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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explains. I'm Sean Ramas-Furham, and I'm standing outside RFK Memorial Stadium in northeast Washington, D.C. It looks kind of like a dying, rusty, convertible spaceship. Washington's professional football team hasn't played here since about 1996, but on Juneteenth, just about where I'm standing, there was this big production because a monument was removed. It was a tribute to a guy named George Preston Marshall. Marshall is best known for pioneering the halftime show, the fight song, the forward pass, and for being a raging bigot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He bought the Boston Braves football team in 1932. A year later, he changed the team's name to the Redskins. And in 1937, he moved his team to Washington, D.C. It was the NFL's last team to integrate in 1962. 15 years after other teams had begun drafting black players, and he acquiesced only after the federal government threatened to kick him out of its federal district.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just before Marshall's statue was removed a few weeks ago, protesters covered it in red paint. On the sides of it, they scrawled a message. Change the name. Bit of a Hail Mary, but it appears to have worked. Some major news out of the NFL. Washington's NFL team retiring its controversial nickname. Here's the statement from the team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dan Snyder and Coach Rivera are working closely to develop a new name and a design approach that will enhance the standing of our proud, tradition-rich franchise and inspire our sponsors, fans, and community for the next 100 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I knew it might be coming, but it's such a shock when it actually happens. Nothing was more immovable in the mascot discussion than the Washington franchise. Paul Chott-Smith is a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian here in the district, and he's going to help us understand the complexities of the fight to change the name of Washington's professional football team.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: You know, over the past few decades, there's been a lot of change with universities and public schools that have changed names. So the mascot movement has been amazingly effective. But the professional sports leagues have always been the hardest, the most immovable. And of those, the ones that had the most investment in keeping the name as it is was Washington, the football team.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: Redskins owner Dan Snyder has held firm under some protest that he will not change the nickname of his team. Snyder, who bought the franchise in 1999, claiming it honors Native American heritage, even telling USA Today in 2013, quote, We'll never change the name. It's that simple. Never. You can use caps.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: That's when there was a lot of attention paid to it. There were more and more people who were recognizing it as something defamatory. Many say this team has been behind the times. They were the last NFL team to integrate. They have held on to this controversial name. name widely seen as racist for 87 years.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: For a while, many sports writers around the country wouldn't use the name. This was like 2014. And then it sort of went away as being a hot button issue But then you know the end game with this issue was other billionaires and other interests that really pushed it FedEx sent a private letter to the Washington Redskins saying it will remove all its stadium branding and signage unless the football team changes its name.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: FedEx signed a 27-year, $205 million naming rights deal with the Redskins back in 1999 to assume the banner of their stadium. Adweek magazine reporting that investment firms and shareholders worth $620 billion have requested that FedEx, as well as Nike and Pepsi, all terminate their ties with the franchise, unless owner Daniel Snyder makes the change.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: None of that would have happened without this activism that went on for years and years beforehand. Let's make our voices loud and heard and make sure people know exactly who we are. And the Redskins name is not a name of the mascot. It is a racist derogatory term that I personally take offense to and so to my children.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: Tell me a bit about the history of this name. Do you know why it was chosen to begin with? Yeah, you know, we did a lot of research at the museum into this. And, you know, these are names chosen mostly by, you know, really rich white guys. and in the 1930s or 40s, there wasn't a great deal of thought or what might happen or what did Native people think.
--:-- Paul Chott-Smith: That changed starting in, you know, as far back as the 50s and 60s in which people started to voice opposition to this. But it's really only been in the last 20, 30 years that it's begun to register as a significant issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What did the team say back? The name of our team is the name of our team and it represents honor, it represents pride, it represents respect. And in no way is this derogatory or racist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Washington, the hardest thing is that it actually is a dictionary-defined slur. Did it ever cost the team financially in the past 20 or 30 years of controversy? I think mainly what cost them was just not having won a playoff game since 2005.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that's ultimately the major thing. And people, you know, very few fans choose a team based on the name. You know, fans, you know, you don't say, boy, I would be for the Jaguars, but I just really don't like Jaguars. You know, it's just not how it works.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so this is something D.C. has. The fans never chose the name. But then once you love something, if people from the outside attack it, you know, you're defensive. An argument that Dan Snyder has made from time to time is there are Native American fans of the Washington Redskins who approve of the name.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think that argument was overstated or overemployed to defend the name? I think there always have been, and there are today, Native people, some of whom who aren't offended, but also some who really support their name. I've met some of them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My question would be, how often on any big policy issue do we ask, well, how do the whites feel about it? And do all the whites feel the same way about this issue? And, you know, the reality is, like any other community, there are not many things all of us agree on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this is not like some tiny elite of coastal Native people from universities. This is a widespread view that this is something that's hurtful, that's a relic that needs to change. What did it finally take to change this team's name? Well, I've been thinking about that, and actually it's kind of depressing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because you're going to catalog, first of all, is these decades and decades of activists who were yelled at at stadiums and attacked and didn't give up. So they deserve most of the credit. But in terms of why it happens now and what it took, it's very dismaying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It took a national uprising led by African-Americans in all 50 states. I think the pandemic played a role in which some things got more attention because people are at home. and then it took something like $600 billion of corporate and investment money to say, well, time's up. We don't want to support this anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then things changed on a dime. So it took George Floyd's death and protests like this country's never seen for FedEx to feel justified saying, you know, the name's got to go. It feels like this actually didn't have anything to do with respect for Native Americans or their culture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As far as the endgame, yeah. Indians have less political power in the United States and economic power so that these huge advertisers that even before this past year certainly would say they progressive on racial questions can ignore it. They did it once it became untenable, primarily because of, you know, what happened in this country since Memorial Day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it really, truly had nothing to do with actual Native people. I want to talk to you more about how Native American culture is appropriated in the United States after we take a quick break. But before we do that, as a Washington sports fan, you got any preferences for a new name for the football team?