Debates on the Kansas City Chiefs’ name have long centered around opinions on whether the moniker and associated fanfare honors Native people. Yet, experiment-focused research reveals that Native-themed mascots lower self-esteem and contribute to Native youth suicide.
Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and Lily Gladstone have both now spoken on the issue, following protests on the Kansas City Chiefs’ name in Las Vegas, Nev., at Super Bowl LVIII. Specifically, Gladstone and Standing Bear addressed appropriative fanfare of the Native-themed team in the form of the “tomahawk chop.”
“The song has got to go,” said Standing Bear, speaking of the chant associated with the tomahawk chop, which Lily Gladstone characterized in an interview on Variety magazine’s Awards Circuit podcast as a link to denigrating Hollywood depictions of Native people. “It’s a stark reminder of really what Hollywood has done to us, because that tomahawk goes directly to the sound of ‘here come the Indians’ in these Westerns where we were not playing ourselves, or if we were, we were like backdrop actors pretty much there to get shot. But just this ahh… this claiming of that sound—and this saying it’s in ‘honor of’?”
Gladstone also spoke about the problematic erasure of California Native history in the name of the San Francisco 49ers, during the podcast episode ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lily-gladstone-killers-of-the-flower-moon-and/id1536666553?i=1000645499664 ), saying, “I mean, honestly, you could hold both teams accountable … because 49ers is based in the Gold Rush in California which was an incredibly brutal time for California Indians, so there’s that. And then, the Chiefs, you know, there’s a lot of ways that you could wear the name ‘Chief.’ There’s a lot of different things. It’s not the name, as much, that bothers me. It’s hearing that damn tomahawk chop. Just every time,” said the actress.
When it comes to the representations of the Kansas City Chiefs, there’s a lot of pseudo-Native iconography, despite rebrands of past years which removed a caricatured Indian from the logo. From the deranged, googly-eyed K.C. Wolf mascot to the supersized fake drum, and repetitive, gif-like tomahawk chopping action of the Kansas City Chiefs, the sound that Gladstone decried is oft-played by the stadium’s band, with fans singing “the chant” overtop in an anthem or “a chant” that many Native people might not even recognize as related to any Native culture.
Such depictions of Native culture created and circulated by the dominant American culture reflect the commonly-held ideas of Native identity back to Native children, showing them how Native American culture is perceived, and what they must as a result fit themselves into, in order to project an “authentic Native American identity” that can be validated by society. American popular culture’s commodifying images of Natives come from both sports and media, but both are maligned reflections of stereotyped Native identity which contribute to suicide crises for young people in Indian Country; when Gladstone spoke about the truths of what these Native youth are going through, the Internet bit into her analysis in a defensive manner.
Rather than citing a study Gladstone referenced, US Weekly instead wrote that Gladstone “alleged” the study, which found that 40 percent of people do not believe Native Americans exist ( https://rnt.firstnations.org/#top ). Other critics insisted that Gladstone must be ignorant since they found the tomahawk chop hurtful, and did not know (https://www.outkick.com/sports/lily-gladstone-tomahawk-chop-chiefs-fans-criticism ) that Native people historically fought with “axes”; in fact, they critiqued the sound associated with the motion, rather than the ability of the physical fan ritual action to mimic axe-throwing, itself.
The tomahawk chop motion, officially rebranded as “the chop” in 2021, but still referred to broadly as the tomahawk chop, recalls the Nazi salute—so much so that the Kansas City Chiefs’ leadership officially changed the motion from an “open-handed” to a “closed-fisted” motion. Yet, most fans have yet to receive the memo that their fists must be closed.
Along with the wearing of redface and fake headdresses, the open-handed chop is another Kansas City Chiefs fan practice that has been banned, but continues on the same anyway. “Just because Kansas City says it wasn’t okay to do it, that doesn’t stop them from doing it. They’re certainly wearing them in the parking lot and to the Super Bowl. It’s not just that people are hesitant to change. They are holding fast and really rallying to keep this racism,” said Gaylene Crouser, the director of the Kansas City Indian Center, who was among the protestors who traveled to Super Bowl LVIII to address the Chiefs’ name, alongside other organizations.
“The [fans] want to say it’s cancel culture,” said Crouser, summarizing the opinions of detractors, who are worried that all images of Native people will be banned, and are criticizing those working to end the usage of NFL teams’ Native-themed branding. “No. It’s not [cancel culture],” said Crouser. “It’s the psychological scientific community who is problematizing this.”
After decades of scientific research on the impacts of Native-themed mascots, the American Psychological Association called for the retirement of Native mascots, concluding that “the use of American Indian mascots, symbols, images, and personalities undermines the ability of American Indian Nations to portray accurate and respectful images of their culture, spirituality, and traditions.”
