Edmonton’s CFL team changes name to Elks after dropping Eskimos
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Edmonton’s Canadian Football League franchise announced Tuesday that it will change its name to the Elks, after dropping its long-standing Eskimos team name in 2020.
“We are looking forward to preserving our heritage and combining that with the opportunities to usher in a new name and new brand,” Edmonton president and CEO Chris Presson said in a statement. “Please join us in protecting and honouring the past, and developing the future.”
The team, founded in 1949, decided to move on from Eskimos after agreeing that the name could be offensive to Inuit and other indigenous peoples of northern Canada. That move was made around the time that Washington’s NFL team announced it would review and ultimately abandon its controversial name, and amid last year’s widespread protests against racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
As with Washington, Edmonton called itself the Football Team until finding a permanent name. Unlike the WFT, Edmonton did not play in 2020 under that interim moniker after the CFL canceled its season because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The CFL is back this year and the Elks will be looking to improve upon the franchise’s total of 14 Grey Cups, second only to the 17 won by the Toronto Argonauts.
“We definitely did the right thing,” Presson told reporters Tuesday (via Canadian Press). He said the name change was “needed” and “probably a few years overdue.”
After soliciting suggestions for a new team name in November, the green-and-gold-clad team eventually winnowed the options down to seven, all beginning with the letter ‘E.’ In February, those choices were reported to be Eagles, Eclipse, Elements, Elk, Elkhounds, Evergreens and Evergold. The team has long used “EE” as part of its branding.
“This was a process that originally began back in early August of 2020 with an initial discussion around the possibilities,” Presson said in his statement. “Thanks to our wonderful fans and partners across the board for their input, dialogue and debate.
“Rebranding a team is hard. Rebranding a team with 100 years of history is even more challenging and we worked hard to meld that history with something new and meaningful.”
Edmonton said it finally went with a plural version of “elk” that uses an “s” after consulting with linguistics experts from the Oxford Dictionary and the University of Alberta. That name proved popular “through all demographic categories,” according to the team.
MLB’s Cleveland franchise announced in December that this year would be the last in which it would call itself the Indians, a name used by the team since 1915. The name “Eskimos” has been associated with football teams in Edmonton dating back to the late 1800s, but it is considered unacceptable by some, as a term imposed by colonists.
In February 2020, a team executive said (via Canadian Press) it would keep the name Eskimos after hearing “a wide range of views, ranging from individuals within the Inuit community who were very supportive of the name, and some [who] weren’t as supportive.”
In July, the team said it was speeding up a review of its name and noted that “a lot has happened” since its previous declaration. Amid some reported concerns from club sponsors, Edmonton announced later in the month that it would go ahead with a name change.
Franchise great Warren Moon, who led Edmonton to a record five straight Grey Cups between 1978 to 1982 before joining the NFL’s Houston Oilers, said at the time that he was on board with the change.
“The name Eskimos, to me, just means pride and it means winning with that organization,” said Moon, a star at the University of Washington who opted to start his pro career in Canada because he felt the NFL wasn’t receptive enough to Black quarterbacks. “But if it is something that is insensitive to another group of people, then that is something we really need to be concerned about.”
“We wanted to make sure we got it right,” Presson said Tuesday. “We wanted to make sure we did the proper research and we wanted to make sure we created something that was special, and we have.