Kansas City brings racist imagery and antics to the Super Bowl – again

As Kansas City heads to the Super Bowl, its logo and its signature “Arrowhead chop” will be broadcast all over the world. But TV audiences aren’t likely to see the group of Indigenous activists protesting outside the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

In recent years, dozens of professional and school teams have eliminated offensive mascots mocking Native American cultures, including Washington’s football team and Cleveland’s baseball team. In 2021, more than 60 K-12 schools gave up their Native American mascots, according to the National Congress of American Indians’ mascot-tracking database. (Some 2,000 schools still use them.)

Kansas City’s football culture has remained mostly unchanged, despite the nationwide momentum to move past mascots based in Native American imagery. Name? Same. The pregame ceremony banging a “Native American” drum? Same. Fans doing the tomahawk chop? Still happens. And their logo? An arrowhead.

Even the origin of the “chiefs” name is rooted in cultural appropriation. The team is named after a white Kansas City mayor who founded a Boy Scouts group based on Native American cultures that still exists today. The so-called “Tribe of Mic-O-Say” has been criticized for mocking sacred Indigenous dances and wearing Native American-themed regalia.

The team’s most charitable move came in 2020 after their Super Bowl win, when they announced a ban on headdresses and “American Indian-themed face paint” in their — sigh — Arrowhead Stadium, as well as a pledge to review the chop and drum ceremony. A year later, the team retired its mascot Warpaint, a horse that cheerleaders would ride across the field at home games whenever they scored. (In the ‘60s, the rider wore a headdress). The effort was a half concession, a result of growing pressure from Indigenous protestors.

These changes followed decades of offensive behavior mocking Indigenous traditions in the stadium and beyond. In 2019, owner-CEO Clark Hunt and his son had been pictured grinning in mock headdresses in an Instagram post that was subsequently deleted. Hunt had long faced protestors outside the stadium, and received multiple petitions and letters pleading for his franchise to stop cultural appropriation. In 2020, his team sported the NFL-approved slogan “End Racism” on their helmets, inches from the arrowhead logo.

“The hypocrisy of that is amazing to me,” said Amanda Blackhorse, the leader of No More Native Mascots, best known for taking the Washington football team, now called The Commanders, to court. “Like, Native people aren’t even included in the topic of racism. Because we’re not even supposed to be alive.”

“People need to understand that the Washington team and the Kansas City Chiefs are both in the same category,” said Blackhorse, whose Arizona-based group organized the Super Bowl LVII protest. She remembers feeling sick once she learned that the team was heading to her home state. Though some have argued that “chiefs” is less offensive than the slur that was used in Washington, Blackhorse maintains that any use of Native American imagery in sports dehumanizes entire nations of people, reducing them to racist caricatures and archaic stereotypes.

“They try to say, well, it’s an honor, and Native people were brave, and this and that,” said Blackhorse. “But then that just also goes to show that people want to see Native people how they want to see them, they don’t want to see us how we represent ourselves today. That’s mascoting an entire group of people and our identity, our spirituality, our way of life, our history, our ancestors.”

Still, many non-Native people overlook this racist practice that is proven to cause harm.

“It is a form of very violent entitlement. I really don’t know what they’re thinking, that they believe they can appropriate and it is correct or not harmless,” said Mabel Negrete, executive director of Indigenous People’s Day Philly.

The American Psychological Association insisted these mascots to be retired from schools, universities and sports teams nearly 20 years ago. Multiple studies prove these images are detrimental to Native Americans’ mental health, particularly for young people who can develop low self-esteem from negative portrayals throughout their lifetimes.

As of 2020, there were 64 schools with Native American mascots and names in Pennsylvania. Organizers throughout the state, including the Pennsylvania Youth Congress, have demanded change, but there has been little progress. In Bucks County, Neshaminy High School has spent nearly half a million dollars fighting to keep a slur even after Washington changed its name.

» READ MORE: In Pennsylvania public schools, an ‘epidemic’ of Native American mascots and nicknames

“I understand that they think they’re honoring the idea of Indians, but they’re honoring an idea that came out of Hollywood a long time ago, and doesn’t have anything to do with modern life,” says Terry Shepard, an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation who lives in Bryn Mawr. “It always breaks my heart whenever I hear Indians declare, ‘We’re still here,’ because everybody thinks of us as the disappearing Indians.”

In the ‘80s, Shepard was involved in discussions to retire the University of Illinois mascot Chief Illiniwek, typically portrayed by a white student in a headdress who danced during halftime shows.

Shepard says the Kansas City team still inspires fans to be disrespectful and “behave in a way that certainly Indian kids look at that and say, ‘You know what, they’re making fun of us.’” He also points out that the “Arrowhead Chop” chant is set to the tune of “Pow Wow the Indian Boy,” a song featured in a racist cartoon from the 1950s.

Despite the Arrowhead Stadium bans, fans are allowed in with face paint and headdresses, says Rhonda LeValdo, a cofounder of Kansas City’s Not In Our Honor coalition, which has organized regular protests at home games for years. (LeValdo will be joining Blackhorse in Arizona for her second Super Bowl to protest Kansas City.) The Kansas City Chiefs did not respond to requests for comment on this observation.

LeValdo and her fellow protestors say they have faced hostility from fans encountering their “Stop the Chop” and “Change the Name” signs. Fans have screamed slurs and thrown glass bottles at them. LeValdo says that they’re “trying to educate people on what the real history of this country is, and they don’t want to hear it.” Throughout history, white Americans forcibly assimilated Indigenous people in conversion camp-like boarding schools and forbade the use of Indigenous languages or traditional practices. “So why is it OK for Kansas City to be Indian [when] our people were punished for being Native?” she asks.

Many activists planning to protest say the time will come for Kansas City to officially give up the name and the chop. “They obviously know what they’re doing is wrong because they’re taking steps to curb that [behavior],” LeValdo said.

With Kansas City’s recent success and increasing profits — the organization is valued at $3.7 billion —LeValdo says the owners have paid no attention to their requests for comment. But that doesn’t dissuade her. “They need to understand that our people matter, our voices matter, our identity matters. And we need to be seen as human beings.”