Susquehannock Logo Reinstated

January 20, 2024

The Associated Press reports that Southern York County School District reinstated Susquehannock High School’s logo and team names back to what they had been prior to April 2021. This caught my attention because York County abuts the county I live in a few miles from my house.

The 2021 board voted 7-2 to cease using the logo but would continue using “Susquehannock” as the Glen Rock, Pennsylvania school’s name and “Warriors” as the teams’ name. Earlier, an on-line survey received 3,300+ responses of which 80% did not want the mascot to change. In a special meeting held the month before the vote, Ian Record of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) spoke, saying the mascot perpetuated racist stereotypes with war-like depictions. The board waited until the district’s diversity committee returned its research on the matter to vote. Those voting to retire the logo considered it racist.

Last year, five new school board members, who used the retired logo on their campaign literature, were elected to the board in November 2023. The outgoing board president did not run for reelection. The new board immediately dealt with the logo issue when it took over in January 2024 by placing the issue on their meeting agenda. The board debated reinstating the logo for a considerable time before residents voiced their opinions in a two-hour public comment period. The Native American Guardian’s Association (NAGA), whose motto is “Educate NOT Eradicate,” made an hour-long presentation explaining why this group of American Indians lobbies against the removal of Indian mascots.

About four hours after the meeting started, board members voted 7-2 to reinstate the logo. More information about NAGA can be found at: https://www.nagaeducation.org/

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Wrong Think

January 9, 2024

A person, whom I’ve never met and whose name I’m not divulging for fear of reprisal to him, wrote to me about my being banned from Facebook for Wrong Think.

Hi Tom, sorry to hear about being banned from Facebook, for no reason at all, and not being able to dispute it. I will back you up by saying that of the thousands of student files I’ve read, I’d say that well over 90% of the students were appreciative of their time at “Dear Old Carlisle”, and you would be hard pressed to find negative comments in those same records. That being said, there were “runners” for sure, which I understand, Carlisle wasn’t for everyone. These ignorant, on the subject of the Carlisle Indian School, virtue signalers, who just parrot the same old “all Indian schools were evil” narrative, don’t have a clue, and do the Carlisle students a serious misjustice by not learning the good it did. People need to realize that a census done in the late 1890’s, early 1900’s accounted for maybe 225,000 Indigenous folks left, Capt. Pratt was on a mission, not to let their extinction happen.

I haven’t read thousands of student files because my interest lies primarily with the football team. However, I have read hundreds of files of players and their relatives. Families often sent several or all of their children to Carlisle and information on the players’ family histories, particularly with regard the health and deaths, could be found in siblings’ files. I will concede that former students who had unhappy experiences at Carlisle would have been unlikely to respond to requests from the administration about their lives after Carlisle. Also, administrators may have purged negative responses from the files. In spite of that, a huge number of positive responses can still be found in the archives over 100 years after the school closed.

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Historian Wants Redskins Name Restored

December 5, 2023

Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) historian Andre Billeaudeaux has laid out the history of American Indian motifs being used in association with the Washington NFL franchise. The story, however, begins with the Boston National League baseball team. In 1912, James Gaffney, a member of New York’s Tammany Hall, purchased the Boston Rustlers and renamed them the Boston Braves in honor of Saint Tammany and used his image for the team’s logo. Tammany was Lenni Lenape chief Tamanend who was called the “Patron Saint of America” for promoting peace and harmony. His likeness appears on numerous monuments and societies were named in his honor.

In 1929, the Braves shifted to a four-color version.

This version of the image was still being used by the Boston National League baseball team in 1932, when George Preston Marshall and three partners bought a defunct NFL franchise and installed it in Boston’s Braves Field. As was the practice at that time, the NFL team “borrowed” the name of the better-known baseball team that played on the same field. It also appropriated the baseball team’s Tammany logo as shown on the letterhead below.

