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A high school football team is an unlikely flash point for a national crisis, but before the Massapequa Chiefs can take on their traditional rivals in Farmingdale, East Meadow or Westbury, they have to take on a much tougher team with a much bigger roster (but much worse running skills): the New York State Department of Education.
The Long Island team ran afoul of a movement by New York Democrats, the worst team in the state which long ago rigged all the games in its favor, to ban Indian team names. After their out-of-state counterparts took out the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins, the New York Democrats have come for the Massapequa Chiefs.
The Massapequa Chiefs have been accused of being offensive. But whom are they offending? The Massapequa have disappeared and members of other tribes are speaking for them. All the media could find to object to the high school football team was a local professor from a tribe whose old territory was 400 miles away
What’s offensive about the Massapequa Chiefs? The most common objection is that the mascot wears a headdress and none of the local tribes ever wore headdresses. But inaccurate is a long way from being offensive. The average sports mascot is as accurate as the Stanford Tree or the West Virginia Mountaineer, but after President Trump intervened on behalf of the Massapequa Chiefs, pitting the national Department of Education against New York’s version, the media came after the entire town.
The AP penned purple prose about “Massapequa’s grim legacy of violence against Native Americans” and described the town as being “the site of a massacre in which scores of native men, women and children were killed by Europeans in the 1600s.”
As per usual for the Associated Press almost nothing in those sentences is true.
Fort Massapeag was actually a Dutch fort that the colonists built for their Indian allies to serve as a bulwark against the English, but even that is mostly guesswork and no one is sure. The massacre has long since been dismissed as a legend. The New York Times noted that “most archaeologists and historians discount legends” of a massacre. An attack on an Indian town often cited to indict Massapequa likely took place in Queens, President Trump’s old neighborhood, by the orders of the old Dutch government.
But the graphic myths of a massacre that left the earth “tinged with a reddish cast, which the old people said was occasioned by the blood of the Indians” lingered.
Legends of dead Indians persisted in the area and led to the Amityville Horror and the house built on an imaginary Indian burial ground in nearby Amityville. The Matouwac Research Center, claiming to uncover the story of Long Island’s Indian history, argued that the massacre of the Massapequa “became the basis for the Amityville Horror House legend.” That’s just as imaginary as the rest of the Amityville backstory.
(Amityville sports teams, which used to be known as the Warriors, were forced to change their names to the Hawks because the only warriors in history were Indians. That name change will last only long enough for someone to discover the existence of Black Hawk.)
The legends of Indian burial grounds and the Indian themed sports teams all come from the same romantic impulse of developers and newly arrived suburbanites creating an identity for the emerging New York City bedroom communities in the area. Few people lived in Massapequa until well-connected Irish lawyers with an insider tip about the direction of a highway bought it up, invented a village, appointed themselves to public offices and dotted it with ‘Indian’ references to give charm to their Tudor kit houses.
The Irish, Jewish, Italian and other New York City middle class residents who moved out here came to believe the legends, but they’re based on very little history and less archeology. Very little was preserved in the area so that no one really knows where the places referred to in the records are located. Stories of battles and massacres are even more dubious and mostly useful for inventing ghost stories for local kids to shiver to.
But in the woke age, the myths have been broken up and are on a collision course. Woke activists use the legends of battles that never happened to demand the end of sports teams based on fictional Indians.
“There was no tribe east of the Mississippi that ever wore a headdress — ever,” the AP quotes an Indian activist from the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma who was raised by white parents.
The headdresses are as imaginary as the rest of the local Indian backstory. Activists and suburbanites are just embracing different parts of the legends. History easily becomes legend, but the problem is that one side is trying to bully the other out of its bad history by using more bad history.
Massapequa really ought to have been named after three shady lawyers, but they might not have made as good mascots. The local residents want to feel connected to something more than real estate developers. Teams named Chiefs or Warriors are not a show of disdain, but a genuine part of the area’s identity.
That the identity is made up of myths is a technicality when the other side is busy pretending that the Amityville Horror was inspired by an equally mythical massacre.
The question is not what’s true, but what do the identities we choose mean to us?
Massapequa residents like feeling connected to a semi-mythical pre-American past, but, like most Americans they don’t want to endlessly litigate that history, they want to celebrate being part of an area with a strange and wonderful (and maybe cursed) past.
The campaign against Indian team names is embraced by professional victims who want to control a history that is almost as fake without admitting that’s what they’re after. Some of the most visibly aggressive Indian activists were exposed as frauds, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, white people appropriating Indian identity to score political points.
But perhaps they, like the people of Massapequa, also liked being part of a myth.
The Baldwin brothers are from Massapequa. They’ve made some good movies and Alec is funny as fuck because he’s so intemperate.
Massapequa is an old “native” American term for smelly farts, If I remember correctly.
I have to comment, instead of letting that pass.
If the name of the team is offensive, then so is the name of the town. Maybe all references to indigenous Americans should be expunged in that county.
I realized today that the leftist identity politics gives people who otherwise feel worthless, a sense of worth by belonging to their identity politics group.
Good point. However I would say “people who are worthless”, but I am evil of course.
