Duke has effectively answered the OP – nobody in the UK could care less what you call your sports teams.
But after that, several posts have made presumably well-intentioned, but nevertheless ham-fisted attempts to connect the relationship between Native Americans and the European settlers/their descendents to the complex ethnology of the UK.
Unfortunately, no such analogy can be drawn – at least not the way you’ve tried to describe it. Nobody in the UK self-identifies as Roman, Viking or Norman French and the invasions/occupations of those groups took place between one and two thousand years ago, so any wounds that were opened by conflict between them have had plenty of time to heal. That’s hardly the case between Native and other Americans is it?
Consequently, although I’m not aware of any sports teams here called the Romans or the Vikings, if there were they wouldn’t cause any eyebrows to rise. In fact they do feature in the marketing of relevant tourist sites (Legionaries at Hadrian’s Wall, Vikings at the Jorvik Centre in York etc, etc).
Also, there are rugby teams called London Irish, London Welsh and London Scottish that were founded by people born in those places but living in the capital. I suppose the closest comparison might be the Boston Celtics? In any case, nobody thinks they represent anything sinister or patronising.
There are no sports mascots called Irish, Welsh or Scottish anything because people who live there don’t need mascots to remind them of the fact, and English people wouldn’t be interested in appropriating emblems of those places for English mascots. We’re not big on mascots anyhow by the way.
If you wanted to, you could draw an analogy similar to the one described here though. If you called a sports team in Wales after Edward I, or one in Scotland commemorating the Highland Clearances you would be digging a very deep hole for yourself. Maybe worst of all would be starting a team in Northern Ireland called the Englishmen, giving them orange uniforms to wear and a mascot called Billy the Brit. Let’s just say that would be a really bad idea. Similarly, there are no sports teams here named in memory of the numerous peoples around the world we dominated during the Imperial period.
It’s probably none of my business, but it seems to me that if Native Americans feel offended by sports teams being called the Indianapolis Indians, Washington Redskins or whatever it seems pretty stupid not to realise why that might be the case and to cry Political Correctness when somebody suggests a more tactful alternative. Just my two penn’orth.
vunderbob – there’s no such place as Bombay any more; they renamed it Mumbai