At the end of the season, Marshall shed his partners of their ownership of the financially unsuccessful franchise and moved the team to Fenway Park, where the rent was lower. A name change was in order to reduce confusion. Although opposed to integration, Marshall held American Indians in esteem. Critics have claimed that Marshall changed the name to Redskins to retain the Indian motif and to save money by reusing the 1932 uniforms. That is patently false. The 1932 uniforms were blue with gold numerals where the 1933 jerseys were red with gold and black stripes around the collar and cuffs. The design was likely created by the new head coach Lone Star Dietz, an artist of considerable talent who had illustrated Carlisle Indian School publications when he was at the school. The colors he chose were similar to those of Carlisle, where he had played alongside Jim Thorpe.

The concept of placing the logo on the front of the jersey was probably borrowed from the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team’s jersey That design was by Irene Castle, who was best known as a ballroom dancer and partner of Vernon Castle.

Marshall moved the team to Washington, DC. He died in 1969 but the new owners continued his legacy. In 1971, the team updated its logo to one designed by Walter “Blackie” Wetzel (Blackfeet) using Chief John Two Guns White Calf (Blackfeet) as his model. The changed uniforms were warmly received in 1972.

Billeaudeaux supports a return to the historic name. “The name Redskins is a national treasure.”

Posted in Carlisle Indian School, Football, Jim Thorpe, Lone Star Dietz, Uncategorized, Washington Redskins | Leave a Comment »

Canceled by Facebook

November 26, 2023

A month ago, I posted an article to Facebook that was nearly identical to the last one I posted here. By lunch I was canceled. No explanation. No appeal. No nothing. I am now banned from Facebook for life.

It isn’t all bad because I’ll save money. Promoting my books on Facebook didn’t increase sales. I will save the time I spent reading useless things but I will miss reading what friends, acquaintances, and schoolmates are up to these days.

Why exactly did they ban me? I can only guess. At the end of the article, I included a quote from a former Carlisle Indian School student who wrote in positive terms about his experience at the school. It is against wokester ideology to mention the good Carlisle did. That is not allowed. Earlier postings about the Native American Guardians Association’s (NAGA) attempts to have the Washington NFL team revert to calling themselves Redskins surely didn’t endear me to the activists and guilty white liberals who demanded the team to drop that name in the first place.

In respond to a 1912 letter requesting information about his life after leaving the school, George responded in part:

The likely offending passage follows.

“ I feel as that my learning while at Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the foundation of my success in life so far. Does it pay to educate the Indians? Certainly it does. Today there are white people that don’t live far from me that can’t write their own names. Does it pay to educate white children?”

Posted in Carlisle Indian School, Football, NFL, Washington Redskins | 5 Comments »

George Conner, Osage (1870-1936)

October 23, 2023
Some family members doubt this is a photo of George although it is labeled as such in the archives.

An interesting article from 2012 unexpectedly came over my virtual transom today. It was about an Osage Indian selling his grandfather’s Carlisle Indian School uniform to the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). No, it wasn’t a football uniform. It was his student uniform which was similar to those worn by the cavalry. That may seem strange to those not familiar with the school but it really isn’t. The school’s founder and superintendent for 25 years, Richard Henry Pratt, was a cavalry officer as was his successor. Pratt’s adult life had almost all been spent in the army, either fighting in the Civil War or in the Indian wars later. The military life was what he knew so he dressed the students in military uniforms, assigned them military ranks, arranged them in units, and drilled them in marching.

What was a little surprising was that the man was Osage. Since few of them were football players, I didn’t know much about them. According to his grandson, George Conner was an orphan who arrived at Carlisle in 1885 and stayed until 1890. He returned for a second enrollment at Carlisle, during which he assisted with the physical education program. He finished his schooling in 1899 at age 29 and returned to Oklahoma (Indian Territory at that time). There he put his training in harness making and saddle repair to work when he opened his own shop in Pawhuska, the Osage capitol.

