EDMONTON, Alberta – The Edmonton Eskimos will change their name.
The Canadian Football League team announced the decision Tuesday, following a decision by the Washington NFL team to do the same.
Teams across all sports have come under increasing pressure to drop racist or stereotypical names. Critics say the Edmonton team name is a derogatory term from the colonial era for the Inuit.
The team said in a statement that it will begin “a comprehensive participation process” with a new name. Meanwhile, the club will use the names EE Football Team and Edmonton Football Team.
Edmonton team president Chris Presson said in a video conference that the club wants to keep its double E logo as well as its green and gold colors.
In February, the Edmonton club announced that it would keep the name after a year-long investigation involving Inuit leaders and community members across Canada. The club said it received no “consensus” during that review.
On July 8, Edmonton promised to speed up another revision of his name and provide an update for the end of the month. In that statement, the club noted that “a lot has happened” since its decision in February.
One of the team’s sponsors, national auto and home insurance provider Belairdirect, announced a day earlier that he was reconsidering his relationship with the team because of the name. Other sponsors also said they would appreciate a name revision.
All of this happened when the NFL’s Washington team said it would undergo a thorough review of his name. A similar announcement was made by the Cleveland Indians of MLB.
It is unclear when Edmonton will play his first game under a new name. The CFL in June postponed the start of its 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is no guarantee that the league will play this year.
There have been repeated calls in the past for the Edmonton team to change its name. In 2015, Canada’s national Inuit organization said it was time for a change.
“It is not okay for any team to be named after an ethnic group,” said Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, who represents Canada’s 60,000 Inuit people. Obed has said that Inuit are not pets.
Although the American Inuit continue to use the word Eskimo, the people of northern Canada left that name around the same time that they began to negotiate their land claim in the 1970s.
Founded in 1949, the Edmonton team won the Gray Cup 14 times, second only to the Toronto Argonauts’ 17 total.
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