Hot Take: Washington, D.C.'s NFL team finally changes its name
On Monday, July 13, 2020, the Washington, D.C. NFL team announced that finally, after 90 years of using it and decades of Native protest against it, it would change its name.
On Tuesday, July 14, Jessica spoke with Jordan Marie Daniel, a citizen of the Kul Wicasa Oyate tribe and founder of the Rising Hearts Coalition, and Dr. Natalie Welch, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and a professor of Sport Management at Linfield University.
Transcript
Jessica: On Monday, July 13th 2020, the Washington DC NFL team announced that finally, nearly 90 years after first adopting the racial slur against Native peoples as its team name and decades of protest by Native and Indigenous people, it will change its name. On Tuesday, July 14th, I spoke to two experts about this.
Jordan: Whew. Oh my gosh, I’m still feeling all of the emotions.
Jessica: This is Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel. She is a citizen of the Kul Wicasa Oyate, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. She’s been organizing against Native mascots for years through the Rising Hearts Coalition, the Indigenous led grassroots group she founded.
Jordan: But it was amazing. It’s such a huge win. Me emotions really started the night before when I saw an alert on my phone saying that they were gonna come out with an announcement about their announcement. I already started getting emotional, never thought I would see the day that this would happen because Dan Snyder and the NFL have been so hell-bent on not changing it, especially Dan Snyder. He was quoted as saying, “NEVER” – in all caps, that he would never change the name. I think he spoke way too soon.
Natalie: When Dan Snyder said “NEVER – you can capitalize that,” I had no reason to believe he would be denied, because people in his position normally don’t get denied.
Jessica: Natalie Welch is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and a professor of sport management at Linfield University in Oregon.
Natalie: I just loved seeing all my social media with Native folks that I know embracing the decision. It was a really great day, and a really great week for Indian country, to be honest. We’ve had a lot of really cool things happening. We’re just not used to winning [laughs] in Indian country, and it’s been the story of my lifetime and I honestly never thought I’d see the day.
Jordan: But yeah, it’s an incredible win. This is decades of hard work. Two amazing matriarchs come to my mind who inspired me to start organizing on #ChangeTheName and #NotYourMascot: Amanda Blackhorse and Suzan Harjo. They really took Dan Snyder and the football team and the NFL to court and to fight this injustice and to dismantle racism, which is what this name means and represents. They’ve done so much work and I’m so appreciative of what they’ve done and what they’ve had to go through. I’m really honored and grateful to have shared multiple spaces with them and have learned from them. This is hard work from so many, so many that were in the front and so many that were just behind the scenes, really putting all their heart and efforts into making this change happen.
Jessica: They are both on alert for what will come next with the team’s name.
Jordan: Here we are, they’re planning to retire the name and the logo. But I do wanna make sure, keeping the consistency of the message of what Amanda Blackhorse said, is that they need to commit to a whole rebranding and making sure that all names and all Native mascots are not going to continue. So I think that's really important because they never did specify that they wouldn’t still have some sort of Native logo or mascot or anything like that, so we’re still hoping they’re gonna do the right thing by completely disconnecting themselves from that entirely.
Natalie: Of course we’re all still, I think, a little bit nervous with the rumors of what the change is gonna be and they’re gonna just change the name but then go to like ‘Warriors’ and keep all the imagery and all the kind of traditions and that might be still missing the point and problematic. I saw a really good Onion headline yesterday too, like, ‘They changed the name to the DC R-words.’
Jessica: As Jordan mentioned earlier, Native and Indigenous people have been protesting Native mascot for decades, so why does she and Natalie think this happened now?
Jordan: Just momentum of what we’ve been seeing with the dismantling and removing of Confederate statues, of segregationists and conquistadors, of renaming street names and potentially air force bases. This is really the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and fighting for justice and fighting against police brutality, the horrible deaths that we’ve had to watch on our phones and on the TV with the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Tony McDade and so many other Black folks that have been taken and, you know, we have to give them credit too because without the movement and momentum they have created and making this country’s ugly secret and dark history more visible, this change wouldn’t have been possible.
