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The pressure on some professional sports teams to change their names continues to mount.
In Saskatchewan, it has been about three years since the Swift Current Indians retired their name. Now, the Western Canadian Baseball League team is known as the Swift Current 57’s.
Team president Brad Woods, who was also on the naming committee, said the organization foresaw a change in the cultural landscape and knew it had to do something about it.
“The world we live in now is different than it was even 10 years ago. (We need to realize) sensitivity and understanding of not just what the significance of a name is for me, but what that same name’s significance is for somebody else. We have to be more understanding of those differences, and we can’t just brush it off as, ‘It’s just a nickname,’ ” he explained.
Business relationships and consultations with Indigenous people helped the Swift Current group come to the conclusion of changing its name.
“We have a really good relationship with Living Sky Casino. We talked to them about the name, and they were very supportive,” Woods said.
While the name Indians was a reference to when the team was an affiliate of Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians, Woods and the rest of the organization thought it was more important to focus on sensitivity.
“There did come a time where we saw that a rebranding was in order, just with the changing social environment,” he explained.
Under the old name, there were also marketing and business challenges.
“When you have a name like Indians, you’re very challenged in how you can promote your club. You think of things like logos, nicknames, mascots … If you take into consideration the sensitivity and the repercussions of making bad marketing decisions … you get to a point where you’re really handcuffing yourself,” he said.
While Woods is still confident in the name change, the 57’s did face some backlash at first.
“You get the letters and the emails with the traditionalists, the people who say, ‘It’s always been the Indians, there are reasons why it has been, the tradition,’ but you’ll always have two sides to the argument … But as an organization, we thought this was the right thing to do,” he said.
In the big leagues, Washington’s NFL team will no longer be known as the Redskins. No concrete decision has been made by the CFL’s Edmonton Eskimos, but they’re considering different options.