Fans of franchises with Indian team names often show up to games dressed as fake Indians. Sometimes fans do the same even if the teams are named Giants and Padres: This week a white male fan attended a game in San Francisco wearing a phony headdress, apparently because Monday was Native American Heritage Night.
Things did not go well after that.
April Negrette, who is real Native American, approached a group of men who were passing around the headdress and told them it was disrespectful, according to an account she posted on Facebook: “The guy asks/yells at me because he’s getting embarrassed and flustered, ‘What do you want from me?’ So I said ‘Give me the headdress’ and he did.”
She declined to return it and security was called. Kimball Bighorse, another Native American, took video of some of this — he later posted it on Tumblr — and both were forcibly handcuffed and detained by security, who returned the headdress. No arrests were made.
The group Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry issued a statement that says in part: “It is our feeling that Native Americans should be able to not only attend sporting events free of harmful cultural misappropriation, but also be able to speak out about the desecration of Native cultures, people, and items. … Ignoring Native peoples’ concerns is indicative of the fact that Native people are treated as relics of the past, non-existent, and we hope (the Giants and police) will treat cultural misappropriation as hate speech, as that is the way it feels to have sacred items mocked
Story at: http://bit.ly/GiantsWarBonnet