This interesting debate as gone on for 40 years. It seems that Daniel Snyder would give in and change the name of the Washington Redskins. It would even add money to the franchise if he did change the name. So why the reluctance?
Check out the background of the battle of the names below as reported by Think Progress.
It was a simple declaration. With it, the owner of the Washington
Redskins probably thought he was putting to bed the idea that his
franchise might ever go by another name.
“We will never change the name of the team,” Daniel Snyder said in May.
“We’ll never change the name,” he reiterated when the reporter followed-up. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
But for all of Snyder’s public bluster on the subject, the tenor of
the organization’s private response would shift in the months to come.
Inspired in part by Snyder’s own comments, a small but powerful Native
American tribe would join the long fight other Native American activists
and advocacy groups had waged to change the franchise’s name. And in
response, the Redskins would enlist a group of high-profile Republican
strategists and officials to privately shape the organization’s response
to public pressure as Snyder sought to preserve the name the team has
used for 80 years.
For forty years, a loose coalition of Native American tribal and
organizational leaders had targeted the title of Snyder’s football team.
For the past two decades, they had waged legal fights that sought to
undermine the team’s federal trademark protection, arguing that laws
prohibiting the trademarking of offensive racial terms should void the
one that covered “Redskins.” Snyder, like the owners who came before
him, had no inclination towards a change. Especially not last spring,
with his team coming off one of its most successful seasons during his
tenure as owner and — despite questions about his star quarterback’s
shredded knee — with the franchise’s future looking bright.
And the simple statement meant to end the discussion instead helped
ignite a major controversy that enveloped Snyder and his team.
“The stonewall by the NFL and the Washington team was shattered this
year,” Ray Halbritter, a representative from the Oneida Indian Nation,
which conducted a wide-ranging campaign against the team’s name
throughout the 2013 season, said. “It’s a permanent movement now.”
And it’s a movement with increasing chances of success. But even as
changes close in on the Redskins, emails between team advisers, obtained
by ThinkProgress, reveal a deep contempt for the arguments that may
ultimately cost the franchise its name.
Kill The Indian, Save The Man
The etymology of the word “Redskin” is, according to a study from
Smithsonian Institution Native American language historian Ives Goddard,
“entirely benign”
Native Americans, Goddard found, were the originators of the term,
which they used to set themselves apart from people new to their land.
By the early 1860s, however, whites had co-opted the term as a racial
descriptor at best and, at worst, as a slur. A newspaper in Winona,
Minnesota used the word as part of a bounty notice published in its
evening edition on September 24, 1863. The notice, provided by the
National Congress of American Indians, which claims it has been
independently verified, read:
THE State reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.
CREDIT: National Congress of American Indians
Sixteen years later, a United States Army Captain named Richard Henry
Pratt founded Carlisle Indian School, one of the first in a wave of
Indian boarding schools meant to help the U.S. government solve its
“Indian problem.” Many whites at the time believed that the only way to
deal with Indians was to educate and assimilate them into Euro-centric
American culture. Indians could be “saved,” but only if whites
eradicated their cultural backgrounds. Carlisle, in the words of its
founder, existed to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man."
Carlisle sat on an abandoned military base and existed under the
authority of the United States Army. The school found little success in
educating Indians. But it excelled in replacing Indian traditions and
beliefs with the English language, Western religion, and American
culture. This was especially true on the football field, where Carlisle ascended to the top of America’s new burgeoning obsession: collegiate football.
Carlisle regularly competed with–and beat–the powers of the day, Ivy
League schools like Harvard and Yale, and military academies like Army.
Though they were officially known as the Red Men or Indians, newspaper
reports referred to its players by another name. “Every time the reports
of Indian games are printed, hundreds of Chicagoans are heard to
express ‘Oh, how I would like to see those redskins play,’” a Chicago
reporter wrote of the team in 1898.
By the second decade of the 20th century, Carlisle had spawned
numerous other Indian boarding schools, which decades later would fall
under criticism for their curriculums and cultural assimilation
programs. Some who attended such schools remembered them
as repressive institutions that destroyed their culture and provided
little in the way of actual education. Carlisle closed in 1918.