Regardless of representation arguments, Crouser is sick and tired of hearing people debate opinions on Native-themed sports team names while ignoring data-based research, which baldly shows that such mascots harm youth. “Whether people are offended or not, the bottom line is Native-themed mascots harm people, and nobody’s paying any attention to that. It’s been completely disregarded,” she said.
A little more than a week after the Las Vegas protests, Crouser received a letter of support from the National Council on Urban Indian Health, which bolstered efforts to hold the Kansas City Chiefs “accountable,” as Gladstone said on the Variety Awards Circuit podcast, for appropriating and commodifying Native American culture, and ultimately negatively impacting Native youth.
After the APA’s call for the immediate retirement of all Native-themed mascots and teams, the Kansas City Chiefs didn’t respond. One may wonder why they would respond now, even as Lily Gladstone and Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear have added comment? It was more than fifteen years after the APA’s call to retire Native mascots, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, that the Kansas City Chiefs made efforts to de-claw problematic branding around the franchise.
Rather than spend money on a complete rebrand, the team created a few, unenforced bans, redid their logo, and put together a working group (https://www.chiefs.com/americanindianheritage/workinggroup ) whose purpose is to “[serve] as a collective liaison with the Native community and as an advisor to the Kansas City Chiefs to promote an awareness and understanding of Native cultures and tribes in the region.” Yet appropriative activity has continued on the part of fans, en masse.
Since then, research on the impact of Native-themed mascots has continued.
It’s not a debate, it’s research
Despite the widely varying swaths in opinion of whether or not Native-themed sports teams honor Native people or not, peer-reviewed empirical research provides the point of consideration that Native mascots negatively impact Native self-esteem in youth, (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2020.1772221 ), even including Native-themed mascots and teams which are broadly regarded as being “honoring.”
Such logos, teams and branding are additionally found to negatively impact all people who encounter the stereotypical branding, according to the American Psychological Association, in that the Native-themed team imagery and associations “undermine educational experiences of all communities—especially those who have had little or no contact with Indigenous peoples” https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/indian-mascots .
The granular reason that Native mascots are harmful to youth, according to the research, is because they “remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves” ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=hcLUpRQAAAAJ&citation_for_view=hcLUpRQAAAAJ:2osOgNQ5qMEC ), as seasoned psychological scholar Stephanie A. Fryberg found, along with fellow researchers in a 2008 study. A large-scale, empirical study in 2021, conducted by Fryberg and colleagues, revealed that Native people with stronger behavioral engagement with their tribes and cultures more greatly opposed the mascots ( https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-96348-001 ).
During Super Bowl LVIII, protestors to Native-themed mascots specifically called for the end of the “tomahawk chop chant,” the “big drum,” and “any and all Native American appropriation that occurs within the [Kansas City Chiefs] franchise,” according to a press release announcing a conference at the Nuwu Art Gallery + Community Center on Feb. 10. The protesting groups included Not In Our Honor, the Kansas City Indian Center, the Az to Rally Against Native Mascots, and Nuwu Art, and Crouser, who said they were motivated by the disparities in health that Native people experience, including the Native youth suicide crisis.
According to the Center for American Progress, Native youth experience suicide at a rate 2.5 times higher than the national average, and in a 2014 report concluded that American Indian and Alaskan Native suicide “is a crisis” (link to https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/StegmanAIANmascots-reportv2.pdf
). As Gladstone said, “Our kids have the highest suicide rate of any demographic in the country … When you don’t see yourself represented—or you do and it’s either fetishized or distorted or otherwise mocking … it shapes your sense of self and what you’re capable of doing in the world.”
In addition to the negative impact that Native-themed mascots have on youth’s self-esteem, there are also questions about how caricature-based mascots like the Kansas City Chiefs may be reinforcing systemic racism. In 2019, the Kansas City Council unanimously approved a resolution declaring racism as a public health crisis, but curiously, no local, state or national representatives in Kansas City have been able to understand the link between caricature-based fanfare and oppression of Native people and other minority groups.
As Missouri representation ignores the issue, leaders like President Barack Obama, organizations such as the American Psychological Association, human rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Congress of American Indians and sports regulatory commissions like the National Collegiate Athletic Association have all condemned Native-themed logos and mascots.
So, why do the Kansas City Chiefs persist?
‘Can’t Stop The Chop’
In recent years, watered-down versions of Native American history taught in schools have prompted the likes of Native writers such as Tommy Orange to write novels attempting to narrate the whole of the Indian Wars—from massacres and treaty violations, to missionary efforts embattling Native cultures, and then to the Federal Indian Boarding School Movement and the Dawes Act’s division of Native land to put ownership into the hands of settlers. Despite cultural arts efforts, a generally poor awareness of the federal policies which forced tribes toward removal, relocation, isolation, and in some cases, termination, remains the norm.