George married Lillian House, who was a matron at St. Louis School (often referred to as Osage girls School), a Catholic institution funded by Mother Mary Katherine Drexel. After George’s stepfather was murdered, the couple considered Pawhuska too dangerous a place to raise a family and moved to Grainola. He took up farming and remained there the rest of his life.

He became involved in the resistance to the Dawes Act and worked with fellow Osages for two decades in an attempt to prevent the division of the reservation into allotments. He also served as the Osage National Council Secretary for a number of years.

In responding to a 1912 letter from Carlisle requesting information about his life after leaving the school, George said in part:

“I feel as that my learning while at Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the foundation of my success in life so far. Does it pay to educate the Indians? Certainly it does. Today there are white people that don’t live far from me that can’t write their own names. Does it pay to educate white children?”

/https://osagenews.org/osage-donated-grandfathers-1886-carlisle-uniform-to-nmai/

Joe Conner’s wife commented that the photo at the top is definitely not George Conner. Below is a photo that surely is him. However, he was too far from the camera for his face to be seen clearly.

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Turn Every Page

October 6, 2023

The famous biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, Robert Caro, tells of an admonition the cigar-chewing editor on his first job as a reporter told him, “You’ve got to turn every page, kid.” In another land-use battle into which I’d gotten myself embroiled, Caro’s admonition proved true once more. A neighbor uncovered an important detail I had missed. I had gone through all of the township’s ordinances I thought pertinent at the conditional-use phase but the neighbor went a step further and perused the ordinances for a later phase, subdivision and land development (SALDO). In them was a tiny nugget crucial to our case. Some might consider this akin to finding a needle in a haystack, a very sharp needle.

The ordinance he found dealt with the maximum impervious coverage allowed in a wellhead protection zone. The limit varied depending on the underlying zone. The land on which the commercial soccer complex was to be built was zoned agricultural conservation (AC), which normally allowed 25% impervious coverage. However, when a wellhead protection zone overlays an AC zone, the maximum allowable impervious coverage is only 15%.

When our attorney informed the soccer club that their plan, which called for 25% impervious coverage, would fail getting approval, the club withdrew their plan and investigated another, more suitable location. To conform to the ordinance at the original site, the plan would had to be scaled down to fewer artificial turf fields than the soccer club wanted. Turning every page saved the community from an ill-designed facility.

Caro also recommended visiting the important places in a subject’s life. He used sticking his fingers in the thin layer of topsoil at LBJ Ranch to discover the reason LBJ’s father went broke trying to farm that land. Last year I was asked to comment on the most recent book on Jim Thorpe because of my work researching the Carlisle Indian School football program and its players. This book got a lot of hype because it was written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have serious errors of the type Caro admonished writers to avoid. Two of the most egregious errors in the book have to do with Carlisle itself and the parade held in Thorpe’s honor after the 1912 Olympics.

During a Q & A session at a talk he gave at the local library, I asked Mr. Maraniss about Caro’s recommendation to visit the site. He claimed that, because he conducted his research during COVID, he didn’t visit Carlisle. That excuse seemed lame to me because the COVID lockdown was over months before his book was released. Had he visited Carlisle, one assumes he would not have described Carlisle Barracks as being on a hill outside the city of Carlisle. Locals laugh when they hear this because Carlisle Barracks is not on a hill and no one ever considered Carlisle to be a city.

His second egregious error, regurgitating an erroneous newspaper account of the parade following the 1912 Olympics, may not have been made had he actually driven around the center of town. That article placed the train station at the square opposite the James Wilson Hotel. The station was across from the Jimmy Wilson, as locals call it, but neither were at the square. The routing of the parade as described in that article made no sense. Anyone familiar with the town’s layout spots that immediately. Had Maraniss turned every page, he would have found an article in a different newspaper that described the event in such detail that he must have known Thorpe was going to get off the train at the junction at the eastern edge of town to avoid the crush at the square and to give him time to visit with friends and officials at the Indian School before joining the parade.