Fourteen
years later, the team that is known today as the Washington Redskins
played its first professional football game. The Boston Braves, as they
were known then, adopted the “Redskins” name after just one season. As
legend holds, the team changed names to honor its second coach, a burly
Indian man named William “Lone Star” Dietz. The team moved to Washington
in 1937. It has called the nation’s capital home ever since.
Dietz, in the organization’s version of the story, was a Sioux, and
the team adopted its name “out of respect for Native American heritage
and tradition.” The Redskins have used the story to defend the name for
decades; it plays a central role in Snyder’s defense of the moniker now.
“Dietz’s true identity remains a bone of contention,” author and historian Linda M. Waggoner wrote in her exhaustive effort to debunk Dietz’s claims of Indian heritage
in the spring of 2013. But his birth certificate stated that he was
born to German parents in Wisconsin. It was only later that Dietz
adopted the story of his Indian heritage. Waggoner’s research suggests
that he did so for self-promotional reasons, first to help him sell his
talents as an artist and later to help him gain prominence as both a
football coach and a film creator.
Dietz gained entry into the Carlisle school, as an acquaintance put
it, “thru some subterfuge” in 1907. Waggoner found that he was likely
among the players illegally recruited to Carlisle for football purposes.
At this point, Dietz “began crafting himself a fabulous autobiography,”
Waggoner found, and he appears to have made up an “astoundingly
anachronistic” Indian heritage that cribbed heavily from an Indian named
James One Star, who had left Carlisle in the 1890s and, based on
government records, likely died as a soldier. His “heritage” had gotten
him into Carlisle, though, where he played and coached football
alongside the famous Pop Warner, a non-Native who coached the school’s
team.
His time at Carlisle helped launch his coaching career — he went
on to work at, among other places, Washington State and Purdue. In 1933,
he joined the Redskins.
His tenure there was hardly outstanding. In Dietz’s two seasons as a
coach, the team’s record stood at 11 wins, 11 losses, and two ties.
And Dietz’s story about his heritage was already in doubt before he
joined the team. It actually caught up to him the year after Carlisle
closed in 1918. A Washington state-based FBI agent investigated Dietz,
and he was charged in 1919 for attempting to dodge the World War I draft
by falsely registering as an Indian, and for misrepresenting a business
he ran. He disputed the charges during a trial that ended with a hung
jury. He pleaded no contest to new charges of lying about his heritage
and misrepresenting his business and served 30 days in jail in 1920.
Upon his release, he stuck to his story until the day he died.
The Redskins and the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, may not
have been aware of this backstory. Still, Waggoner found little evidence
from the time to support the claim that Washington chose the name
Redskins specifically to honor Dietz, though it changed names when it
hired him, and before he coached his first season. Waggoner’s research
instead claims that the name was possibly a ploy “to cash in on Indian
football nostalgia,” a phenomenon Carlisle helped create. Home to
football legends like Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation,
Carlisle helped foster the belief that Native Americans had supernatural
athletic talent, particularly on the football field.
Dietz died in 1964, three decades after his short stint with the
Redskins and right around the time the movement against Native American
imagery in sports began. In the early 1960s, groups of Native American
activists and students began working with colleges and universities to
change names and drop mascots, and by 1970, they had won their first
prominent victory. That year, the University of Oklahoma banished Little Red,
an unofficial Native American mascot, from Sooners football games.
For
the first time, an American sports team had listened to Native Americans
who were arguing that it was inappropriate to make caricatures of their
people for the entertainment of sports fans. Marquette University
dropped its Native mascot in 1971 (it would take 23 years for it to change its “Warriors” nickname). Stanford University dropped its “Indians” nickname the next year. In 1974, Dartmouth College’s board of trustees decided the school should quit using its unofficial “Indians” nickname and imagery.
The Redskins could have been next.
Four Decades of Fighting
As Oklahoma banned Little Red, the Redskins underwent a transition of
their own. Owner George Preston Marshall — who had finally wilted and
integrated his team in 1962 amid federal pressure to do so — died in
1969. The Redskins were left in the hands of Washington-based attorney
Edward Bennett Williams, who owned a minority stake in the team and
became its managing partner. Native American activists who wanted the
name changed thought the new leadership presented an opportunity.
