Duluth News Tribune, Aug. 6, 2009
As an American Indian, Donna Blue Bird said she has had to deal with racism all her life, but it’s not often as blatant as the kind the Duluth woman came across Wednesday in Canal Park.
Blue Bird found T-shirts at a tourist shop printed with the lines “My Indian name is ‘Drinks Like Fish’ ” and “My Indian name is ‘Crawling Drunk.’ “
“I was shocked,” said Blue Bird, 51, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe. “It was like slapping the Native Americans in the face; giving us a black eye and letting the world see it.”
{snip}
According to Simon Shaked, the store’s owner, nobody will be seeing the T-shirts anymore. He sold the last ones off the rack Wednesday evening and has agreed to not buy any more.
The decision was prompted by a visit to the store last Thursday by Duluth’s Human Rights Officer, Bob Grytdahl, and Donna Ennis of the Duluth American Indian Commission. They told Shaked the commission had been receiving lots of complaints about the T-shirts.
“We have a lot of joke T-shirts. … When we bought this one we didn’t know it would be offensive but he explained to me why [American Indians] would take offense and we agreed to take them down,” Shaked said.
He didn’t get rid of them altogether, though. He moved the merchandise off the wall and sold them at a deeply discounted price to get rid of the rest—about 20—as quickly as possible. He sold the two to Blue Bird for $1.99 apiece.
Grytdahl, who doesn’t have any authority to demand Shaked stop selling the shirts, said the store owner first offered to sell them all to him at cost but Grytdahl couldn’t afford them.
“We didn’t have the money. … We appreciated him taking them down and not having them in his store,” he said. “I don’t want to make him out to be a bad guy. … He seemed to listen and understand it and found a way to try and make it better.”
{snip}
Shaked agreed to get rid of the T-shirts after Grytdahl explained that while some T-shirts about groups or nationalities could be found humorous for their shock value, the ones depicting American Indians were not.
“A lot of people don’t immediately see the difference between the historical experience of American Indian people and everybody else. … Most of us have made it through our period of discrimination, but American Indian people are continually shortchanged,” Grytdahl said. “Those kinds of offensive depictions just add to the acceptance of that discrimination against American Indians today.”
{snip}
Shaked said his store will not be carrying T-shirts like that anymore.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on August 7, 2009)
Sarah Horner, Duluth News Tribune, Aug. 7, 2009
One day after angrily calling out a retail shop in Canal Park for selling T-shirts offensive to American Indians, Donna Blue Bird, an American Indian woman from Duluth, was shaking hands with the store’s owner.
The gesture came after Simon Shakad, owner of “I Love Duluth,” agreed Thursday to issue an apology to Blue Bird and all American Indians for selling the shirts in his store. The shop carries tourist merchandise as well as various “joke” T-shirts.
{snip}
11 a.m. By 12:15 p.m., Shakad was sitting down with Blue Bird to draft an apology, which included the phrase: “I am apologizing to the Native American people for their concerns.”
He read the statement standing next to Blue Bird in front of his store and then shook her hand.
“I am happy [Shakad] was a big enough person to apologize,” Blue Bird said. She added that the battle to fight discrimination against American Indians still is far from over. “This conversation needs to continue. … We are not to the bottom of it yet.”
DeFoe said the bigger issue is contending with major corporations that make their living by selling racist merchandise.
“He is the smallest on the chain as a shopkeeper, but the solution has got to start somewhere and it started here today,” he said. “Two people came together today and that’s a good thing. … This apology goes a long way in looking to create a racially just city.”
Original article
Comments
I side with Native North Americans on this one. We are, after all, talking about a people for which there does not exist an anthropological record of a misery index that was worse (when judged under any cultural value system) pre-Euro contact than post-Euro contact. Blacks on the other hand, even as slaves, met with a better misery index than that which would have been naturally and statistically likely in an undisturbed by Europeans African continent.
Where is my handshake, hug and kiss for having to hear “Paddy Wagon” every night on the news? Don’t even get me started with Notre Dame and the Fighting Irish.
Shaked agreed to get rid of the T-shirts after Grytdahl explained that while some T-shirts about groups or nationalities could be found humorous for their shock value, the ones depicting American Indians were not .
Lefty/Minority-to-Normal translation:I expect a distinct double-standard to be created and preserved, in which I can poke fun at other “groups/nationalities” while simultaneously expressing outrage and demanding an end when the same happens to my own “group/nationality”
Sounds like a Middle Eastern immigrant merchant. Notice there are no pictures because the press would like everybody to assume he is white. Several years ago Duluth put up a permanent memorial to three black circus workers who were lynched after allegations of raping a white girl.