I doubt if Caro’s recommendations would have stopped Maraniss of claiming that Carlisle had beaten Princeton because they never did. In six tries against the Tigers, Carlisle scored only once and that was in the 1896 game. Warner complained that certain teams stopped playing the Indians after they became a good team. However, Princeton gave Carlisle its only loss in 1907, Thorpe’s first year on the squad, and stopped playing them after 1910, just in time to avoid Thorpe’s return and the return of strong teams.

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NAGA Sues for Defamation

October 3, 2023
Blackfoot Chief John Two Guns White Calf served as the inspiration for the Redskins logo used from 1972 to 2020.

One of the Native American Guardian’s Association (NAGA) chief aims is to keep American Indians from being a vanishing race as they were often referred to over a hundred years ago. They consider banishing team names, specifically Redskins, as part of the effort to disappear American Indians. On Monday of last week, NAGA filed a lawsuit for $1M+ in North Dakota, the organization’s home state, against the Washington Commanders for defamation and conspiracy. Named specially in the suit are owner Josh Harris, employee Matthew Laux, and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI).

The defamation charge resulted from an interchange between Mr. Laux and Christina King that was previously mentioned on this blog. After Ms. King informed Laux that she and her sister would not come back as luxury suite owners until the team changes it name back to Redskins. Laux responded, “You understand the people [NAGA] that started this petition is a fake group, right?”

When confronted with the defamation suit, the team responded that Laux, a premium-seat sales manager, did not represent the team. One might conclude that it would have been necessary for him to represent the team during negotiations with customers when he was selling their highest-priced boxes and suites.

Also named in the suit is the NCAI, an organization funded by taxpayers and George Soros.[1] The NCAI issued a report in 2013 that claimed Native American images, such as the Redskins Chief White Calf logo, fueled low self-esteem, suicides, and racial violence in Native American communities without mentioning Tammany and White Calf, who inspired the Redskins imagery.

NAGA claims NCAI contributes to a legacy of cultural oppression suffered by indigenous peoples:

“NCAI is on a mission to eradicate Native American history. The more teams that ignorantly bend, the more power NCAI retains,” the complaint states.

“The powerful few, do not get to have a monopoly on the narrative. They cannot eradicate Native American history from the hearts and minds of Americans.”

Naga states, “The Redskins (were) the only team in the National Football League (NFL) to honor an actual Native American.”

To be continued

[1] George Soros is a far left wing billionaire known most recently for funding the political campaigns of district attorneys around the country who choose not to prosecute criminals or to not require cash bail for defendents.

Posted in Football, Washington Redskins | 1 Comment »

Which Was Best, 1911 or 1912

September 12, 2023

I was recently asked what I thought was the stronger Carlisle team, 1911 or 1912. That is a question that has been raised several times. Let’s start by looking at schedules and results first. The 1911 team went 11-1-0, missing an unbeaten season by a single-point loss to what Warner considered an inferior Syracuse team. They beat two of the Big Four, Penn and Harvard, for only the second time in the team’s history. The Indians scored 298 points while giving up 49. Six teams were shut out, including Pitt, Penn, and Lafayette.

For 1912, like Steckbeck before me, I credited Carlisle with a 12-1-1 record. They shut out five teams where the 1911 version blanked six opponents. They only played one of the Big Four, Penn, and lost to the Quakers. For comparison purposes, I would eliminate the 49-1 game with the University of Toronto Old Boys because the opponent was a rugby team whose players had never played American football. Other Carlisle opponents, even the weakest, knew the rules and had played the game for some years. Dropping the Toronto game reduces Carlisle’s 1912 results to 11-1-1. Eliminating points from the Toronto game from Carlisle’s record leaves the 1912 team with 455 points scored and 113 points given up for the season.

Computing the ratio between points scored over points allowed gives the 1912 team 4.03 points scored for each point given up. The 1911 team’s ratio was 6.08 points scored per point allowed. While the 1912 version was a scoring machine, its defense gave up more than twice as many points, 113 as the 1911 squad did, 49.