Suzan Shown Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee
tribes who later led the National Congress of American Indians from 1984
to 1989, was one of those activists. Harjo said she “watched from the
sidelines” as activists persuaded Oklahoma to change, but she followed
them into the fight. She is today the most lasting and prominent voice
against Native American mascots, “something of a godmother”
to the cause, as the New York Times has described her. Harjo wasn’t
present when Williams finally met with Native American leaders, but
those who were told her that Williams had been personally cordial and
receptive to their criticism.
But when Canadian media entrepreneur Jack Kent Cooke became the team’s majority owner in 1974, its name was still the Redskins.
Cooke refused to meet with Native leaders. So did Daniel Snyder, the
businessman who bought the team in 1999. According to Harjo, Williams
remains the last team owner to meet face-to-face with those who want the
name changed.
Over the two decades following the initial meeting, Harjo and other
activists sought ways to target the name, both legally and in the court
of public opinion. The activists considered various lawsuits challenging
the names on civil rights grounds, but feared they would only end in
crushing and expensive defeats.
They had little idea how to proceed. Then, in January 1992, the Redskins won the Super Bowl.
Super Bowl XXVI, played in Minneapolis, was the third, and last,
championship the franchise won under Cooke’s stewardship. Local Native
American groups held small protests against the name around the stadium.
But the game is more notable because it sparked a thought in the mind
of a Twin Cities-based patent lawyer named Steven Baird, who was working
on a law review article and contacted Harjo for an interview. Harjo
said Baird asked a simple question in the course of their talk: Why had
she and her fellow activists rejected the idea of challenging the team’s
federally-protected trademark? A 1946 law known as the Lanham Act,
she learned during their conversation, contains an obscure provision
that gives the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office the authority to deny
trademark protections when the terms used may be disparaging.
“I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’” Harjo said. “It
wasn’t that we rejected them. It was, you know, I’d never heard of
[that argument].”
The strategy was promising enough for Harjo, the Morningstar
Institute — which she founded to promote Native American culture and
help rid sports of Native stereotypes — and other groups like NCAI to
adopt. They went to work, recruiting Native Americans who found the name
offensive enough to join a lawsuit against it. In September 1992, seven
months after the Redskins won Super Bowl XXVI, Harjo and her
co-plaintiffs, seven of them in all, petitioned the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office’s Trial and Appeals Board, asking it to invalidate the
Redskins’ trademark.
The media took notice of their efforts. “People think that it is only
this past year that there has been any momentum on this, but that’s not
true,” Harjo said. “When we filed our lawsuit in 1992, there was a
tremendous number of press people. It was amazing how many people were
there. It was a big deal.”
Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser
called for a name change, and others did too, giving the movement a new
source of momentum. When the team responded months later, it dismissed
the suit, alleging that it was without merit and that the appeals board
should toss it aside.
In 1999, nearly seven years later, the trademark board agreed with the plaintiffs,
finding that
“Redskins” violated the Lanham Act and as such should lose
its trademark, pending appeal. That same year, a young, wealthy
businessman named Daniel Snyder bought the team, a move that instilled
hope in the activists again. The combination of a legal defeat and new
ownership, Harjo said, fostered the belief that the team might finally
accept the change. Among the factors that made the activists optimistic
was Snyder’s Judaism, which they thought might make him open to the
concerns of another minority group.
It wasn’t so. Snyder, like Cooke before him, refused to consider a
change. The franchise went about running out the clock on whatever
momentum had arisen against it. The team continued to defend the name as
a “tradition” and an “honor,” and throughout the fight it had another
major motivation for preserving the name: money. The Redskins are a
brand, one carefully crafted over 80 years and among the most
recognizable in sports. Though there are disputes over how much changing
the name would cost, the team argued as part of the trademark case that
it would cause “every imaginable loss you can think of.” If the team didn’t have to rebrand, why would it willingly except such an expensive undertaking?
