It seems as though the Washington Redskins won’t be the only North American professional football team changing their name in the near future.
According to TSN, the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League will also make a change in nickname due to concerns that the current team name is a racial slur.
While the team has always claimed the name is intended to be respectful to Canada’s Inuit population, there has been a strong contingent of activists who claim the name is a slur.
In 2015, an Inuit politician named Natan Obed, penned an op-ed about the team name claiming, “we are not mascots or emblems.”
“In a time when we still struggle to be heard, where there is vast indifference to our socio-economic condition, where we still fight for acceptance and respect from Canadians every day, dominant society continues to use us, a minority indigenous people, as their mascots for their sports entertainment,” Obed wrote
“Allowing this practice is a fundamental departure from how we wish to be treated in all other conversations we have with Canada.”
Recent world events, such as the spate of protests and riots following the death of George Floyd have brought added pressure to the team. The same type of pressure that convinced the Washington Redskins to announce last week that they were changing their 88-year-old name.
Like the Redskins, the Eskimos expect to announce a new name for the team, soon.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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