spanish and irish were coreligionists and supposedly allies in this endeavor to defeat english colonialism (among other things ;). but when the shipwrecked spaniards were washed ashore in Ireland, the irish peasants butchered them in the waves and stripped them for their clothes and whatever else they could find. the few survivors that fell into protestant hands were either executed or sold for ransom. there are no tales among the irish that i can find of spanish survivors remaining in Ireland.
but in the US there is the story of the Black Irish - the survivors of the Spanish Armada who were secretly protected by the irish, who fell in love with irish lassies, and fathered dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned children whose phenotype is today called "Black Irish" - descendants of the (defeated) Spanish Armada.
who made this story up? why?
my belief is that the story was constructed to gloss over the disgraceful deeds of the irish towards their allies, and to reconstruct a history in which the irish were actually the befrienders and familial pimps of their brave and very-Catholic spanish friends. UTC's use of a fictional cherokee chief as mascot of a white university is a construction with the purpose of glossing over the despicable deeds of the whites towards their allies, the first-people here, and a historical revisionism in which the whites are to be seen as actually the befrienders of their brave and fearsome cherokee friends, as they do homage to their eponymic cherokee ancestors in the form of a mascot fakely dressed as a cheyenne or lakota warrior of the northern and western plains.

"Chief Moccanooga" is an "Indian" created by whites in their own image of what it is to be indian, not by chiefs of the people whom it supposedly represents.
"Chief Moccanooga" is what some whites want to believe being indian is about.
"Chief Moccanooga" is history revisioned in a white way, in which -whites- and indians work together to conquer the out-of-town bad-guy teams.
"Chief Moccanooga" absolves white leaders of any negative white history -- an Indian dancing to the tune and the games of white academia and white sports.

PT> Phil Thach ( note the capital letters. :) )
duly noted. ;)

thanks for responding and reading.

;>

--- MacWoof 1.5.3
* Origin: ... same as it ever was ... (1:362/122.29@fidonet)