Four years later, in 2003, a district court judge overturned
the trademark board’s decision, agreeing with the Redskins that the
plaintiffs had waited too long to file their complaint. The office
issued the trademark in 1967, 25 years before the seven plaintiffs filed
their case. They hadn’t been offended for years before, the judge
reasoned. Why were they offended now? The youngest plaintiff, an artist
named Mateo Ramero, was just a year old when the original trademark was
granted. To the court, it didn’t matter. For seven more years, the case
wound its way through appeals. The Supreme Court refused to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal in 2009. The case was dead. The name Harjo spent decades fighting was not.
Harjo wasn’t going away. In between appeals, she recruited new plaintiffs to bring the same case. The new group, led by Amanda Blackhorse,
was younger. Young enough, Harjo and the others hoped, to avoid what
they thought was a trivial technicality that had derailed their previous
victory.
If the trademark suit felt like a loss, it was actually one of few
the community had suffered in the three decades since it started
fighting the use of Native American imagery in sports. Students,
parents, and Native Americans alike successfully argued for name changes
in school districts and states across the country. A number of state
boards of education have conducted a system-wide reviews of every Native
American mascot in use in their schools. Miami University in Ohio,
named after the Miami tribe, changed its name from Redskins to Redhawks
in 1997. High schools across the country made similar changes, dumping
“Redskins” and other names in favor of new monikers. In 2005, the NCAA passed a bylaw
prohibiting schools from wearing any logo it deemed “hostile” or
“abusive” toward Native Americans on uniforms during postseason play.
Schools with such mascots wouldn’t be allowed to bring them to
postseason games. As a result, the University of Illinois, with much
consternation, dropped its iconic Chief Illiniwek mascot, who for years
performed faux-Native dances at basketball and football games. Other
schools followed.
In 1970, more than 3,000 high school, college, and professional
sports teams had Native American nicknames or mascots. Today, fewer than
1,000 remain.
‘We don’t need to comment on all of these ignorant requests’
For most of the four decades that the fight had raged, the Redskins
felt little need to respond to their critics. That’s changed
dramatically. But that doesn’t mean that the team is taking the
allegations about its name to heart. To the contrary, the Redskins’
position has hardened, both in Snyder’s public remarks, and in private
discussions about how to respond to inquiries about the controversy.
Emails obtained by ThinkProgress reveal that the team consulted with a
group of high-profile Republican advisers, some of whose involvement
with the team has not been previously reported, about how to handle this
reporter’s questions about the organization’s approach to the campaign
to change the team’s name.
Included in the email chain were Frank Luntz, the Republican
messaging consultant famous for phrases like “climate change” and “death
tax”; Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary under
George W. Bush from 2001 and 2003 and now runs a consulting firm called
Ari Fleischer Sports Communications; George Allen, the former Virginia
governor and U.S. senator who now runs the consulting firm George Allen
Strategies; and Bruce Allen, George Allen’s brother and the
organization’s general manager and executive vice president. Both Allens
are the son of former Redskins head coach George Allen.
The web sites
for neither Fleischer nor Luntz’s firms include client lists. The
Redskins’ vice president of communications, Tony Wyllie, confirmed that
while Luntz had conducted a focus group on behalf of the team, he has
not been paid for other work with the Redskins, and that Fleischer and
George Allen’s firm do not have contracts with the team. Fleischer,
Luntz, and George Allen had not responded to requests for confirmation
at press time.
But the fact that the men participated in the email chain at all is revealing. Last summer, when ThinkProgress first reported Luntz’s involvement
in the team’s efforts to focus group the name, the Redskins and Luntz
declined to confirm that Luntz or his firm, Luntz Global, were involved
in the project.
The email chain shows that after this reporter requested comment on a
number of issues related to the Redskins name and claims made by its
opponents, Wyllie forwarded the email to Luntz, Fleischer, and the
Allens. George Allen’s response is the first included in the chain, and
it suggests that the team reiterate its story about changing its name to
honor Lone Star Dietz, even though the team can’t prove its claims.
“The point was that the Redskins owner at the time obviously believed
that Lone Star Dietz was a Native American and named the team to honor
Native Americans and be motivated by their heritage,” Allen, whose 2006
Senate campaign was marked by allegations about his use of racially charged language,
wrote. “All the other aspects of the story about Lone Star’s adoption
and other intrigue and speculation is undoubtedly beyond our ability to
discern as to its veracity.”