Natalie: Honestly, I can’t say anything more without saying that this would not have happened without Black Lives Matter and without…I hate that it had to come at the expense of Black lives and Black bodies, but the protests and the uprising and the momentum behind that movement really pushed this to a head and pushed sponsors and pushed the money. I kind of joke that you gotta get woke or go broke. That’s the sad thing, but in the end we got the result that we were hoping for.
Jordan: IllumiNative’s Indian collective and the Native Organizers Alliance, they’ve really kind of seized this moment of momentum and just created an amazing campaign to get everybody involved, to get investors to start questioning the Washington football team and disconnecting themselves from racism, from this kind of work and this kind of prejudice and discrimination and these experiences that so many Black and brown Indigenous folks are experiencing every single day. This is the result of it. We have to give credit and appreciation to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially since many have been involved in this fight with us. It’s really incredible for the unification of our movements and our histories together, just our traumas and our past are very similar. People need to recognize that this country was based off the genocide of Indigenous people and built by enslaved Black folks. That's the true history and I feel like that always gets forgotten and doesn’t want to be recognized or acknowledged but we need to start recognizing that now. I’m really happy to see that we’re coming together in these movements and they’re intersecting and we're able to have strength in numbers to call and demand for change.
Jessica: Natalie, now a professor of sports management, grew up on the Cherokee Indian reservation in the mountains of Cherokee, North Carolina. For most of her life, she was what she calls one of the “we have bigger issues” Natives and denied the importance of changing the mascots. Over time though, that changed.
Natalie: Honestly it was when I got the perspective off of the reservation and away from my community where I never really was challenged about my identity, but when I was living out in Portland, Oregon with a huge urban Native population I became challenged, not necessarily by Natives but just by the entire community. That really was when it kind of clicked for me. Obviously the personal side, but then on the more educational side reading about all the research and all the ways that the mascots are detrimental to our culture and our people, you can’t say, well, we need to get rid of diabetes/we need to get rid of drug problems/we need to get rid of the side issues, without thinking about the systemic ways we've been dehumanized. So, it all plays in together. It took me 30 years to really make that change of perspective but it really kind of just all dawned on me – and of course you’re hit with a sudden sense of guilt and shame that you haven’t done more and been more vocal, but we can't think about opportunity cost, we have to think about what we can do moving forward.
Jessica: Natalie explained some of the issues with the teams using Native mascots.
Natalie: Again, it just goes back to making us basically animals and mythical creatures that don't exist. Don’t get me started on the Native women erasure…Basically, there’s no women in any of these scenarios – it’s a Warrior, it’s a Chief, it’s a Brave. Where are the women? Realizing too that Natives see these mascots – some Natives, like my grandpa, I think – see these mascots, especially because the Washington football team and our high school, the Cherokee Braves, have the exact same color scheme. My grandpa I could see, and this is long before the Carolina Panthers, he saw something in that, and like, when you don’t have anything in society that looks like you or represents you at all, sure, you’re probably gonna latch onto something that’s even cartoonish. The thing is, you know that that’s not you, the problem is that society as a whole, if that’s there only representation of you, then that’s gonna be really hard to overcome and overcome those stereotypes.
Jacqueline Keeler made a really good point recently about the Vikings, you know – why don’t people have a problem with that? We have tons of examples of white men, we don’t all just think that white men are Vikings because we see white men on our TV every day or in the news or everywhere we look. That's where I think the issues with Natives and mascots is that most people that’s the only reference they have. I still don't really understand how people are so attached to these. It just kills me when they say, “It’s our heritage! It’s our history!” I’m like, do you know the history of Native Americans in this country…? When they say fan is short for fanatic, that’s really 100% true in this case.
Jessica: But the media has responsibility here too.
Natalie: When you see all these tweets of headlines about the removing of a racist name and using the name it just kind of is like, what are we doing?! Some of the media didn’t even mention Native Americans activists at all, they were just talking about the corporate sponsors and the Black Lives Matter movement. It was just like…Again, complete erasure.
Jessica: During her research for her PhD, Natalie worked with Dr. Erin Whiteside on how sports journalists perceived their role in the mascot issue.