Oddly enough, there is no memorial to a white male teenager who was kidnapped and murdered in the early 90s by a group of four or five American Indians after he accidently rear ended their car with his. I forget his name (mission accomplished, mainstream media?) but it was covered pretty well even down in the Twin Cities. It was a Slavic name typical of the East European immigrants who worked the mines in that area.
Duluth is moonbat central on race issues. Lots of colleges with a very small population of non-whites. More American Indians than blacks for certain.
“Grytdahl explained that while some T-shirts about groups or nationalities could be found humorous for their shock value, the ones depicting American Indians were not.”
Translation: it’s okay to make fun of whites but not non-whites because they’re a “protected group”.
Is there really such a job position as “Human Rights Officer”??? I mean, they have a business card and receive a paycheck for being a HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICER? My Lord, what happened to the days when, if someone was offended, they simply just walked away shaking their heads? Now we need a new enforcement body, a HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICER to come to our defense and fight those evil devils and their evil right to free speech. You hurt my feelings, now I will call the thought and speech police to come and teach you a lesson!! Wow, how far we’ve fallen from a great nation…
If I walked into any “African-American” store (or any left-leaning bookstore for that matter) and picked out all the things that I found “offensive,” thinks that blame whites for all the ills of mankind, I could put the place out of business.
I wonder why nobody removes the male bashing commercials and tv shows we white males must suffer daily? Oh, that’s right….nobody cares about white guys!
Angry White Dude
How about a tshirt with a smiley face Indian that says “Was your ancestor scalped, castrated and disembowled by this lovable Indian?”. I guess truth doesn’t overcome political correctness.
Donna Blue Bird should throw all that energy and outrage into dealing with the alcoholism rate among her tribe rather than worrying about the outside world’s perception of American Indians.
A tee shirt slogan can’t destroy one’s life but alcoholism can.
A lot of years ago, I worked above Duluth up on the Iron Range at Forbes Taconite Iron ore mine. I lived still further north in a little town called ORR. Nearby was the Net Lake Indian reservation. The Indians used to get pretty wound up on the booze.
In a couple of weeks will be ricing season. That’s when the Indians harvest the wild rice on the lake. All anyone has to do is go out in a boat and put a blanket in the boat and bend the rice stalks over the boat and beat the rice off into the blanket. Then take the rice onto the land and let it sit out and dry. Once dry, they take it out to the road and sell it at exorbitant prices. Then go get drunk for a week. It’s a very sad situation.
Having said that, there’s no reason to sell such T shirts.
Tom Iron…
Can anyone here document alcoholism in North
My parents used to work at Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. That was about 20 years ago. From what I’ve heard about that time and even now, alcohol abuse plagues the reservation communities. Maybe this woman was offended by the t-shirts because someone in her life was affected (negatively) by alcohol? At least she didn’t sue the shopkeeper.
I can understand being offended but on the other hand I abhor the double standard that seems to permiate today’s popular culture. It is OK to portray a White man as stupid, unattractive and basically inferior to every other minority or woman but make some stupid t-shirt and you get a visit from a “human rights officer”. It is very telling that they can say that some of the shirts making fun of ethnic groups were funny but the ones making fun of Native Americans were taboo.
As someone with a little bit of Native ancestry, I find those shirts objectionable because it makes light of alcoholism…like being an alcoholic is cute or funny.
I had an aunt-by-marriage who was Chippewa and French Canadian, married to the uncle who lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, not too far from a reservation. She had a MAJOR drinking problem. That woman could put away a suitcase (24-pack) of beer in no time flat, it seemed. Oh, she was nice, but she drank too much.
“My Indian name is ‘Drinks Like Fish’ ” and “My Indian name is ‘Crawling Drunk.’
To be honest here, I do think that’s a little out of order, but what ever happened to the number one rule when growing up of “sticks and stones”?
Dead right Turlough!
I’m not one to profit from anyones suffering unless they deserve it, and I’m happy to befriend Indians or if you prefer native Americans but there’s a limmitation for blaming peoples suffering on “What the world did to them”. The shirts are a kind of thorny jest, funny and there’s a truth in stuff like this. If humor becomes a hate crime wallowing in self pity will become a virtue. Life is damn hard for everyone and honey flavored pity cannot take the place of dignified labor to extricate yourself from a karmac hell. At the same time…I wouldn’t wear a shirt like that around any big Indians!