In the 1912 Spalding’s Guide, George Orton of Penn wrote of the 1911 Indians, “…whatever inferiority they may have shown in defensive work, they more than made up by the much greater brilliancy, variety, and power of their offense.”

When evaluating the 1912 team Orton wrote, “…defensively they were not strictly first class.”

Something to keep in mind when reading about eastern teams in the Spalding’s Guides is that articles discussing those teams were written by representatives of IVY League schools who were biased toward those institutions’ teams. They never considered strength of schedule or the fact Carlisle played all its major games away from home.

The 1912 tie, which 1911 didn’t have, was a scoreless affair with Washington & Jefferson. This would be a mark against the 1912 squad. Now, let’s compare the teams’ losses. Warner, through the school newspaper, blamed the one-point loss to Syracuse on a sloppy field to “Poor generalship, poor kicking, and numerous penalties for offside play and holding” and “Thorpe’s kicking and playing in general was disappointing.” Thorpe missed an extra point that would have tied the game.

The 34-26 1912 loss to Penn was due to “the careless work of Carlisle’s backfield, their mistakes on signals, their fumbles, and their failure to intercept forward passes over the goal line, together with a fumbled punt, practically gave their opponents every score they made and enabled Pennsylvania to score 34 points with very little effort on their part.”

Both losses were bad but the one to Penn was worse. Carlisle couldn’t blame its poor play on a muddy field this time.

While researching this article, I discovered an error in Gridiron Gypsies. The season summary table for 1912 did not include the 33-0 victory over Syracuse. It was covered in the text but not in the table. A correction has been sent to the printer but who knows when corrected books will be printed. The corrected table follows.

Posted in Carlisle Indian School, Football, Jim Thorpe, Pop Warner | 1 Comment »

Historian Demands Redskins Name Be reinstated

September 7, 2023
George Preston Marshall (center)

Andre Billeaudeaux, historian and co-founder of Native American Guardians Association (NAGA), thinks opponents of the Redskins name don’t know what they’re talking about. “These people are just ignorant. It’s toxic ignorance. It’s group think. It’s the psychology of a group that has no idea what they’re doing, but they won’t listen to us [NAGA], either.”

The origin of the Redskins name and logos go back to 1912 when James Gaffney, of New York’s Tammany Hall, purchased the Boston Rustlers National League baseball team. He renamed the team as the Braves and used an image inspired by Saint Tammany for the team’s logo. That image is prominent on the left sleeve of Babe Ruth in a photo taken in 1935.

When a group including Washington laundry magnate George Preston Marshall purchased an idle NFL franchise and established a team in Boston, they named the team the Braves. It was common for upstart NFL teams to name themselves after established baseball teams, particularly when they shared the same field. The new Braves’ uniforms didn’t include an Indian motif. Instead they wore jerseys of a simple design in Marshall’s company’s colors: blue and gold.

As a .500 first season, Marshall’s cohorts left, leaving him as sole owner of the team. He fired the coach, Lud Wray, and hired Lone Star Dietz, a Carlisle Indian School alum who had had success coaching at the college level. Dietz brought four of his Haskell Institute (today’s Haskell Indian Nations University) Fighting Indians star with him. The figure on the Braves’ letterhead and pin is different than the one used by the baseball team. On the baseball team logo, the man wore a headdress where the football logo image only had three feathers. I’m not qualified to determine if the football team used Saint Tammany’s profile or not. Having red on the letterhead suggests that the team’s colors changed shortly after Dietz became their head coach. The existence of the pin argues against Dietz changing the logo because he was only with the team a short amount of time before the team name was changed and it was during the off season. So, the logo on the button was probably created for the 1932 season.

One question never asked is: Why did Marshall change the team’s colors? A 1933 jersey shown below has red as the primary color and is trimmed with gold and black bands. These colors are similar to Carlisle’s colors and the stripes on the cuffs are reminiscent of the below-the-elbow stripes on the Indians’ jerseys. Some have attributed the design of the Redskins’ logo to Lone Star Dietz. The image may have preceded him; it’s not clear when the team adopted it. Dietz likely borrowed the concept from the NHL Blackhawks’ design and placed the logo on the front of the jersey.

