So what makes all these mascots and names so offensive? In order to understand where their cultural pain is coming from, we need to first understand Indigenous American history.
In the early 15th century, after Christopher Columbus landed in Central America, white explorers began colonizing the indigenous people of the land.
White settlers realized that the Indigenous Americans’ land was rich and plentiful within North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. The settlers turned to malicious ways of gaining this land from Indigenous peoples for their own crops. They began stealing livestock, burning homes and villages, and committing mass murder against these Indigenous communities.
White colonizers often saw the Indigenous Americans as “aliens” that got in their way. George Washington thought that the solution to blending both communities would be to civilize the Indigenous Americans. This included converting them to Christianity and teaching them to speak, read, and write in English. This idea stripped them of their identity and history.
As white settlers began establishing their towns and communities, they began pushing the Indigenous Americans further out of their land. Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act (1830). The journey following this act became known as the ‘Trail of Tears’ as the journey was often deadly.
In the winter of 1831, the Choctaw became the first nation of Indigenous Americans to be removed from their land. They made the treacherous journey to what was considered ‘Indian Territory, which was located west of the Mississippi River in modern-day Oklahoma. Some of the Indigenous Americans were “bound in chains and marched double file.”One historian writes. They often made this journey without any food, supplies, or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the way, causing a Choctaw leader to tell an Alabama newspaper that the journey was a “trail of tears and death,” coining its name Trail of Tears.