'Slanderous and outdated': Should the Edmonton Eskimos change their name?

Two weeks after the Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV, the Edmonton franchise in the Canadian Football League made an announcement that barely moved the needle on the professional sports seismometer: the team had decided to keep its nickname, the Eskimos.

It was not big news because the nine-team CFL draws scant interest compared with the NFL, and also because many people don’t even know the nickname is a racial slur – even though the Inuit, the Indigenous people in northern Canada, say it is to them.

“Eskimo” does not merely describe anyone living in the north. The word itself has been considered by the Inuit to be pejorative. Its etymology is uncertain: “Eskimo” could mean either “eater of raw flesh” or “he laces snowshoes” in Cree, the language of a First Nations people.

In either case, some Inuit and outside supporters had waged a five-year public campaign to get the nickname replaced, much like some Americans want Washington’s NFL franchise to abandon the “Redskins” nickname. The Cleveland Indians dropped their “Chief Wahoo” logo in 2018. Many colleges have replaced Native American nicknames. But “Eskimos” will stay. Why?

The team has had an “EE” helmet logo for years, and its website is simply www.esks.com. Substitutes like “Elk,” an animal that has proliferated in Alberta, have been suggested. But the team said that it would keep the Eskimos after “an extensive year-long formal research and engagement program with Inuit leaders and community members across Canada.”

The team said there’d been no consensus among Inuit to change the name. The team did say it would increase its involvement in Canada’s north with a plan that includes visits to schools, youth groups and festivals. Edmonton also says the team has been “warmly welcomed” by the Inuit.

Still, the team’s decision was met with some disappointment and skepticism. Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the organization that represents the 65,000 Inuit in Canada, had called for a nickname change in 2015 but declined further comment when contacted by the Guardian recently, referring to what he’d said in the past. “This issue is about our right to self-determine who we are on our own terms. We are not mascots or emblems,” Obed wrote in 2015.

Others with an interest in the issue were not surprised that the team kept its name. Although several Canadian newspapers have editorialized that a nickname change is needed – and even inevitable – critics of the name seemed resigned to its continued usage.

“I believe this is their understanding of compromise and a show of interest in the people whose name that they continue to use is slanderous, outdated and unnecessary. On the one hand they are saying, ‘Yep, we’re gonna keep using Eskimos, but hey, look over here, we’ll bring some Inuit kids to the south for a game!’” Norma Dunning, an Inuit writer and scholar with a PhD in Indigenous People’s Education, tells the Guardian.

The nickname dates to 1949, when the team first joined the Western Interprovincial Football Union, one of the ancestors of the CFL. The nickname was first used as “Esquimaux” in 1892 by sports writers as a derisive way to describe a rugby team from Edmonton that was to play a rival team from Calgary.

The name stuck, even though Edmonton has only 1,100 Inuit and is hundreds of miles south of the Arctic Circle. Over the years there have been Edmonton Eskimos football, hockey and baseball teams.

“Over this past year with the ‘research’ – and I put that word into quotes, because the team refuses to release their data to the public and are falling back on the Freedom of Information and Personal Privacy Act – that the team has brought into media, they gave the appearance of inviting the Inuit perspective on things,” Dunning says.

“However, the bottom line is this: The Edmonton Eskimos is a large corporation. Their logo and team merchandise has value, not just monetarily but through recognition of the ‘EE’ insignia. The Edmonton Eskimos are also a top-rated team. One of the common comebacks that I would receive when I spoke in favor of a team name change were the many fans who were outraged at having to rebuy all the merchandise they have collected over many decades of time. The bottom line may very well be the cost, the financial loss that would occur with a name change and a possible loss of loyal fans. Money always talks.”

To be sure, the Inuit have larger concerns than the nickname of a football team – oil and gas extraction from their lands being just one long-standing issue. It could be that sports fans have come to think of “Eskimos” as merely an old team name, not a representation of the Inuit.

“I think there it is fair to assume that the team and its management may rely on the fact that people still do not understand the history of the term and its meaning, and how it has been used to dehumanize Inuit,” says Jennifer Adese, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Allen Watt, the Eskimos’ director of marketing, referred the Guardian to a recent story in the Nunatsiaq News in which Lorne Kusugak, a member of the legislative assembly of Nunavut, was quoted as telling the legislature: “Everybody else who thinks it is offensive, settle down, take a Valium, and don’t be so sensitive.” Reader comments at the end of the story were mixed, but emotional.

Rick Harp, the founder of the Indigena Media Group and the host of a podcast that has tackled Inuit issues, tells the Guardian: “There’s decades of investment in the name. I, of course, have no way of knowing for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the franchise felt that the costs of inertia would be minimal in comparison to the alternatives. In other words, [the Eskimos were] calculating that more people would be pissed at a name change than would be pleased.”

Unlike Washington’s NFL team, which has the profile of a Native American on the side of its burgundy helmets, or the Chiefs, who were actually named after the mayor of Kansas City in 1963 but whose fans use a “Tomahawk Chop” as a chant, the Eskimos don’t use Inuit imagery, although Harp points out that caricatures have been used in the past.

One of the team’s mascots is called Nanook – evocative of Nanook of the North, the famous 1922 documentary about an Inuk and his family – but this Nanook looks like a polar bear. Merchandise at the team’s online store carry either “Eskimos” or the EE logo. And the nickname is not going away.

“I think it’s worth noting that the team’s management used the lack of consensus as a rationale for keeping the name, rather than acknowledging that they have learned about the term’s harmful impact and moving on from it,” Adese says. “I’m not sure the lack of consensus is a legitimate reason to ignore the way in which it has been used as a derogatory and racist term.”