Suggestions for naming the Big Ten divisions

Very good point (and good movie).

Note, however, that there's a world of difference between playing Indian (or playing Indiana) and paying tribute. Whatever the initial intention, names like "Illini" and "Seminoles" are specific to that place's cultural history -- like naming a Welsh team the Gwynned or something. So long as they have agreements with the survivors of those nations, I think it can be a good thing - how can it hurt to associate your school with the history embedded in that land? Hopefully it can lead to settlers adopting some of that culture as their own. I have a major problem with Cleveland's baseball team, and an even bigger one with Washington's NFL team.

The idea of naming divisions after important historical figures in our region is something I could support. Doing it by culture group or nation group, eh, not so much.

Going by nations or cultures would probably be too difficult anyway, since the divisional alignments don't match any historical configuration we know of. The Algonquin cultural group was the most dominant across this geographical landscape, although Sioux culture was much more predominant in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and parts of Wisconsin, and Iroquois culture was certainly predominant in Pennsylvania and much of Ohio. Remember, however, that these groups had no borders, and our maps are really bad for determining a historical balance point because these balance points were horribly upset by the intrusion of European settlers. Whenever a French or English colonist/trader tried to get an American Indian to draw borders on a map, he'd either be met with a stare that says "uh...own land? are you crazy?" or perhaps if he met someone well-traveled or knowledgeable, at best he would probably get a gross exaggeration of the extent of that guy's people or culture. An English map that shows Iroquois all across Ohio and Indiana is met by a French map written the same month that doesn't have the Iroquois going much past New York.

Nation groups within these culture groups are probably too small. Many cross over two or three states, but none would represent a territory so wide as the Big Ten's footprint. And they moved...a lot. Like at one point you could say the Illini owned Illinois, and the Potawattami were Michigan, and the Miami were Ohio, and the Dakota were Minnesota, kinda. But they were a lot like post-Roman Germanic tribes -- at any given point they could be settled in an entirely new place. I think there was a major shift too in the 1600s when Hurons called the Ojibwe (also: Chippewaw) rushed out of Ontario into Michigan and displaced a lot of the old groups -- the Saginaw (i.e. Sauk) I think were a remnant of what used to be the dominant nation group before then. Even the word Ojibwe might have been something akin to our word "Viking," or maybe "Barbarian," except the invaders, once settled, kind of took the name for their own.

Kind of an irony in the debate over team names: the common words we have for tribes were usually not those they called themselves, but exonyms (names others call them) given to us by East Coast groups. It would be like calling Michiganders "Thastateupnorthers" and then repeating it so often that a few centuries from now we call ourselves "Thastableners." A lot of those words were probably unkind because of the nature with our source's dealings with those people. For example, the Delaware word for "unclean" is "tuweh," and "Miami" comes from "twahtwah" -- perhaps this was originally an exonym given to Miami invaders by the Delaware?

If we are to pay tribute to the original Midwesterners, I suggest it's done by honoring important figures, not groups.