From the Tomahawk Chop to the Road Block: Discourses of Savagism in Whitestream Media

It's the job of the Canadian government's mainstream media to help the RCMP and OPP to use whatever means necessary to conjure up early European images of uncivilized crazed "lawless" savages. These images are then hopefully meant to get the public's attention as this is what they are taught in school and images most Canadian citizens and new immigrants are familiar with. Even if they are not true, Canada will do what they can to sway minds so we will not be supported. Canada then criminalizes our right to stand up and protect our very existence. Is that in accordance with the Rule of Law?

Janie Jamieson (Six Nations of the Grand River)

Since early colonial times, Indigenous peoples on Anówarakowa Kawennote—"Great Turtle Island" in Kanienkeha (the Mohawk language)—have been represented via the imaginations of the invading European settler-colonists. Not surprisingly, such typically distorted representations have long been a part of the popular press and news media in the United States and Canada. In 1996 the report of Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples asserted, "When the media address Aboriginal issues, the impressions they convey are often distorted."¹ In a statement to the Commission, the Canadian Association of Journalists stated:

Canada's Aboriginal peoples are, in general, badly served by national and local media. . . . The country's large newspapers, TV and radio news shows often contain misinformation, sweeping generalizations and galling stereotypes about Natives and Native affairs.. . . The result is that most Canadians have little real knowledge of the country's Native peoples, or of the issues which affect them.²

Typically, the news media have tended to portray Natives as a conquered people, a poor minority in a rich country, militant activists, remnants of an ancient North American past, and so on. As Canada's Royal Commission pointed out, media outlets continue to perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurate generalizations about Indigenous peoples, and aside from a few independent and Indigenous-owned media sources, the misinformation continues mostly unchallenged and unabated. This essay will explore the use, perpetuation, and legitimization of anti-Indigenous rhetoric (discourses of Savagism) in media with regard to two major flashpoints of misrepresentation: racist sports imagery and anticolonial Indigenous protest.

All in Good Fun: Racism, Sports, and the Media

As an undergraduate in aboriginal studies, I first read Ward Churchill's "Let's Spread the 'Fun' Around," in which the author proposes groups other than Native Americans be similarly "honored" with mascots and team names.³ Churchill likens the use of Indigenous imagery for sports teams as analogous to contemporary Germans using Jewish caricatures in a similar way, which should underscore for us the psychologically and historically perverse nature of mocking those peoples and nations whom some European Americans have tried to exterminate. In his usual style, Churchill offers a number of team names that might pay similar tribute to other communities, making the point that the practice of "honoring" people with tomahawk chops, pep rally war whoops, halftime powwows, and similarly grotesque misappropriated images and names is a treatment unique to Indigenous peoples. We might understand this as part of the European American obsession with naming, a symbolic act that requires the self-appointed authority to name (both people and places) and, in this case, the power to ridicule and create an Other that is ridiculed in schools and in the professional sports industry. European colonizers have proclaimed for themselves the right to name (and hence claim) most of the world and the world's peoples—so the team nicknames "Redskins" and "Chiefs" share a genealogy with those nations and people who were renamed in the minds of invading Europeans.⁴ And, as I will soon elaborate, such bizarre imagery and naming is part of the "Savagist" discourse developed over time as part of European colonialism, such that many teams deploy certain imagery to summon a whole catalog of "tribal" and athletic ferocity. But, as Churchill and others remind us, when these images are used "all in good fun," we might be led...