Natalie: I was really lucky, I met Erin – Dr. Whiteside – before I started my PhD. A colleague of mine shared an article she had done about sports journalists and the mascot issue and their perception of where they fit into that. She had done a survey and found that while journalists find the name problematic and found mascots problematic, they didn’t necessarily make that next jump to feeling responsible, that they were just doing their job. With sports you’re having to get access to those teams, you’re having to be on their list of approved journalists, you’re having to go to press conferences, and access is really everything in sports journalism. So that makes it really tough for any journalist to go against the names.
What we did was we decided to kind of expand upon her survey and do in-depth qualitative interviews and we saw that the people who were just kind of covering the mascots as a part of their job, Native mascots, they really felt just very paralyzed and very stuck in a situation where they had to do what was best for their job and at the behest of their editors, the larger newspaper journalism and, as we all know, journalism has taken a hard hit in the past 10-20 years and so it was hard for them to fight back. I did appreciate that a lot of the people mentioned too, like, why isn’t the NFL and Roger Goodell doing something? They could easily put pressure on, and I do actually 100% agree with that, but it was definitely a kind of shifting of blame. I was encouraged because they kind of all seemed to be, while maybe a little bit naive, they all did seem to be very self-aware and very much like they wanted to learn more. But again, it kind of shows you how these power structures in sport really affect how we consume sport and the kind of control that the top of the top has in everything.
Jessica: While the Washington NFL team’s name will change, there’s still a lot of work to do.
Jordan: If the NFL and Roger Goodell are gonna call out and say, “We can do better, we stand with Black Lives–
Jessica: This, again, is organizer Jordan Daniel.
Jordan: –it’s very hypocritical of them to say that they stand with Black lives and they stand against white supremacy and racism when they still yet support a team with a racist name that is dehumanizing and ignoring Native people, the first peoples of these lands and all that they’re connected to. Making sure that diversity is there, equity, justice – it needs to be in every single position. Change has to happen. This country is thriving off of systemic racism and oppression, and that’s all the work that’s happening right now that we’re seeing is to dismantle that for a better future where Black and brown and Indigenous folks are being seen, heard, and respected, and have the opportunities and platforms to be on to be seen and heard.
Jessica: Both women spoke about what specifically the Washington NFL team needs to do beyond changing the name.
Natalie: Well, first, I’d love to see an apology. I would just love to see them really acknowledge the land that the Washington football team is on – who are the Indigenous communities in that area? – and just really push that. It’s been going on in Canada and Australia and New Zealand for a while where places do land acknowledgments because it centers everything back. When you go into the stadium, have something about where this land, who are the original people of this land. Stop propping up Native Americans as the, like, “Oh, they’re not offended so this is okay.” So really moving away from that, moving towards education and reparations, right? So, how can they give back to the Native community. Also something I’ve been thinking a lot about was educating the players themselves on the history. I think players are so powerful, they all have their own social media right now – and especially as much as players move around now, they can carry that history with them.
Jordan: Moving forward in any sort of process too, they need to have conversations with the community, they need to have conversations with us, hear our message rather than just brush us off. So finally now they’re listening to us, there’s seeing what we have to say and what we’ve been saying for decades.
Natalie: Instead of talking to and at Native organizations and these people, really try to listen and have that dialogue, which I just don’t think we’ve seen happen. July 3rd when I said they were gonna do the review, I don’t think any Natives were involved in that, you know? I think that was maybe a brain trust with, like, Ron Rivera and other top brass around DC. I really think they should start to include Native people because there’s plenty, I think, that would love to be involved. I’m not as encouraged from the press release and things like that but there’s still plenty of time and there’s still many people who want to do that work. We’re not just gonna spurn you, we need the help. We need resources, we love any opportunity we can to have kind of a high profile platform. There’s small things and then there’s a lot more long-term relationship repair that could definitely be done.
Jessica: And they both have thoughts on what the team should change their name to.