“We don’t need to comment on all of these ignorant requests,” Bruce
Allen wrote in response. “Tell reporter to call the family of the
College Hall Of Fame Coach Dietz and ask them this insulting question.”
“I agree,” Fleischer responded, “not [sic] need to answer any more questions or waste any more time with this outfit.”
ThinkProgress’ inquiries included questions about the organization’s
response to the idea that the campaign against its name was now
“permanent” and to the fact that multiple Native American leaders and
their allies had suggested that a name change was “inevitable.” The
others dealt with the trademark lawsuit, the fact that civil rights
groups, political leaders, and media figures had criticized the name,
and whether the team was aware of the research questioning the veracity
of Dietz’s Native American heritage.
The team’s official statement in response to those questions is strikingly different from the email chain.
“As a recent national poll showed, the overwhelming majority of
Americans agree with our position on our name,” Wyllie wrote. “An
earlier poll by the Annenberg Institute showed that 90 percent of Native
Americans support our name and that’s the message we have heard from
hundreds of Native Americans who wrote to Dan Snyder in support of the
Redskins.”
The team’s statement included a quotation from a Native American
Redskins fan in support of the team’s name that the franchise has
circulated to many other media outlets as evidence of Native American
support for the franchise’s name.
“We respect those who don’t agree,” the team’s statement concluded,
“but we think the voices of many Native Americans who support the
Redskins should be listened to as well.”
The team’s robust efforts to control the message trace back to the
last spring. It was May 10 when USA Today sports reporter Erik Brady
asked Snyder whether the name would ever change. Initially, Snyder stuck
to the party line. Brady followed up, asking what would happen if the
team lost the new trademark suit. Snyder went off script. He delivered the now infamous quote, telling Brady to print his answer — “NEVER” — in all capital letters.
“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
Months later, D.C. lobbyist, lawyer, and media consultant Lanny
Davis, who Snyder had retained to help with communications strategy,
said he regretted the tone of Snyder’s comment.
“Since I left the White House, I’ve helped him on several matters, so
I know Dan Snyder. And when I saw the all caps comment, I thought that
had the wrong flavor to it,” Davis said during an appearance on a local
radio show. “I think saying ‘we care about people’s feelings, we’re
respectful when anyone is offended, but we have this eighty-year name
that we love. … We sing ‘Hail to the Redskins’ every Sunday at the
stadium, and we say we’re part of ‘Redskins Nation.’ That’s our
vocabulary. Those are terms of honor.’ And that’s what he should have
said, but he, I don’t think, is going to say ‘all caps. Never’ again.”
Though the context of Snyder’s quote was in keeping with prior
owners’ stances, the tone was different — and it mattered. Snyder’s
retrenched intransigence made the Redskins’ name less an immutable fact
of life and more an expression of his personal style. This was the same
combative approach to critics he had taken before, the one that led him to sue both fans who said that the Great Recession had left them financially unable to meet their season ticket obligations and a local newspaper
that criticized him. By stepping out from behind the organizational
justifications, and the organizational tone, for the first time, Snyder
made himself an easy target.
The Redskins have been trying to shift the conversation ever since.
In June, ThinkProgress reported that the communications firm owned by
Republican communications guru Frank Luntz held a focus group for
people in the Washington area about the Redskins name. In October,
Snyder defended the team’s name in a letter to fans
that followed the tone Davis had suggested. In November, the franchise
asked its fans via email to contact their member of the D.C. city
council and urge a vote against a resolution that would condemn the team’s name. Later that month, the team honored Navajo Code Talkers
at halftime of a Monday Night Football game, a gesture that may have
been genuine but came across as a desperate public relations ploy.
A New Version of an Old Fight
Snyder’s new tone in the spring was only part of the reason the team
needed to reset the terms of the fight. The other was much larger.
Snyder’s comment came at exactly the wrong time. A new movement to
reinsert the issue of racially charged sports team names into the public
consciousness had started in February and was beginning to coalesce
around Snyder. And a small but powerful tribe was newly interested in
joining the movement. Amid all of this, Snyder’s May comment acted as a
spark to the opposition, particularly because the media had begun to pay
attention again.
