From the Baltimore (Md.) Sun:
Heritage built on half-truth?
Redskins: Research shows that William 'Lone Star' Dietz, the coach who was the inspiration for the NFL club's nickname, might have fabricated his part-Indian lineage.
By Childs Walker
Sun Staff
Originally published August 30, 2005
It's a story accepted as gospel in Washington Redskins history.
In the early 1930s, when the franchise still called Boston home, owner George Preston Marshall had to drop the moniker "Braves" after leaving the stadium he shared with the town's moribund Braves baseball franchise.
So, seeking to honor his part-Sioux coach, William "Lone Star" Dietz, he re-christened his team the Redskins. Three years later, Marshall moved the club to Washington, and the rest is history.
Or so the story went until last year, when California multicultural studies professor Linda Waggoner began sniffing around Dietz's biography.
After examining correspondence, census and court records, Waggoner concluded Dietz was a white man who began taking on an Indian identity as a teenager and ultimately seized the past of a vanished Lakota tribesman and made it his own.
[snip]
[Read the whole story]
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