Scholarly work has shed light on the possible settler drive to both erase history and stereotypically malign Native people with misrepresentations as part of an overall effort to legitimize ongoing settler claims to land. As described in Philip J. Deloria’s book “Playing Indian” (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264845/playing-indian/ ), the phenomenon of dressing up as Native (while actively maintaining a paltry awareness of true Native history) is an American tradition aimed at erasure, and further, rooted in Pretendianism.
Pretendianism is the phenomenon of non-Native people who are falsely claiming Native identities, and the Kansas City NFL team’s name—the “Chiefs”—actually emerges from one historical instance of Pretendianism. When H. Roe Bartle, a former Kansas City mayor, founded the “tribe” of Mic-O-Say in 1925 ( https://micosay.org/ ), the Kansas City Chiefs were named “in honor” of Bartle, the “chief” of the fake tribe. While Kansas City Chiefs fans might reject such identifications with Pretendianism, the widespread appeal of appropriation points to the strong settler drive to pretend at being Indian, which Gladstone summarized on Variety’s podcast when she spoke about Robert De Niro’s character William Hale.
Of Hale and appropriation, Gladstone said, “You see so little representation up to this point in time and then you just see this fervent fandom around claiming whatever that strange identity is? And it just makes me think of William Hale in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’ It’s like, it wasn’t enough for him to take Osage people’s wealth, to be living in Osage lands. He also wanted to appoint himself King of the Osage Hills. He learned the language, he collected the art, it’s like, he almost completely absorbed the identity. He took that, too. … People don’t bring us into a modern age. If we don’t look and behave the way … we are in those Westerns, then we must not actually be Native.”
The Kansas City Chiefs have held on to every shred of branding they can, and claim to be promoting Native education; but it’s difficult to counteract the effects of the massive ad revenue spent on promoting the image and brand of the Chiefs, without even more money being spent on debunking the same stereotypes that the team branding actively promotes.
Rather than educating the public, the effect of the team’s continued Native-theme suffuses the American popular consciousness with essentialist Native stereotypes. American public schools are following suit, as if enabled by the Kansas City Chiefs’ misrepresentations of Native culture. As of 2023, a total of 1,901 Native-themed mascots were reported at schools monitored by the National Congress of American Indians’ National School Mascot Tracking Database.
The APA went so far as to conclude that “the continued use of American Indian mascots, symbols, images and personalities which present stereotypical images of American Indian communities may be a violation of the civil rights of American Indian people,” (https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/indian-mascots ) but Missouri representatives have not taken actions, not even those whose careers have centered around Civil Rights actions.
One such Missouri representative, Emmanuel Cleaver, who has kept Civil Rights issues at the center of his career, instead validated the Kansas City Chiefs’ name. Learning about this crushed Crouser. “Here he really came into his political career based on being a Civil Rights leader, so the fact that he could overlook this for Natives after all of his work in Civil Rights, it was like, ‘Wow, really?’” \(https://apnews.com/article/super-bowl-native-american-mascot-chiefs-41397b038e03c01865d42a3f77766c98 ) she said.
Additional Missouri leaders who did not respond for comment, and have not pressured the Kansas City Chiefs to change their name include: Senator Barbara Washington, House District Representative Yolanda Young, Governor Mike Parson, Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe, Secretary of State John Ashcroft, Attorney General Andrew Bailey and U.S. Senators Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley.
Native Perspectives on a Name Change
The NFL has claimed that many Native people support Native-themed mascots, but according to research, the majority of Native people actually do not support American Indian mascots and branding. Additionally, a 2020 study found that Native people who are more highly engaged in their Native communities more strongly opposed mascots ( https://record.umich.edu/articles/study-opposition-high-to-native-american-mascots-names/ ).
Along with Gladstone and the principal chief of the Osage Nation, the National Indian Education Association, the largest national Indian organization of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian educators, administrators, parents, and students in the United States said the use of Native mascots is “harmful to Native children,” and “a testament to the continued practice of the outright commodification of Native peoples and their unique cultural identities [which] … devalues Native people and culture and can destroy the self-esteem of Native students.” ( https://www.niea.org/niea-resolutions-2013/support-for-the-elminitation-of-race-based-native-logos-mascots-and-names ).
The National Indian Education Association has called for the elimination of race-based Native logos, mascots and names from franchises across the United States and for “national sports franchises to cease their use of such race-based Native logos, mascots and names in the effort to remove these stereotypes and raise the self-esteem of Native students.”
Another organization, the Kansas Association for Native American Education (KANAE) cited the extensive literature existing on this topic, and noted that there are “hundreds of professional organizations working across the larger American Indian community, including NIEA and NCAI, [who] overwhelmingly favor eliminating American Indian mascots, branding, and imagery” ( https://coe.ksu.edu/collaborations/partnerships/kanae/documents/KANAE-Statement-American-Indian-Mascots-Branding.pdf ).
It is only a matter of time before the Kansas City Chiefs, as Gladstone said, realize “it’s time to retire.” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lily-gladstone-killers-of-the-flower-moon-and/id1536666553?i=1000645499664