No! Your disgusting racist comment is not evil at all! It’s just hilarious and delightful!
Being that you likely belong to the singularity which makes you a NAZI and although a modern NAZI, not any different than past NAZIs, actually an even more ambitious NAZI, since the one’s now are committed to getting rid of a couple religions and a race of people….
are you supposed to be taken seriously on the issue, much less any issue?
Milkorn It’s pretty likely you have whipped yourself up into frenzy of hate about whites, but are we supposed to hate asians more than whites?
Mao killed 120million of his own people
Po lPot killed over 25%
World champions of genocide in their own category-they were brown people. likely you have software already to lighten or erase embarrassing brown people.
Ok to you, it’s a feature not a bug since they are disciples of the same religion as you. Takes a few broken eggs to make an omelet. We understand how much you hate humans.
Are you addicted to irony or just telling lies?
Oh Mickey Mickey Mickey. I always love the faux outrage that spews out of you. If you only knew how out of style y0u are in the era of Trump 2.0
How about replacing the Donkey with a Rat and create the Dem-O-Rat Party
Suppose we take seriously the banning of Indian names; it’s cultural appropriation among other things. First we note that “Massapequa” is a Native American name meaning in Algonquian “great water land”. we need to note first that 28 out of the 50 states have Indian names. Here are the states that need to immediately change their names and the language they have mis-appropriated:
Alabama (Choktau), Alaska (Aleut), Arizona (Arizonac), Arkansas (Algonquian), Connecticut (Mohicans), Hawaii (Polynesian), Idaho (Kiowa-Apache), Illinois (Illiniwek), Indiana (means “the land of Indians.”), Iowa (Sioux), Kansas (Kanza), Kentucky (Iroquoi), Massachusetts (Massachusett), Michigan (Ojibwe), Minnesota (Ottawa), Mississippi (Ojibwe), Missouri (Sioux), Nebraska (Oto), New Mexico (Nahuatl), North Dakota (Dakota), Ohio (Wyandot [Iroquoian]), Oklahoma (Choktaw), Oregon (Algonquian), South Dakota (Dakota), Tennessee (Cherokee), Texas (Caddoan), Utah (Navajo), Wyoming (Lenape).
Note that many local and town names (like Massapequa) are also Indian in origins; Chicago (Algonquian), Chesapeake (Algonquian), Chattanooga, Tennessee (Creek) Cheyenne, Wyoming (Dakota), Hackensack, New Jersey, (Achkinckeshacky), Kokomo, Indiana (Myaamia), Miami, Florida (Myaamia) Lake Tahoe, California (Washoe), Malibu, California, (Chumash), Manhattan, New York (Munsee), Minneapolis, Minnesota (Dakota), Norwalk, Connecticut (Algonquin), Roanoke, Virginia (Algonquin), Saratoga, New York, (Mokhawk), Seattle, Washington (Duwamish), Anacostia, DC (Nacotchtank) Not to mention counties in Arizona (Apache, Cochise, Mohave, Marociopa) etc etc etc).
My, we do have our work cut out for us. (You didn’t really think they would stop with high school team names … did you?
Locally, they renamed our famous “Squaw Rock” to “Frog Woman Rock”.
“The Massapequa have disappeared”…. Hmmm… Curious. How do you think that happened? Maybe they vanished into thin air? Maybe they walked into a transdimensional portal? What do you think, Daniel? any clue as to how and why the Massapequa disappeared?
Perhaps the how and the why they disappeared has something to do with why it’s offensive to wear headresses to baseball for the amusement of white people?
Do you know of any other communities that “disappeared”, Daniel? Perhaps some of people you are related to? Would it be ok for the descendants of the people who destroyed those communities to impersonate them for their amusement?
Empathy, much, Daniel?
hmmm. karen, I wonder how many peaceful European settlements were the targets of warring Indians? It’s all ancient history, in which YOU had no personal involvement or vested interest 400 years later. *Empathy*…lol…stop cosplaying Gladys Kravitz. Even the descendants of Indians mock your ilk, because unlike your condescension to them in instructing them how they *should feel*, they actually largely feel proud of Indian names and mascots and culture, justifiably.
Since you belong to the religion of hate mickhorn why do you belong to a religion dedicated to genocide of a major religion and a whole race of people.
The handy book of Ironic nonsensical hate- jack mickhorn
Offensive to who? Busy body Karens like you?
Hail to the Redskins.
I remember years ago there was a Colorado intramural team that had an answer to all of the absurd political correctness. They renamed their team the “Fightin’ Whities.” Nobody was insulted, and they made money selling t-shirts with their team name and logo.
The Massapequa Chiefs could drop chiefs for its etymological doublet chefs. Then the cheerleaders could chant, “C-H-E-F, there’s no i in team!” That would be a nod to the original name.
The left is doing something similar in Dekalb County, to try and stop the first responder training facility from being built. They’re calling it some mythical .sacred Indian forest. It was actually part of the Smith plantation and became a prison farm until those were shut down. I lived near there from about 3 to 8 years old.
The left’s penchant for making up history is laughable, but it gets tiresome and needs pushback.