Jordan: Obviously we did all the work in 2017 with the Go Redhawks campaign. I saw on CNN yesterday a list of artwork fans have done or other people proposing names and new logos, and I saw that our Go Redhawks logo was on that list. That’s the point of that whole campaign. It sparks a lot of positivity and yeah, it’s that simple. We’ve had other sports teams in schools or other institutions that have gone through rebranding and renaming, it really is that simple. We changed four letters and kept the same colors and we designed a new logo that was not dehumanizing or racist or derogatory or insensitive. We wanted to package it up, hand it over and be like, “We did all the – here you go, take it.” We wanted to show the world that it’s that simple, show the world a day without racism with this team, what it could look like. It’s just that simple.
Natalie: I want them to surprise me and do something, just nothing with any Native connotations. While I do enjoy all the DC political jokes I don’t know how great that would be but I kind of want them to get kind of wonky with it. I’m all about the Philly Phanatic, Gritty, and the more outrageous, the more fun you can have with it. Ultimately at the end of the day we do want sports to be fun.
Jessica: The road ahead is long but the Washington NFL team changing their name and logo is a real start.
Jordan: I mean, it’s a domino effect. Everyone keeps saying, well, what about this team, what about this team, like the Cleveland Indians or the Atlanta Braves or the Kansas City Chiefs. When you start with the most racist and pressure them and get them to do what we’ve been fighting for and wanting for so long, it’s gonna have a ripple effect, it’s gonna have that domino effect. We’ve been seen it. Cleveland Indians have already vowed to not have the logo by a certain year and date; they still have the name, and now they’ve announced that they’re gonna be reevaluating everything. The fight isn’t over. We need to still keep this momentum and we need to keep targeting stakeholders and investors and continue these campaigns. We need to keep them going and we need to bring everyone onboard with us because if they’re able to see that this is insensitive and racist I think we can still get those wins for the other teams as well. So many people are sending me petitions for their school and all of that because people are starting to see that their high schools are a big problem, especially with their name and mascots. So now they’re trying to get school boards and get them voted on and get them voted out.
Natalie: I think the most egregious things are the things like the tomahawk chop and the Chief Wahoos and the red faces and the headdresses, the things like that that are really hard to control, because you have fans that are gonna do whatever they wanna do. Then you also have to always think about the opposing fanbase. From my high school, for example, we were the Cherokee Braves and our rivals would put up signs saying, “The Trail of Tears starts here.” You’re never going to be able to stop that, and I think a lot of people have worked really hard at the high school level and I think that's a really great place to start because the two places most people hear about Native Americans are mascots and Thanksgiving myth, pilgrims and Indians.
So if we can do a better job better educating at the high school level, I just don’t know if it’s gonna be feasible to get rid of them all in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it! But I think we can do the work around education and advocacy and outreach and we can put the pressure on corporations like Nike, like Adidas, and that commitment to change is really important. It’s gotta be all of us, it can’t just be one team or one league, it’s gotta be kind of a collective.
Jordan: It’s really amazing to see the ripple effect of action and impact that this campaign is having in other communities across the United States, it’s really amazing to see.
Jessica: Jordan Daniel and Natalie Welch both do work for Native and Indigenous communities that goes beyond protesting Native mascots. Jordan is an athlete; in 2019 she ran the Boston Marathon and at each mile she said a prayer to help break the silence against violence happening to women in Indigenous communities, raising awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women. She hopes to participate in the 2024 Olympic marathon trials. I asked her about running for justice.
Jordan: I’m a fourth generation runner and as I’ve gotten older I don't want to just run for time all the time, I wanna run for me and connect with my surroundings and the lands, I wanna continue this legacy within out family. In 2018 after maybe a year of really increasing my awareness about the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, I wanted to do something because this has happened in all of our communities. It’s really heartbreaking to hear that, in 2016, 5,712 Indigenous women were reported missing and only 116 were reported in the federal department of justice database. There are so many Indigenous relatives that are not even being accounted for.