They shouldn’t sell tshirts like that. But let’s also ban tshirts that trash Whites or Christians or Jews or heterosexual people.
As a quarter Cherokee, I guess I am supposed to find this t-shirt guy a despicable human being—I don’t. It is irreverent, I guess, but I just don’t believe we are guaranteed the right not to be offended. And, let’s face it, almost everyone is offended by something every day. We ARE, however, guaranteed the right to free speech, even if that speech is on a t-shirt.
How about this slanderous insult to White Germanic Americans:
“School Vandalized”.
You see this ethnic slur against the Germanic tribe The Vandals every day in America, no protests.
How does the media know the people who destroy property have any racial/ethnic ties to the Vandals?
Would the media say “Zulus destroy school classroom”? Or say, school, Detroit “Zuluized”.
Maybe “Zuluized” is a word that should now be used to destruction caused by suspected Black African Americans.
I doubt the descendants of blond and blue Germanic Vandals are messing up property in Detroit, West side of Chicago these days.
I also have to say it is very disturbing to have a human rights officer to pay a confrontational visit to the store owner. Seems rather intimidating to me. The “resolution” to this could not have gone any other way, but for the store owner to cave. Otherwise the media and others would have ruined him.
This reminds me of the Viking playoff game back in the early 1990’s against the Washington Redskins here in MN. When the Redskins came to town the local Indian agitators were down by the stadium all 12 of them in traditional garb banging on tom toms and demanding the name of the Reskins be changed. The owner of the Reskins at the time Jack Kent Cooke was asked by the local liberal rag if he was going to meet with the offended group he responded, “How many tickets did they buy?”. Needless to say he did not meet with them and the team is still called the Redskins. Go down to Franklin Ave. in Minneapois on Friday and Saturday night and you will see all kinds of Indians stumbling around drunk. The truth hurts but it is still the truth.
I don’t see how this is racist or demeaning to NAs unless they were being exclusively marketed and sold to NAs. NAs have a tradition of using such quirky names. It’s not mocking NAs, it’s just playing off their naming tradition.
NA would be seen in a better light if they laught along with the joke.
Wait. Jokes about alcoholism? The Irish have been shrugging those off for years, or rather telling them to each other…. over beers.
Indians as individuals have a sense of humor; they just need to get one as a group.
Oh yeah, & everyone needs to stop apologizing, now.
the guy should have made up some t-shirts making fun of white people, and hung them right beside the indian t-shirts. that would have brought their complaints to a drop dead halt.
“…He didn’t get rid of them altogether, though. He moved the merchandise off the wall and sold them at a deeply discounted price to get rid of the rest—about 20—as quickly as possible. He sold the two to Blue Bird for $1.99 apiece.
Grytdahl, who doesn’t have any authority to demand Shaked stop selling the shirts, said the store owner first offered to sell them all to him at cost but Grytdahl couldn’t afford them…”
A simple shakedown for free merchandise. Nothing more.
Can anyone here document alcoholism in North
There was no alcoholism amongst Indians north of Mesoamerica, because they didn’t have alcohol. None of them knew how to make it. The Aztecs knew how to make certain types of alcoholic beverages, but had very strict liquor laws. Unless a person was too old or infirm to be of any use to society, drunkenness was a criminal offense and one could be executed for it.
The reason Indians (and Australian aborigines) have rates of alcoholism so much higher than everyone else is probably because people in the rest of the world have been exposed to alcohol for much longer and much more widely. Since alcoholics tend to die younger and leave fewer children, most of the alcoholic genes have been selected out of our gene pools.
I’ve heard that chronic alcoholism is less of a problem amongst Indians in Latin America, due to the fact that those societies are much less affluent and alcohol is a luxury that can seldom be afforded. They’ll get drunk whenever they can afford it, just like our Indians, but, unlike our Indians, they can only afford it a couple times a month when the paycheck comes.
“Most of us have made it through our period of discrimination, but American Indian people are continually shortchanged,” Grytdahl said. “Those kinds of offensive depictions just add to the acceptance of that discrimination against American Indians today.”
Discrimination? Where? Everybody seems to want to claim Indian blood. If I were the same, I’d be ashamed to say so.
The t-shirts are jokes which, like all jokes, have to have a strong element of truth to be funny.