In February, a month after the Redskins lost in the playoffs, Harjo organized a symposium
at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. The event brought
together activists to talk about Native American mascots in the
Redskins’ backyard, and with little else to do at a slow time in the
sporting calendar, the media showed up. Newspaper reporters, local
television cameras, and web journalists all listened as Harjo and other
activists described their new trademark case, which the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office would hear in March, and explained why they found names
like “Redskins” troublesome. The event spawned a round of media
coverage that reintroduced sports fans to an issue that, for the most
part, had been out of the national news cycle for years. The timing was
perfect.
A month later, as a small group of members of Congress prepared
legislation that could strip the Redskins of their trademark, the school
board in Cooperstown, New York voted to drop the “Redskins” name
used by Cooperstown Central High School. The vote came at the request
of students who no longer saw the name as appropriate. The board agreed,
though it had a question: how was it going to afford new uniforms,
signs, and everything else it would have to refit with whatever new name
the school chose?
Oneida representative Ray Halbritter
CREDIT: AP
Enter one of the names now synonymous with the “Redskins”
controversy. The Oneida Indian Nation of New York heard about
Cooperstown and told the school board it would pay for the change. In
March, the school board unanimously approved the change. Oneida donated
$10,000 to pick up the tab. And there was more. Oneida didn’t plan to
stop in Cooperstown. There was another, much more notable team using the
same name in Washington, and Oneida leader Ray Halbritter wanted them
to change, too.
Oneida is a relatively small tribe in New York, where its people
lived before Europeans reached North America. Despite its size, Oneida
is financially secure, thanks to the Turning Stone Casino and a network
of gas stations it owns and operates in upstate New York. The tribe has
attracted criticism over tax deals it struck with the New York state
government, and Halbritter, the tribe’s public face, has attracted both
vigorous support and equally energetic criticism. In a profile of the
newest face taking on the Redskins, the Washington Post described Halbritter
as a man loved by supporters for “pull[ing] his people out of poverty” —
the casino helped bring jobs, hospitals, schools, and other basic needs
to Oneida’s people — and “defending their image.” But the Post found
that Halbritter’s adversaries, some of whom are members of the nation
and others who oppose the tax, casino, and land deals he struck with the
New York state government, criticize him “as an opportunist who has
amassed a fortune at the expense of others.”
Both his proponents and detractors, the Post wrote, acknowledge “that
he is a formidable adversary who has faced tough fights before,” and
that is the persona Halbritter brought to Oneida’s campaign against the
name of Washington’s football team.
Cooperstown is close to the Oneida tribe — in the Washington Post
profile, Halbritter recounted a childhood memory of seeing tribe members
burned alive in a trailer not far from the town — but the students’
movement against the name struck Halbritter and Oneida for another
reason. There are virtually no Native Americans in Cooperstown.
According to the Census Bureau, Otsego County, New York is nearly 95 percent white.
Native Americans make up just 0.2 percent of the county’s population.
Native Americans hadn’t forced this change. A group of white students
who didn’t want to exclude another group of Americans had.
“They were kids and they did something these billionaire team owners
and the nine-billion-dollar NFL won’t do. That was sort of a shining
light moment, a moment of clarity,” Halbritter said. “That was very
inspiring to us.”
NCAI and smaller Native American groups had fought this name for
years, both behind the scenes and in public papers and reports. Oneida
was familiar with the NFL — the New York tribe sponsors the Buffalo
Bills, while its Wisconsin tribe sponsors the Green Bay Packers — and
its members may have even been personally offended by the Redskins’
name. But the Oneida had never organized around it.
That was about to change. The symposium in Washington and the pending
trademark case had re-energized the people who had worked to change
these names for decades. The Cooperstown decision brought Oneida into
the fold. And Oneida brought with it two things the other groups never
seemed to have: an organizing strategy that would inject their cause
into the mainstream and the money to fund a major advocacy campaign that
no one could ignore. Oneida’s Change The Mascot campaign, launched in
September, marked a shift in the way Native American activists would
tell and sell their story to their opponents, the media, and the broader
public.
