In 1981, the Stanford University mascot was changed from the "Indians" to the "Cardinals". Except for some alumni who would periodically petition for the name to be changed back, it was a non-event.
If the minority involved is offended by a team name it should be changed and I'll be fine with it. If that minority doesn't care and the name is not changed, I'm not going to be offended on behalf of a group of people that aren't.
I don't understand why people are so worked up over possible team name changes that have nothing to do with them personally.
This is a bad argument. This would make sense if what we were talking about was, like, an insult. But that's not the issue.
Naming teams after Indigenous groups participates in this whole Romanticizing aesthetic of the indigenous as Noble Savages whose doomed honor, valor, and courage made them incompatible with modernity. It's a laudatory aesthetic, but it's also an apology for Indian Removal. They're just too stoic and beautiful to coexist with, so we killed 95% of them and expropriated the rest, who now struggle — many in poverty — to maintain and recover their cultural traditions.
If you are an American whose ancestry has roots anywhere beyond the American continent, then your ancestors perpetrated a genocide against these people. Not all of them meant to eradicate these people (the large majority of the deaths were from disease spread accidentally), but many of them did intend it. The German "Lebensraum" might be translated to American English as "Manifest Destiny."
When you speak about indigenous people, you should speak in the way you would want a young German person to talk about Judaism: respectfully, and with a degree of contrition, even if they personally had nothing to do with Naziism. You might say, but it's so long ago! Cultural values have changed! Yes and no. Certainly Columbus' genocide of the Taino or King Philip's War were centuries back, but the Indian Wars west of the Mississippi (which, incidentally, are why Ulysses S. Grant's statues are getting torn down out west despite him being emphatically a Good Guy on slavery) were only in the late nineteenth century — Sitting Bull surrendered to the US Army the same year the Cincinnati Reds were founded. But what's the statute of limitations on genocide? Will the Holocaust not be wrong any more by 2100?
"Where do you draw the line?"
You draw the line where actual people are used as mascots for sports teams. It's not rocket science.
Exactly. Just name your team after an animal (Buffalo Bison! Baltimore Orioles! Miami Marlins!), a geological formation (Tacoma Raniers! Colorado Rockies!), article of clothing/uniform color (Chicago White Sox! Cleveland Browns!) — or mix and match (Bowie BaySox!). In some instances, professions are suitable, where they are particularly identified with a location (Milwaukee Brewers! Pittsburgh Steelers! Houston Astros! Washington Senators!).
It is quite risky to name your team after a racial group, even admiringly. There are a number of European soccer teams historically associated with Judaism (e.g. Ajax and Tottenham Hotspur), and this basically sets up an uncomfortable stadium dynamic where fans of other teams basically end up singing holocaust jokes (!?!?). Not great, but also not totally different from the Tomahawk Chop, which is also effectively a weird bit of race war/genocide humor.
Nicknames that allude to history at all are risky, because history is often subject to reassessment as other perspectives are included. You might think you're naming your team after the Texas Rangers, a rugged crew of rough-and-tumble lawmen who were key to the state's founding, but then you look up a few decades later and your team is named after a
settler-colonial death squad that led pogroms against Mexican Americans completely exterminated an indigenous group along the Gulf Coast. Oops.
One of the minor league ball clubs of my childhood, the Albuquerque Dukes, are now named the Isotopes after a gag from the Simpsons. I was sad about this when the change happened (twenty years ago now), but not that sad: I get it. It's just a weird move to name your team after Conquistadors.