I lived in several Western States after first getting out of the military, and I’ve seen first hand the rampant, almost universal spectacle of Indians drunk for a few days after the first of the month when their government checks came. I saw one passed out over a fire hydrant, with his chest holding him up off the ground and his arms dangling downward.
One of the locals said they just ignore the bodies laying about as long as the weather is warm. They continue to drink and sleep it off until the money runs out, then they return to the reservation, he said. He added that no amount of free programs would garner their interests. He also made the un PC observation that Indians seem to become addicted to alcohol easier than any other group.
My observation was that, as long as they were broke, they seemed perfectly happy to stay sober, so I’m wondering if these payments to them are another government-made minority debacle, making their situation worse and depriving them of any ambition?
It also affects their behavior to a greater extent. I can tell you from personal experience that there is no person so obnoxious as a drucken Indian, and there are none that demean themselves so greatly. And “No”, before you point it out, that description doesn’t fit only a few of them.
I’ve heard mockery of “white bread” Americans for years and years, and it’s becoming more common by the minute. But I have NEVER yet heard an apology.
}} … a visit … by Duluth’s Human Rights Officer… {{
This is an agent of the government, right? And he’s making a “visit” in response to a businessman exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech, right?
What times we’re living in!
Pretty shocked to see all the posters who claim some percentage of Indian blood (*rolls eyes*)
Funny thing, today at work I saw an Indian wearing a shirt that said “Do not give alcohol to the Apache, or the Irish.”
Oddly enough, I think the local tribe in Maricopa County is the Pima tribe. Was this an inside joke for the Pima?
“Pretty shocked to see all the posters who claim some percentage of Indian blood. I went to a super lefty college and it was very fashionable for all the Whites to claim some Tribal heritage”
Indeed. Some years ago, I knew a white man (a neighbor) who claimed that he was really Chinese. The stories about his ancestry varied, sometimes Polynesian, but they were always non-white. But if you stood him up next to me, he looked exactly as white as I am! He was married to a black woman and had several multi-hued children, including a red-headed little girl.
That’s been the fashion for at least the last 30 years … anything else but white. Nobody wants to belong to the hated race, the cancer of humanity; nobody wants to be on the losing team. Any tiny drop of something else gives you some redeeming legitimacy. Anything but white.
“Can anyone here document alcoholism in North
No, because
(1) North American Naive cultures were pre-literate, and
(2) They had no idea what “fire-water” was.
I don’t see these t-shirts as offensive to Indians in any way. The t-shirts are mocking heavy alcohol consumption, not Indians.
Some are wondering why Duluth has a Human Rights Officer. It is interesting to note that the city of Duluth is very friendly and supportive of gays. They have yearly gay pride festivities. I remember reading in the local paper a few years ago that the city mayor “welcomed and encouraged” gays to come to Duluth.
We are, after all, talking about a people for which there does not exist an anthropological record of a misery index that was worse (when judged under any cultural value system) pre-Euro contact than post-Euro contact.
That might be because few, if any, tribes in North America had ever come up with the brilliant notion of a written language. Chalk that up as one benefit of their contact with the Euros. Another would be the wheel (name one tribe that came up with it on their own). Others would be, as with other minorities in America, pretty much every luxury of civilized society their descendants enjoy today.
Look, I’m not denying that North American Indians got what might be the rawest deal ever experienced by any group which ever had the unfortunate fate of going toe-to-toe with whites, but that raw deal was borne by their long dead ancestors, not today’s Indian descendants, such as Donna Blue Bird, who enjoy and can utilize (if they choose) all the benefits of white Euro society that you and I can.
So no, I have no sympathy for this woman and her oh-so-delicate sensibilities whatsoever. She has no right to live unoffended and the store owner has every right to offend her. Same goes for all of us.
The fact that she involved a government official to try to muscle a private citizen out of his right to free speech leaves me with nothing but contempt for her.
Also, anyone know where I can get one of those shirts?
Today, Native American ancestry is a novelty, a fashion statement of sorts. Americans (of all races) seem quite obsessed with claiming 1/4th or 1/8th or 1/16th ancestry from various Indian tribes.
I’ve also found Puerto Ricans and Dominicans equally obsessed with claiming native Ancestry, probably as a way to escape being appropriately labelled mulatto or in many cases, black.
Interesting how in Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, or even nearby Mexico, where many 100% pure Indigenous populations live, people will do almost anything not to be associated with Indigenous heritage or culture in any way or form.