Other events helped set the stage. The 10 members of Congress who
introduced The Non-Disparagement of Native American Persons or Peoples
in Trademark Registration Act of 2013 in March wrote a letter to Snyder
and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in May. Goodell responded in June
with a letter largely based on the historical claims of “honor” and
“tradition” the activists had long opposed. In July, Eni Faleomavaega,
American Samoa’s delegate to Congress, blasted the name on the House
floor, calling the racial implications a “moral issue” that its defenders had ignored.
And right as football season prepared for kickoff, Oneida’s campaign
launch blew the issue through the roof. The arguments the Oneida made
weren’t very different from the ones that had been presented before.
Natives had used a broad, inclusive message. And they had argued that
the mascots create and reinforce stereotypes with long-term
consequences. They had even argued that this change was ultimately
inevitable.
Oneida helped refine these messages and to craft broad media
strategy that would take the arguments public in a way the movement
previously hadn’t. Over the next six months, Oneida and its immediate
allies — Harjo, NCAI, other Native American groups, and the original
members of Congress — orchestrated a media-driven push that looked and
acted like an insurgent political issue campaign. Oneida placed
strategic ad buys in cities across the country where the Redskins were
scheduled to play road games during the 2013 season. Taking the issue
outside of Washington would get it away from a public predisposed to
defend the team and into other communities, some of them, like Green Bay
and Minneapolis, that were already familiar with Native American
issues.
The ad buys weren’t solely aimed at the public, though. They were
also a way to generate free coverage — earned media — that would beget
more coverage. Oneida spent thousands of dollars on ads, but it knew
that it couldn’t go toe-to-toe financially with the Redskins, much less
the NFL and its $9 billion in revenues, its own dedicated TV network,
and major media influence. Oneida, like any campaign, needed organic
help. The ads would give sports and news writers a reason to talk about
the campaign and the issues it raised. They would give reporters a
reason to ask local political leaders and influential people about the
issue. The ads would generate attention that led to more attention,
stories that led to more stories.
In some instances, the campaign used a broad message of racial
tolerance that tied Native Americans’ fight to those of other racial
minorities, particularly when those fights were in the news. Oneida’s
first ad, targeted for Week One of the NFL season, likened the Redskins
name to the racial slur Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper
used against a black security guard at a concert during the offseason.
Cooper’s slur was in the news — the Eagles, his teammates and fellow
players, the media, and even commissioner Roger Goodell condemned his
actions.
Oneida praised the Goodell’s response, with Halbritter saying in the first ad
that Goodell “is absolutely right; this kind of bigotry has no place in
America.” Then it asked a question. If the NFL had to condemn Cooper’s
form of bigotry, why did it sanction another? Halbritter used Goodell’s
own words against him, and it worked: the ad generated coverage in
mainstream outlets, and it was both educational and effective.
In other instances, the comprehensive media strategy went on display. A protest march
accompanied the ad Oneida released in Minneapolis ahead of the
Redskins’ Week 10 tilt with the Vikings. Children and adults alike
carried signs throughout the streets around the Metrodome with messages
like, “I am not a mascot,” a provocative image for the web and the next
day’s paper. The ad and the march occurred in an area where Rep. Betty
McCollum (D) had spoken out against the name — she was one of the 10
members behind the legislation targeting the trademark and the letter to
Goodell and Snyder — and where tribal issues were well known. And the
efforts inspired reporters to pose questions to other local leaders. At a
press conference days before the game, a reporter asked Gov. Mark
Dayton (D) to weigh in. “I believe the name should be changed,” he said.
While its campaign focused on a deliberate media strategy, the
coalition never lost sight of its educational message. The franchise and
its defenders often argued that “Redskins” was merely a name and that
Native Americans had larger issues to worry about. Oneida and the other
groups countered with research NCAI had pushed for years showing that
these mascots perpetuated harmful stereotypes that had deep psychological and social effects
on a community that deals with higher than average rates of poverty,
under-education, alcoholism, depression, suicide, homelessness, and
mental health issues.
McCollum, the co-chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus,
argued that those stereotypes made it harder for her to do her job on
the Interior Committee, which deals with Native American issues.