There are so many families out there searching for justice and wanting answers and solutions and needing that support, and there are so many advocates out there, so many coalitions and organizations working to end violence and the systemic racism within our communities, working to try and eliminate the predators that know about the jurisdictional loopholes within tribal lands and reservations and knowing that you can get away with murder, basically, and knowing that Indigenous women – especially young girls, you know – are targets. I wanted to do something that was more than just re-sharing, retweeting, participating in virtual action. I wanted something that could create the opportunity for this discussion to happen beyond Indigenous people because I felt like no one else was seeing this issue, this problem, this danger, aside from within Indigenous communities.
It was getting depressing seeing missing flyer after missing flyer, and knowing that in my family I have a cousin who was murdered and my grandmother’s brother was murdered not long ago. Just knowing that you’re either directly impacted or you know someone who has been impacted, you can’t escape it. It’s there, it’s present. In 2018 at the San Diego half marathon I decided to dedicate my bib number to the hashtag #MMIW hoping that would start conversations, and it did with just a couple people, but it didn’t have the impact…Then a year later it happened again, San Diego half marathon in 2019, did the same thing, sparked a couple conversations but nothing that was outside of Indigenous conversation.
Then a month later the Boston Marathon. I was out there supporting Wings of America, supporting the Native youth that were there visiting; there were juniors that were having a college visit at Harvard and they were also there to run the 5K and I was a chaperone. But I wanted to be there for them, I didn't wanna do anything that would take away from their attention and what they deserve, but at the same time I was really conflicted because I was getting so sick and tired of this issue, this epidemic, and all the hard work and the families not having support where they needed. I just didn’t know what else to do, I was like, well, clearly marches aren’t enough, rallies aren’t enough. We’re lobbying and trying to get laws passed, like, that’s not enough. I just kind of gave up and was like, you know, the only thing I know how to do is run.
I’ve participated in prayer vigils and prayer runs that were non-competitive and I was just like, no, I’m gonna run for them. This is the least I can do to honor them, to pray for them, pray for their families, pray for their communities. This is my way to create and share this space that’s just with them, and I don’t care about a time. This is the Boston Marathon, after I’m done praying in that mile and dedicating it to this Indigenous relative who’s been missing and murdered I’m gonna enjoy the rest of that remaining mile to look at the Boston Marathon, have fun on the course, and then start all over again when the next mile came. It was just my way of honoring them and to let them know that I am one among so many that are not forgetting them, that want answers, that want justice, that want them to be able to move forward in their life, for their families to be able to move forward. There was one post on social media talking about it that changed everything, and I’m really really grateful for the opportunities to be able to share this story and share especially that prayer run.
This is something I’m committed to and dedicated to until we’re not going missing and we’re not murdered and our lives aren’t disposable anymore. Sadly I don’t know that that’ll happen within my lifetime but this is something that I plan to keep doing. In 2019 I dedicated 106 prayers to 106 missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, two spirits, elders, children. 106 miles repetitively out there for them. This is running for justice, running for solutions, running to remember and honor them.
Jessica: Jordan also founded the Indigenous led grassroots group Rising Hearts Coalition that organizes and mobilizes to elevate Indian country into national public consciousness.
Jordan: Rising Hearts Coalition is something that was created during the Standing Rock movement trying to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline, NODAPL. We just saw a huge win in the last couple of weeks with that Dakota Access Pipeline being halted, but it came out of wanting visibility for Indigenous people and Indigenous voices and when I was living in DC I kept seeing so many rallies…It was with the exception of a couple that did include Indigenous voices, but they were from outside of DC a lot of the time. I was seeing other organizations organizing on behalf of Native people but not including them on those platforms and not giving land acknowledgements, especially not having them be given by Piscataway Natives in the community.
So I started asserting myself in those conversations, going to those rallies and then trying to find the organizer or someone that I saw on the stage and just ask them like, hi, why didn’t you do a land acknowledgement? Why didn’t you open up with that? Why didn’t you invite the Tayac family, the Piscataway Natives to these lands? Why didn’t you invite Native people who are from these homelands in the Dakotas which is where I’m from to speak about this issue? Why aren’t you uplifting and centering Indigenous voices? That’s how Rising Hearts came about is basically to ensure that what's happening in our movements and on the front lines, especially for Indigenous folks, but now intersecting with the Black Lives Matter movement and our immigrant relatives, our brown relatives, LGBTQ-two spirit communities. I wanna make sure this is all-inclusive and supportive of all of these movements because they’re all fighting for equality and for justice and for visibility and for respect and that our lives are not disposable.
