Minnesota campus gears up to protest NFL's Redskins

Protestors will hold a "No Honor in Racism" rally on Sunday when the Washington Redskins play at the Minnesota Vikings. Nothing new there: Protestors rallied against the team's Indian name ast season when Washington played at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, as well as 22 years ago, when Washington won Super Bowl XXVI there.

But this time, with the Metrodome gone, the Vikings are renters at the University of Minnesota's TCF Stadium. And the NFL is discovering the name controversy plays far differently on a college campus, especially in a state where 100,000 Native Americans live and the stadium includes a plaza honoring Minnesota's 11 federally recognized tribes.

Minnesota has faced pressure for months about limiting use of the Washington team name, which the school's American Indian Student Cultural Center says perpetuates cultural stereotypes.

"This is on our turf," says Vanessa Goodthunder, the center's community outreach coordinator. "This is a place where respect matters."

Minnesota has a history of student activism: More than 70 African American students occupied administrative offices in the late 1960s, leading to the creation of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies – and indirectly to the Department of American Indian Studies, the nation's oldest such program with departmental status.

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Colleges have boards of trustees that are often sensitive to moral arguments on issues of diversity and race. Scores of high schools and colleges have dropped Indian team names – more than two-thirds of what was once more than 3,000 are gone. But the billionaires who own major pro teams almost never change their Indian team names.

This summer, ESPN asked Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington team, about the move away from Indian team names except at the professional level. Snyder dismissed the decades-long trend as political correctness.

"I think that when you have political pressure, PC, whatever you call it," he said, "that type of thing will happen."

Snyder vowed to USA TODAY Sports in 2013 that he would never change his name. Put it in caps, he said. The NFL takes the position that it is up to owners what to call their teams.

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says major pro sports franchises function as autocracies where maximizing profit is the main concern, whereas universities are nonprofits where academic freedom allows many voices to have their say.

That's how the drama has played out at Minnesota, a public school where the American Indian studies department says it "embraces ways of knowing that stand in contrast to the linear analytic Euro-American studies typically found" at other schools.

"A university is a collection of people who spend a good portion of their day raising their consciousnesses and opening up new ways of thinking," Thompson says. "If a university is really doing what it ought to be doing, it will be filled with people who are thinking about these subjects harder than anyone else.

"So when you've got a controversy like this one, the University of Minnesota seems like the last place that the Washington team would want to go because it is guaranteed you are going to have a lot of people with strong opinions who will have the opportunity to make those opinions known."

Rally organizers expect the largest demonstration yet seen against the Washington team name, larger than the roughly 700 who demonstrated at the Metrodome last year.

Snyder has long said that his team's name honors Native Americans, and he has financed major works on reservations through his team's Original Americans Foundation. A spokesman for the Washington team said Tuesday the team's focus is on playing the Vikings.

"We are traveling to Minneapolis to try and win a football game, and that is the foremost issue on our mind," spokesman Tony Wyllie wrote in an email. "Whatever the politics going on outside the stadium will happen outside the stadium."

LEASE LIMITS SCHOOL

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) says she will be among Sunday's protestors. The Democratic co-chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus has pressed Minnesota about allowing the game, and the name, on its campus. McCollum says school policy pledges an environment free from racism and intolerance and she seizes on a contract clause that says the Vikings shall not use "language that might denigrate any class or group of people."

McCollum often displays an oversized poster-board copy of a newspaper page from the Daily Republican of Winona, Minn., which carried this chilling notice in 1863: The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.

"Students have been very engaged by this issue," McCollum says. "They are looking at us as adults and elders, wondering why we are still allowing this caricature, this slur to be part of their campus and come into anyone's home who turns on NFL football."

The school says its hands are tied by its lease agreement with the Vikings, who are paying the university $300,000 per game while their new stadium is under construction.

The university said in a statement last week that it considers the Washington team name "offensive and inappropriate" but that it does not have authority to prevent the game from being played or to ban use of the Washington team name on campus.

The school's statement also says that a public institution's lease with a user "does not carry with it the ability to generally regulate the content of expression — even offensive expression — by the private parties using the property."

The Vikings said in a statement that they "recognize the sensitivity of this issue" and are in talks with the school and tribal communities but that "in terms of in-game elements, we are obligated as a member of the NFL to operate the game as we would all other Vikings home games."

TEACHABLE MOMENT

Some students want the school to take a more forceful stand. Andrew McNally, president of the council of graduate students and a graduate instructor and doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies, says the Minnesota campus is no place for a racial slur, which is what he calls Washington's team name.

"The Golden Gophers, the university's mascot, is harmless," McNally says. "But students choosing a name for an intramural team could not pick one that denigrates a race of people, so I find it contradictory that this would be applied to students but not to visitors coming on to our campus to play a game."

The American Indian Student Cultural Center, Goodthunder's group, sent a letter to Minnesota president Eric Kaler this month asking that the school not allow derogatory mascots on campus. The Minnesota Student Association approved a position statement in support of the center's concerns and an editorial in the student paper applauded both, calling for "tolerance and understanding … over racism and profits."

Some students at the student association meeting objected, citing free speech considerations, Goodthunder says. Constitutional protections allow pro sports teams and other entities to disparage any race or religion as they choose, McCollum says, but she argues that does not mean the people of Minnesota should allow a private business to promote a racial slur at a public school.

Minnesota is using the controversy as a teachable moment. It will offer educational programming "intended to increase awareness, discussion and understanding of the effects of American Indian nicknames and stereotypes of American Indian mascots and logos," the school's statement says.

Input for the programming came from students and faculty as well as the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media and tribal nations, including the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, which donated $10 million toward the stadium.