Nike Adds Indian Artifacts to Its Swoosh

 When Nike recently introduced a shoe designed for American Indians, the company said it was to promote a healthy lifestyle on a reservation. But along with its brand swoosh, the Nike Air Local N7 features feathers and arrowheads, which bloggers have found off-putting. “If this isn’t an example of corporate mind games of race, I don’t know what is, ” wrote one of about 200 readers Idea online about an article that appeared in the Rapid City Joual in South Dakota. There, the respond to this content was split. “What makes this a unbelievably bad move is decorating it ‘Native American style, ’” added a reader defined as “la foi, ” on the web site of the Portland Mercury, an alteative every week. Nike headquarters are seven miles weste side of Portland, in Beaverton, Ore. “They probably brought in a Local consultant and heard what they wanted to hear, which is that Local Americans like sunrises and rainbows and feel real linked Nike Free Run 5.0 V2 to the earth and the night sky and stuff. ” But one of those consultants, Rodney Stapp, a podiatrist and a member of the Comanche Nation of Okla, begs to differ. “There are Nike Free Run 3.0 always going to be negative Idea, ” said Mr. Stapp, who is director of the Dallas Urban Indian Health Center, “but most of them say that because they are not really familiar with the whole process that Nike experienced. ” Mr. Stapp first contacted Nike in the past, he remembered, after he leaed that a Nike crosstraining shoe, the air Monarch, was perfect for his diabetic patients, who had tued up their noses at “those big ugly black shoes” made for diabetes patients.

(American Indians are more than two times as likely to end up diabetic as non-Hispanic whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control. ) Mr. Stapp contacted the company, which agreed to give you the shoes to him at their wholesale price of $27. 50 rather than the retail price of $60. The clinic, which was loaned by the govement, in tu agreed to give you the athletic shoes to patients free. Four years ago, Nike greeted Mr. Stapp about being part of a team of consultants to develop a shoe from scratch. “Indians generally have a broader forefoot, ” he said, “but their heels are about average, ” which means that when shoes fit in top, there might be “heel slippage” in the back. Of course, the shoes will fit many who are not Indians perfectly well, but it is unlikely that they will be able to get their hands (or feet) with them. According to a Nike spokesman, the shoes, that is shipped starting Nov. 1, will not be available at conventional stores but only through Nike’s Local American business program, which markets through Indian clinics and businesses, many on a reservation. Doctors who serve American Indians may have even more cause to nag their patients to exercise than doctors elsewhere. Along with a higher incidence of diabetes, fatalities from heart problems are 20 percent higher than in the American population over all, while fatalities from strokes are 14 percent higher, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The shoes have an $80 suggested retail price and you will be sold to the Local American groups for $42. 80. The company says its first run of the shoes, which come in men’s and women’s models, will be Nike Free Run 5.0 V1 about 10, 000 twos, and that all profits from those sales — estimated at $200, 000 at first — will be put into American Indian communities via a Nike fitness program called Let me Play.

While some have taken umbrage at the idea of designing shoes for a specific ethnic group, others take this all less seriously. “When I heard it, the first thing Used to do is I chuckled until I cried, because I recently though it was hilarious, ” said Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian and a novelist, who is on a book tour for “The Absolutely True Work schedule of a Part-Time Indian, ” an adolescent adult novel. “The day it was aounced, I thought: ‘Are they going to have dream catchers with them? Are they going to be beaded? Will they have local bumper stickers with them that say, ‘Custer had it coming’? ” An article in operation Day on Wed about a Nike shoe designed for American Indians misidentified the cities in Oregon that are home to the company’s headquarters and to an alteative every week newspaper that reported on the shoes. Nike is situated in Beaverton, and the paper’s location is identified in its name — The Portland Mercury. Neither is situated in Bend, Ore.