Jessica: Natalie is not only a professor of sport management but she is also the founder of Creative Native, whose goal is to promote and serve the Native American community with creative stories, strategy and solutions, and which includes the Creative Native podcast. Early in her career she spent time working for Nike.
Natalie: When I was an undergrad in college at Tennessee and I just got into sports management I learned about this program started by a Native American man from Montana who had worked in the factories of Nike and realized, hey, we should do some sort of collaboration between Nike and Native American communities. Sam McCracken’s his name. He was so great with getting in with the people at Nike who he needed to get in with, he’s like a master networker, and he got to the important people and was able to establish N7. Originally the ideal was for N7 to provide shoes for Native communities that were actually for diabetic patients where they needed wider shoes, but then it really evolved into kind of a Livestrong for lack of a better reference where they would create an N7 line of attire, shoes to promote that just like any other Nike product to the public; proceeds would go back to Native sports organizations. It was just really a great experience working with that because it is such a small little cog in the Nike wheel.
So it’s basically Sam and now he’s got a great designer there, a Native designer that’s been working a lot recently, just a lot of great collaborations in the Portland area. Initiatives at Nike, they come and go, and so the fact that Nike N7 has lasted nearly 20 years really says a lot, I think, about their commitment – while, yes, they should never be selling Washington football team apparel they are still doing this great work in the Native community and it’s not everything but it is something. I was at the point where I was like, I don't think I could be in this for me. I don't see a journal article helping my community and helping the Native community in general, and so I wanted to pivot. I thought about, I’ve been thinking about this ideal of doing some consultations, starting a podcast, and so based on my other experiences as a producer and I just feel like I have a lot to offer.
So I’m sort of creating that kind of intention to be able to help when people are trying to plan Native American heritage nights and be a liaison, something I’ve done in my professional career, be a liaison between a corporation and a tribe. I think that we often cite Native Americans, we have to walk in two worlds, if we’re not on our reservation we have to walk in our Native heritage world and our beliefs but we also have to walk in the white man’s world and so I think utilizing my experience there and really just wanting to do what I could to give back to the community and provide solutions that help both corporate and businesses but also Native Americans and all the while having that sport thing throughout. The cool thing about being a professor now is that I get to educate students on the things like the mascot issue. Also for me it's important to be a representation in sport management specifically because you would not believe how many people who say, “Oh, you’re in Native studies? Is that what you…?” And I’m like, no! I’m sport management. That’s my background, sport marketing. I don’t know of any other Native women in sport management – I’d love to hear if any listeners are out there.
I’ve had so many students reach out to me these past couple of weeks being like, “I’m so thankful I had you and your perspective about this to know.” Because unfortunately they don’t know Native Americans other than the one professor they had. That’s been really meaningful and rewarding. I’m always torn about not being home and serving my tribe directly but I think I’m doing it my own way. I always say my retirement is gonna be athletic director at my high school one day, and so I do ultimately plan to go back. I think there's some really cool things that I can do for my tribe, not necessarily being home and being on reservation.
Jessica: Please follow the work of both of these women. Jordan?
Jordan: Yeah, people can find me on Instagram @nativein_la and @rising_hearts on Instagram. You can find me on Twitter at the same name as well and stay tuned for what we have coming.
Jessica: For Natalie.
Natalie: I am on Twitter @rerunnat, like a TV re-run – I’m also a runner. @rerunnat on Twitter, Instagram. NatalieWelch.com you’ll find links to Creative Native from there.
Jessica: That’s it for this hot take, thank you all for joining us. A special thank you to Jordan Daniel and Natalie Welch for talking with me, especially on such short notice.
Jordan: Thank you so much.
Natalie: Yes, I appreciate it, Jessica.
Jessica: This episode was hosted and produced by me, Jessica Luther. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you wanna subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. Thank you to our patrons, we couldn’t do this without you. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown. Until next time, burn on and not out.