The name “makes it much easier in the back of your mind to disregard
the health care, to disregard the housing,” McCollum says. “The same
person you put down is the same person I’m going to be working for to
make sure they have access to dialysis and diabetes prevention.”
Leaders like Robert Holden, NCAI’s deputy executive director, focused on the religious and cultural background to the issue.
“Look at the antics that were done in the stadium. (Fans) don fake
eagle feathers and put fake war paint on. These are things that are part
of our culture,” Holden told ThinkProgress. “Those eagle feathers,
they’re a sacred item, shown by the creator to us how to treat them and
how to respect this creature, what it does and how it sends our prayers
to the creator. Some of these feathers are given to warriors and to
people who do great things for our community. For these idiots to put
these on and jump around like idiots, that’s like making fun of religion
and our culture. It’s part of the education process, making them
understand that what they did, what they have done and what they will
continue to do is an affront to us.”
Halbritter framed his fight as one not over a name, but over Native Americans’ rights to define themselves.
“What is more important in life for anyone than their own belief in themselves?” Halbritter asked.
As the campaign progressed, it rapidly picked up allies. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan wrote in September that she’d no longer use the name. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized the name, and the Post’s editorial board opined against it. President Obama said in October that he would consider a name change
if he owned the team. NBC’s Bob Costas devoted a segment to the history
of the name during halftime of a Sunday Night Football broadcast and
concluded it was “a slur.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
said the team should change its name. The D.C. City Council unanimously
approved a resolution condemning continued use of “Redskins.” Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized it in December.
Along the way, the campaign’s broad appeal brought in other civil
rights and religious groups too. The NAACP and ACLU, which had long
opposed the name, were part of a coalition of 200 civil rights
organizations that condemned the name in December. Members of D.C.’s black clergy pledged to preach against it to their congregations. 60 D.C. area religious leaders from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities signed a letter to Goodell calling for a name change.
To many of the people involved in the campaign, change seemed
inevitable. The only question was whether Synder would embrace it
himself.
“It’s going to change, but he can be a part of the change,” McCollum
said of Snyder. “He has an opportunity to do that. He just needs to see
the handwriting on the wall and be the change that should be.”
An End in Sight?
By all indications, Snyder has no interest in being a part of that change.
His organization, as it has in the past, continues to lean on public opinion polls to defend the name, citing a recent survey
showing that 71 percent of Americans wanted to keep the name compared
to 18 percent who wanted to change it (a previous poll by the Associated
Press showed those numbers at 79 percent and 11 percent, respectively).
Oneida and other Native American groups counter by arguing that the name should not be subject to public opinion.
“I don’t think this is an issue that you just vote away,” Halbritter
said. “How many people have to be offended for things to change? This is
a defined offensive term.”
But their solution might not have to rely on public opinion.
A decision in the second trademark case is due any time. The
Trademark Trial and Appeals Board heard arguments in the case in March
2013; in the previous case, the board issued its ruling just less than a
year after it first heard the case. There are indications that the new
plaintiffs could win. They won at this stage last time, of course. And
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently rejected a trademark for a
product called “Redskins Hog Rinds” on grounds that it contained a derogatory term.
If Harjo is right and if the issues with the first case are fixed,
the plaintiffs may be able to hold on throughout the appeals process
too. If they do, the Redskins name will almost certainly have to change.
Losing the trademark would prevent Snyder and the NFL from protecting
the Redskins brand. Anyone who wanted to market Redskins-brand gear
could make their own and sell it. It would cost the team a substantial
sum of money, and those costs wouldn’t just hit Washington. The NFL
splits merchandising revenue evenly among its 32 teams. Lose the
trademark, and every team loses money. The NFL is content leaving the
decision up to Snyder now. It’s hard to imagine it sitting idly by if
his pride in the name starts costing the league not just public support,
but revenue.
But there is something tragic about that fact that financial
interests will, one way or the other, ultimately decide the fate of a
name that so many Native Americans have fought so long to change.
“There’s no financial solution to a moral problem,” Halbritter said.
“Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t give you the right to use a
racial slur.”