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My two favorites are the Ocelots or the Replacements. The Replacements. There's a Keanu Reeves football movie with the same name, right? Keanu could be the mascot. Everybody likes him.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Paul, this isn't just Washington's football team or the Cleveland and Atlanta baseball teams. You curated this great exhibit at the Museum of the American Indian called Americans that shows people all the different and complicated ways this country glorifies and co-ops images of Native Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'll just let people know that they can find a version of it online at americanindian.si.edu slash americans. It's a very weird, subversive phenomenon that most folks don't really think about. But Indian imagery has been in the United States popular culture since before the country started for a really, really long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So my view is it actually is something profound. It's something where Americans actually want to remember and acknowledge the fact that the whole country exists because of dispossession of Native people and to try to come to terms with it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: there's something really spooky and interesting about it. Give us some examples for people who have no idea, who maybe see it but don't even realize they're seeing it. When you come into our exhibit, when it opens, once the cell phone pandemic is finally over, you know, you see, for example, a Tomahawk missile.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Tomahawk is considered the world's most advanced cruise missile. You see an Indian motorcycle. You see a lot of sports memorabilia, and we chose in almost all cases to use children's clothing, onesies, things like that, to talk about how usually you become a fan when you're a kid.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've got to admit, it's a catchy little tune. As the season went along, the Atlanta Braves' tomahawk chops spread like wildfire through the stands. You see Elvis in headdress and you see tons of advertising and magazine covers share How free That all I ever heard How free You see an episode of The Addams Family from the 60s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Almost every long-running TV show, situation comedy, sooner or later has an Indian episode. Why? It just makes sense, you know. It's American. What's the chief doing, John? Make Peter Pan, he big chief. you now will fly and giggle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So for most visitors they come in there and they see things that trigger memories in their own life of watching that TV show or going to a school that had an Indian name and when you put it all together it becomes very powerful to see it as opposed to something that's simply trivial and is there and so what if we were the Braves in high school it doesn't really mean anything and medium motorcycles are cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then when you look at it all together, you realize it's kind of an obsession for Americans to generate this imagery over time. And there's a lot of negative about it, but some of it is actually positive. For me, it shows an openness to trying to think about what the history of the country is and how central Native Americans are in that history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it feel like sort of a one-sided conversation, ultimately, that financial institutions, corporate entities, Kanye West on some of his merchandise that I saw in that exhibit. You know, they want to sort of recognize this rich, noble Native American culture, but maybe not spend the time and think about the experience of Native Americans in this country right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's the conversation that people should be having apart from, yeah, let's change the name of the Washington football team? Yeah, I think that's exactly the right question. And for us, it was about opening up a space where people can see this whole thing is much bigger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if the phenomenon of these images, you know, it's actually brought up Kanye West, there's a Lynyrd Skynyrd poster that has almost the same motif. It's an Indian skull feathers. And so what do Kanye West and Lynyrd Skynyrd have in common? I guess you could say they're politics right now, but I won't say that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But things that are radically diverse have nothing in common about the country. motor oil you know butter right yes land o'lakes they're just there so the conversation needs to be okay is it right or wrong to have the butter maiden on land o'lakes okay that's okay i'm not that's a fine conversation they got rid of it but it's not like that solves anything the real issue is why is all this great honoring only happening to us in these particular ways.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Are there other changes you would love to see happen in this country as they relate to Native American appropriation and culture? Well, I guess I've been encouraged, not something I feel that often, but the kind of news coverage of something like the Supreme Court decision in Oklahoma or when the president went to Tulsa and in the Black Hills in South Dakota.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's just been a really epic shift in the last 10 years about attention to Native America in a way that there wasn't before. So that's really ultimately what we want is for Native people to be seen as part of contemporary American life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're certainly drawing a line in the sand as far as a museum. These sports teams should be rename, no Indian anything, you know, and we'll take positions on those things generally. But what we really want is an American public that feels like this history is part of them because this history is so central to the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's a very long-term project. And in terms of the reckoning that people are talking about, it's been really inspiring to see so many Native people as far as part of Black Lives Matter. It's been really inspiring to see the leadership, the tribal governments took in handling the pandemic and making really wise decisions about controlling, you know, the outbreaks on their community and that that's getting attention.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it is, a lot of good things are actually happening, even in this dark time. I'm glad you feel inspired. And if the Washington football team decides to choose the replacements, maybe you can accompany me to my first ever NFL game. Consider it a date. Excellent! We'll get to see Keanu in person at the football game. That'll be so cool.
