This article was originally published in Pollen Nation Magazine and is republished here as part of a partnership with Street Roots. Pollen Nation is a Native-led and -edited magazine dedicated to providing North American readers with an in-depth understanding of issues affecting Indigenous people.
I don’t feel I — or Native people — accomplished this. I credit Black Lives Matter for achieving this. Many of us laid the groundwork and fought for the eradication of offensive Native mascots over the years. Still, the Washington NFL and Cleveland MLB franchises would not be making announcements now that they were reconsidering their names without the movement led by Black leadership.
I suppose I should also credit the pandemic, time when freed of commutes and confined to our homes. With the occupant of the White House in denial over it, many Americans, mainly white America, have time to reflect on our country’s true nature.
In early July, Adweek reported, 87 investment firms and shareholders representing $620 billion in assets, sent letters asking Nike, FedEx and PepsiCo to terminate their business relationships with the Washington NFL franchise unless the team agreed to change its name. They cited Black Lives Matter for a change of urgency in addressing this issue.
“Many of us have raised this issue with Nike for years to little avail,” the investors wrote. “But in light of the Black Lives Matter movement that has focused the world’s attention on centuries of systemic racism, we are witnessing a fresh outpouring of opposition to the team name. Therefore, it is time for Nike to meet the magnitude of this moment, to make their opposition to the racist team name clear, and to take tangible and meaningful steps to exert pressure on the team to cease using it.”
Money talks, and this was followed closely by an announcement by FedEx, which pays $7.6 million per year to have its name on the football stadium in Landover, Md.: “We have communicated to the team in Washington our request that they change the team name.”
Although an organization I co-founded, Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, led the Nike World Headquarters protests in Beaverton, in 2014, I want folks to remember the late Susan White, Oneida from Wisconsin, who pushed the strategy of investor activism. She worked tirelessly to get Nike and FedEx to do the right thing in her role as head of the stock investments of her tribe’s Oneida Trust. I attended meetings with Trillium Investments at her behest (my aunt married into that tribe and introduced us) to discuss a Nike shareholder resolution. We lost her too soon to cancer.
And although the activism laid the groundwork, recent research was done by Dr. Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip) and other researchers revealed changing minds was even more of an uphill battle that we realized at the time. In a focus group study funded by the Kellogg Foundation, only 30% of whites, both college-age and older, were sympathetic to the issue. Compare that to Standing Rock, where it was above 70%.
White focus group members understood Standing Rock and the fight for land and water, but mascotry was a more difficult concept to grasp. This was partly due to another finding of the focus group study, which found white people seeing other white people in Redface raised whites’ self-esteem and strengthened white in-group identification. Fryberg and her fellow researchers also found white respondents rated Native people at only 60% human. That is, not fully human. So, it was this perception, promoted by mascots, that stacked the cards against us. Logically putting forth arguments or simply asking whites to do the right thing had limited efficacy.
In 2014, while leading Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, faced with this wall of incomprehension, I hit upon the strategy of making the antics of the billionaire owner, Dan Snyder, the news. Thereby making #NotYourMascot a referendum on him, by putting his venality on display in news coverage. In this, I was assisted by a network of Native mothers across the country, including Frances Danger, who joined me on Pollen Nation’s July 3 podcast on Native mascots. In this way, we were able to garner headlines and make some headway in this fight.
Notably, we could win on that, making a billionaire look ridiculous and poison the Native mascot’s brand by proximity, but not on the racism of mascotting itself. Many fans’ inability to see the racism and inequality baked into the power dynamics of mascotting Indigenous people is a demonstration on how the house that white supremacy built makes dialogue between racial/caste groups in this country difficult, if not impossible. Those who live in the bubble of white privilege cannot see that their house is only a built structure and not the whole world. The windows afforded by that house necessarily frame their only views of the outside world.
What was possible in this pre-pandemic world was for Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry to embarrass Snyder about every two weeks by connecting the press with a network of mostly Native mothers monitoring Snyder’s activities in their communities and online. In the podcast, Frances and I discuss how, through her online sleuthing, we got Snyder’s new vice president of social media he had hired to fight us fired — just days after he took the position. Danger found racist comments about Native Americans on the deleted blog of the new hire. We did this repeatedly until Snyder stopped responding to us and started listening to his PR advisors.
But without Black Lives Matter’s activism and changing the playing field, all this work done by anti-Native mascotry activists would still be a story of some victories (thousands of high schools and college teams dropping Native mascots) and stubborn professional teams and still skeptical fans refusing to make a change. So, I say we owe this victory to the struggle of the Black community. We always do. They are, in a sense, our leaders in this country for social justice. Always have been. Every success we’ve had has been made possible by their courage and sacrifice.
It goes both ways; the example of tribal fish-ins in the 1950s to fight for treaty rights in the Pacific Northwest did not go unnoticed by Black civil rights leaders. We do inspire each other. This is not a denial of that history our two communities share.
And so it was, that on the past Fourth of July, on this country’s birthday, Lakota activists were in jail for protesting the illegal occupation of our sacred Black Hills guaranteed to us under treaty by the U.S. And yes, I feel we might make headway in the sacred Black Hills’ return we emerged from in our creation stories, our Eden. And yet, it’s also due to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter that more Americans finally grasp that the monument to four white men, Mount Rushmore, is defacing a sacred mountain, the Six Grandfathers, where my ancestors once prayed.
Columbus statues are finally falling all over the country. That’s not a small thing. And, yes, we owe it to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Editor’s note: The Washington NFL team announced July 13 that it would change its name. This article was originally published in Pollen Nation Magazine on July 8.