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For the second year in a row, the Kansas City Chiefs have won the Super Bowl, drawing America’s sports spotlight. The team could put that spotlight to good use by changing its name.
For years, Indigenous Americans have said that uses of Indigenous names, images and, perhaps worst of all, fake dances and cheers are offensive. It is time for the Chiefs ownership to listen to them.
“There’s no honor in you painting your face and putting on a costume and cosplaying our culture,” Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center, recently told the Associated Press. The center provides health, welfare and cultural services to the Indigenous community.
“The sheer entitlement of people outside our community telling us they’re honoring us is so incredibly frustrating,” she added.
The team has long said that the Chiefs name did not have any affiliation with Native American culture. The name was meant to honor Harold Roe Bartle, a Kansas City mayor who helped engineer the team’s move to the city from Texas. Bartle’s nickname was “Chief.”
He gained this name as a Boy Scout, when he founded the “Mic-O-Say tribe,” a longstanding and popular Boy Scout honor society, Indian Country Today has reported.
This origin story of the team name reaffirms the problems of white people co-opting Indigenous culture, symbols and names, and reaffirms why replacing the Chiefs name is appropriate.
Over the years, the Kansas City football team has taken steps to be less offensive. It ended the tradition of a cheerleader (decades earlier it was a man wearing a headdress) riding a horse named Warpaint onto the field after the team scored a touchdown. More recently, it has prohibited fans from wearing headdresses and face paint that appropriate Indigenous culture to the stadium on game days, although some fans still do. Fans also still do a “war chant” with a chopping gesture during games.
For a decade, the team has had an American Indian Community Working Group, which has tribal representatives serving as advisers, to educate the team on Indigenous culture. Indigenous American representatives have been featured at games, sometimes offering ceremonial blessings.
However, Crouser said that the group does not include anyone who works with organizations that serve the Indigenous community in and around Kansas City.
Rather than continue to try to justify the name, a change is overdue.
The Cleveland Guardians, Washington Commanders and scores of teams at schools across Maine and the country have dropped offensive names and mascots. It is past time for the Chiefs to do the same. Ditto for the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Blackhawks.
Rhonda LeValdo, who has lived in the Kansas City area for two decades, founded and leads a group called Not In Our Honor. She is a member of the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico.
She was in Las Vegas over the weekend to again call for the team to change its name.
LeValdo told the AP that her anger and activism is rooted in the pain of the oppression, killing and displacement of her ancestors and the lingering effects those injustices have on her community.
“We weren’t even allowed to be Native American. We weren’t allowed to practice our culture. We weren’t allowed to wear our clothes,” she said. “But it’s OK for Kansas City fans to bang a drum, to wear a headdress and then to act like they’re honoring us? That doesn’t make sense.”
It doesn’t make sense and finding a new name for the year’s Super Bowl champions could be a big step in ending a stubbornly long era of offensive imagery and team names.
