Canadian Politics Today

To add:

 

"Redmen” came about as a reference to the university’s dominant colour — “red helmets, red sweaters and red trousers,” as the Montreal Gazette pithily put it in 1946.

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Certainly, the name has been perverted in the past, sometimes by McGill’s own hand. The school women’s teams were colloquially known as “The Squaws” and “Super-Squaws” until a name change to Martlets in 1976. Yearbooks of the time often played on the lazy and unfortunate Redmen double entendre with headlines like “Redman scalped.”

The university also changed the Redmen logo in the early 1980s; for just under a decade, the football and men’s hockey logo featured a native chief’s head, complete with headdress. Students rightly complained, and the university rightly backtracked, replacing the logo at a cost of $5,000 in 1992. History was then righted, and a stereotype wiped out. It was money well spent.

McGill shouldn’t cave to pressure this time around; to do so would be to demonstrate cowardice, not conviction. The history and intent behind the name bear none of the ugly precepts still very much present with the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, to name but two. Changing it would be to give power and legitimacy to stereotypes the name was never meant to invoke.


https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/martin-patriquin-mcgill-redmen-should-keep-their-name

The author of this op/ed says contradictory things...  that it was never meant as an indigenous reference...  until it was...  then it wasn't.   Well, clearly it was at some point.  And I think this is enough to ditch the name for something else.

If they could point and say "it has never meant anything with respect to indigenous people", I think they'd be on firmer ground.   But their logo was a native caricature.