Probably to save money, Marshall moved the team from Braves Field to Fenway Park. To eliminate confusion with the baseball team, he felt he had to change the name. Some think red was chosen because they were then based on the Red Sox home field. A Boston newspaper writer claimed that Marshall chose the name to save money by not having to buy new uniforms. As shown in this piece, both colors and design of the team’s uniforms changed when the team’s name changed. However, the team had to wear the old uniforms in the first game of the 1933 season because the new ones hadn’t arrived yet.

Billeaudeaux thinks otherwise. “Redskins is not about race. It’s a warrior who’s gone through the bloodroot ceremony. “They shave their heads and surrender their souls to their Creator. They paint themselves red as if they were born new into the world.”

“The Redskins were the only minority representation in the entire NFL and it was a real person, not a mascot,” said Billeaudeaux. “The name Redskins is a national treasure and for that reason it should be protected. It’s a cultural treasure and deserves to be protected and understood. It’s not just about the football team. It’s about the DNA of the nation.”

NAGA members aren’t the only people who prefer Redskins for the team name. As of this writing, 130,790 people had signed NAGA’s petition demanding the team name be changed back to Redskins. “Redskins Fans Forever,” a Facebook group with 61,600 members, refers to the team only by its historic name. 

Ninety percent of Native Americans around the country supported the Redskins name in a Washington Post poll in 2016, as the woke assault on the traditional name grew stronger.

Red Mesa High School on a Navajo reservation in Arizona recently installed a new football field with the Washington Redskins logo on the 50-yard line.

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Posted in Carlisle Indian School, Football, Haskell Institute, Lone Star Dietz, NFL, Uncategorized, Washington Redskins | 1 Comment »

Redskins Revival Continues

September 1, 2023
Christina King & Carolyn Steppe in their Redskins regalia

More has happened regarding the Redskins naming controversy. Former luxury-box owner—can you imagine how much the team lost when she dropped it?—Christina King texted “We just signed the petition from NAGA…We [she and her sister Carolyn Steppe] will come back as suite owners when the name reverts back to the Washington Redskins.“ to Matthew Laux, a premium-seat sales manager. She gave up her suite when previous owner Dan Snyder capitulated by dropping the “Redskins” name in 2020. King stated, “We’re Redskins fans, not Commanders fans. We’re not coming back until the name comes back. They’ve taken these images from sports. They bowed to the woke and they’re trying to erase Native American history.” 

Laux responded, “You understand the people that started this petition is a fake group, right?”

That statement did not sit well with NAGA—Native American Guardians Association. Fullblood Dakota Sioux NAGA President Eunice Davidson responded, “We’re not a fake group. We’re tribal-enrolled members from tribes across the United States.” NAGA had posted an on-line petition to have the team’s name changed back on June 21. It stated, in part:

“The name “Redskins” carries deep cultural, historical, and emotional significance, honoring the bravery, resilience, and warrior spirit associated with Native American culture.

“It was never intended as a derogatory or offensive term but as a symbol of respect and admiration. Changing the name abruptly disregards the positive legacy that the Redskins name has built over the years and disorients the passionate fans who have invested their emotions, time, and unwavering support in the team.”

As of last Monday, August 29, the petition had garnered 128,000 signatures.

The NFL team’s spokesperson stated that Laux does not represent the team.

NAGA co-founder, historian Andre Billeaudeux, author of How the Redskins Got Their Name, stated, “We’re in it to win it….’Toxic ignorance’ has fueled the effort by woke professors and academics to erase Native American history from the nation’s sports and pop-culture lexicon .

Team President Jason Wright responded to a question about the name change, “”It is not being considered. Period.”

More next time on the team’s history.

Posted in NFL, Uncategorized, Washington Redskins | Leave a Comment »

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