This meant that the true American Indians could not openly perform their ceremonial dances, while the invented fakes could leap aside, mocking the religious rituals of what a dominant white culture considered an endangered red culture.
Up to 10 million indigenous people lived in North America before Columbus. When sports teams began to be nominated for the victims of this genocide, around 250,000 remained.
Native American children were taken from their families at this time and sent to boarding schools, based on an assimilation policy that was another form of genocide, this time cultural – students were told not to speak their own languages. not even between them. The motto of all this: “Kill the Indian and save the man”.
So the names of these teams were about cultural appropriation, not honor. Also, “Braves” was a bad idea for another reason as well: why take a team name in use by another sports club from the year the Titanic sank, when you could choose a completely new one?
Rick Martin, Gil Perreault and Rene Robert, Sabers French Connection, since January 20, 1974.
Photo of the news file
This is what Buffalo Sabers did. Their name is deeply familiar to us now, but it was once as fresh as a new sheet of ice. The team said in a press release introducing the name that a saber is “a clean, sharp, determined and penetrating weapon in attack, as well as a strong parade weapon in defense”.
The Sabers have gone one step further by choosing Canadian rather than American spelling. So Gil Perreault was a Saber, not a Saber (even if it was a center, not a center). It was a brilliant way of welcoming Canadian fans from Fort Erie and beyond.
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