End tribal names’ misuse
Last week, the chief executive for the parent company of Jeep signaled an openness to granting the Cherokee Nation’s request to change the name of the company’s popular SUV. Even this modest gesture represents a shift. When Jeep revived the then-dormant Cherokee brand back in 2014, it never even bothered to contact the Cherokee Nation — and its first response to the request to drop the Cherokee name was to praise itself for choosing names that “celebrate Native American people for their nobility, prowess, and pride.”
Jeep is not alone. Legions of Native American-oriented brands crowd the marketplace — and exploit tribal names to market products that have nothing to do with the communities with which they are associated. Apple named an operating system Mojave. North Face sells Chilkat insulated boots. The Apache Software Foundation maintains an open-source web server. Yakima makes roof racks. In each case, non-Indigenous entities benefit financially from the brand identity provided by Indigenous terms and names.
Defenders of this appropriation often portray it as a tribute to American Indians. But as Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. noted, “it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car.”
Native trademarks are particularly fraught because they cannot be disentangled from the harrowing history of mistreatment and land dispossession in the United States. Over the years, non-Indians have co-opted Indian culture and identity as a distinctly American phenomenon. The practice of generations of American children playing “cowboys and Indians” is one facile example. Native trademarks are its legacy.
The reach of powerful brands — and the campaigns associated with them — can overpower the voices of tribes and people themselves. By removing tribal names from their histories, contexts and cultures, they obscure contemporary Native American nations.
For example, since the first Eskimo Pie trademark was filed in 1921, the cheery icon of an Alaska Native child wearing traditional cold weather clothing has traveled not only throughout the United States but across the globe. This happy-go-lucky imagery has circulated more broadly than knowledge of Alaska’s complex colonial history, ignoring the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of Alaska. Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream announced last year that it would change what it called the “derogatory” name to Edy’s Pie and discontinue the use of the character.
Addressing this paradox — the ubiquity of American Indian names and the simultaneous neglect of American Indian people — requires us to reckon with our own history, in which the dispossession of Indigenous land and culture are intimately linked to the rise of racialized marketing. It entails confronting the multiple mechanisms behind this phenomenon that make it possible for our states, counties and municipalities to bear Indian names, even as most Americans do not even know the tribes on whose land they reside.
It is timely, now more than ever, to respect American Indian voices and perspectives. Native groups have been protesting the names of teams for decades; last year, two of the most prominent offending sports franchises — in Washington and Cleveland — announced decisions to change course.
Remedying the harms of the past will require more than simply changing a name or a logo, but it is a first step toward ensuring that racial stereotypes are retired to the annals of history.