If you haven’t seen the giant red banner in your Facebook feed or heard of any talk about it, there’s been a lot of recent controversy over the Redmen name. Beginning as “Red Men”, the phrase was first termed in the 1920s to refer to McGill’s male varsity sports teams. The origin of the name, however, is up for debate. Some athletes side with Montreal journalist, Martin Patriquin, whos claims that since the “origin has nothing to do with Indigenous people” and “refers to school colour”, “it would be wrong to cave to political correctness” and change the name (Montreal Gazette). References to varsity teams as “the Red and White team” and “the Red crew” are evidence that the name indeed refers to McGill’s dominant color and not the skin color of indigenous people. Despite the claims that the term was coined from the color of McGill’s jerseys, indigenous students still find the term frustrating and derogatory.
Since the term was coined as a nickname for the varsity teams, which at the time were the “Indians” for the male teams and the “Squaws” or “Super Squaws” for female teams (clearly pejorative), students claim it still holds connotations to Indigenous culture. McGill, like many other North American universities, have discussed changing derogatory references before. Images of native chiefs and headdresses were used as logos on uniforms, but decisions were made in the 1980s to remove those depictions (the history of the Redmen name also came up in the same discussion, but the conclusion was that it had no relation to Indigenous culture, and thus was allowed to stay). The logo was immediately removed, but not replaced until 1992. Similarly, varsity women teams were still known “Squaws” until 1972 until the name changed to Martlets.
Tomas Jirousek is a First Nations varsity rower at McGill and is the organizer for the Change the Name Demonstration set to take place on October 31st. McGill’s task force on indigenous studies was brought upon to look into the issue of the name last year, but according to Jirousek, their effort has been extremely limited, which is why he’s bringing greater attention to the matter. The Montreal Gazette predicts it’ll be brought to the McGill Board of Governors, who will further research the history behind the name and decide whether to remove it keep it.
What do you think? Is the term “Redmen” insulting to Indigenous culture, or is it merely the name of our school color? I guess we’ll see what the board decides.