“If people are genuinely interested in honoring Indians, try getting your government to live up to the more than 400 treaties it signed with our nations. Try respecting our religious freedom which has been repeatedly denied in federal courts. Try stopping the ongoing theft of Indian water and other natural resources. Try reversing your colonial process that relegates us to the most impoverished, polluted, and desperate conditions in this country… Try understanding that the mascot issue is only the tip of a very huge problem of continuing racism against American Indians. Then maybe your [“honors”] will mean something. Until then, it’s just so much superficial, hypocritical puffery. People should remember that an honor isn’t born when it parts the honorer’s lips, it is born when it is accepted in the honoree’s ear.”