They are coming for the chop too

[BigRedChief]

The Kansas City Chiefs’ racist “Arrowhead Chop” has flown under the radar. Not anymore. The Kansas City Chiefs’ chant isn’t a tribute to people like me. It’s racist.

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Spoiler!

A self-described lifelong Kansas City Chiefs fan once asked me the meaning of the words that are sung as the crowd performs the “Arrowhead Chop” at Chiefs games, the beloved fan chant made up of a series of literal “oh oh oh”s.

“They don’t mean anything,” I told him, disgusted and annoyed.

“Really, nothing at all?”

My face got hot and I could feel my heart beating fast in my chest. “Nothing,” I repeated.

This is just one example of the uncomfortable situations I deal with as an Acoma Pueblo woman living in the Kansas City area.

This year, my city’s NFL football team, the Chiefs, will be playing San Francisco in the Super Bowl. It has been a 50-year wait for the team, and from the looks of it, they are the favorite to win. Unfortunately, that also means the Arrowhead Chop will be broadcast on millions of screens across the nation, along with fans in headdresses and all that comes with having a team that has a Native American mascot. For years, the national conversation around offensive team mascots that stereotype Native American culture has focused on the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, while Kansas City’s Chiefs flew under the radar.

Not anymore.

As an educator at Haskell Indian Nations University — the only four-year university for federally-recognized Native tribes — I have done many presentations on the misconceptions about Native American people and the terrible stereotypes that are reinforced by sport mascots like the Chiefs. And every single time it is traumatic to go over the massacres, racism, and genocide carried out against the people indigenous to this country. It is also getting exhausting.

This is the unsanitized truth about American history you probably weren’t taught in school alongside stories of the “noble savage” or fables about peaceful dinners between Natives and Pilgrims on Thanksgiving: European settlers mercilessly raided and killed our people. My own people, the Acoma, Haaku, were attacked by Spanish conquistadors seeking retaliation for an earlier fight that resulted in the deaths of 12 conquistadors. As punishment, they took the right foot of men over the age of 25. They stole many of our women and sold them off as slaves in Mexico. This is not the only massacre rarely taught in schools. There were many California tribes that were decimated due to the gold rush of the mid-1800s. The San Francisco football team, the 49ers, is a direct reference to this period of history.

Today, erasure and oppression of Natives only continues. The movement of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, #MMIW, has been going on for years, but the media mostly ignored it until the killing of pregnant Savanna Grey Wind and the taking of her baby in North Dakota in 2017. Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported murder as the third leading cause of death for American Indian Women and Alaskan Natives between the ages of 10-24. In 2016, according to an Urban Indian Health Institute report, there were 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaskan Native women. Of that total, only 116 were logged into the Department of Justice database.

Then there is the fact that Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Where is that story being told?

The historical traumas Native Americans face have manifested through loss of our people and the loss of our land. And while we have been told by dominant society to “get over it” and to assimilate, all we Native people want to do is remember and honor those who gave their lives so we could be here. We don’t need to be reminded that general American society is so disinterested in, and disrespectful of, our culture that they choose to perform nonsense chants, while costumed in our clothes, to minimize our entire race into a goofy caricature for sport.

Too many people don’t care about Native Americans unless they can use our likeness for their companies, cars, or costumes. Many people don’t see the Native headdress unless they are at KC or Washington football games, Halloween parties, or music festivals.

So many of the images used in the Kansas City games — the arrowhead, which is specifically Native American; the horse called “War Paint” they prance around the field before the game; the beating drums; and that tomahawk chop — are used in disrespectful and often bastardized contexts. For example, Native people respect the drum, and that drum is never used in the presence of alcohol. War Paint is used to mark our horses and warriors to protect them. Using our cultural ways to “pump up” your team is disrespectful and racist.

I met a man a couple of months ago in Lawrence, Kansas, who was a member of the Boy Scouts of America’s Tribe of Mic-o-Say, whose members dress up as Native Americans and do powwow dances. The Mic-o-Say are based in Missouri and eastern Kansas and state their mission is “to make ethical choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Scout Law.” The group was founded by H. Roe Bartle, a white man whose Scout moniker “Chief Lone Bear” gave the Kansas City football team its name.

The man I spoke to was also a military veteran. He refused to believe that his dressing up as a Native American is cultural appropriation, instead saying the clothing and dances “honor” Native Americans by continuing their traditions.

I asked him how he feels about people who pretend to be veterans when they are not. That is what the Native headdress equates to: Chiefs went to battle and earned it, much like the medals military veterans earn. But he refused to see the correlation.

It saddens me that the city I work in continues to celebrate the racist “tomahawk chop.” I have heard it at concerts, in commercials for grocery stores. I love Kansas City, especially its diversity. I also worry that this tradition will find another audience of young people who perpetuate it without realizing what it is doing to erase the Native Americans living here.

As part of my classes teaching mass communication, we talk not just about the true history of Native Americans and the impact of stereotypes, but also how we can fix this. Educating students about Native people needs to be a priority in school systems nationwide; educators need to emphasize the real, unsanitized history of how Indigenous people were treated and the problems associated with demeaning stereotypes. Native people need to be included in larger conversations as actual people, not just as entertainment during sports games.

I only hope people will understand this is not about being “politically correct.” It is about understanding and respecting the horrible history our ancestors were subjected to and the policies enacted by the US government to erase our Native identity.

Maybe it is time to start a new tradition of treating all people, including Native Americans, as human beings.

This essay is adapted from commentary in the The Kansas City Star and on KansasCity.com.

Rhonda LeValdo teaches media communications at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas.

https://www.vox.com/first-person/202...fs-kansas-city


KC Star:
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/sp...244153762.html


Kansas City Magazine:
https://www.kansascitymag.com/is-the...s-who-you-ask/

Twitter has its own hashtag
https://mobile.twitter.com/chopisracist

NY Times: Stop the Chop
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/s...hawk-chop.html

[displacedinMN]

Originally Posted by loochy

If we don't go to the Super Bowl's what? You left out part of your sentence.

Maybe it should say this would not be an issue if we did not make Multiple super bowls.

I'm sitting waiting in my truck contributing to global warming. Not a big fan of Typing on my phone

[displacedinMN]

Originally Posted by IowaHawkeyeChief

The comments are interesting... Also, the fact that the "chant" conjures up Native Americans as Savages and the Boyscout take is ridiculous...

I dropped one on there. I am sure you can figure out which one is mine. As of now it's still there. Not surprised if it gets deleted

[Otter]

I despise woke culture

[FloridaMan88]

Originally Posted by displacedinMN

Chiefs under pressure to ditch the tomahawk chop celebration. http://strib.mn/3oN5T2M

Are they going after Florida State next... i.e. the originators of the Tomahawk Chop at sporting events?

Of course they’d have to deal with the inconvenient reality that the Seminole Tribe of Florida... i.e. actual injuns... have supported/approved of FSU using the chop for 40+ years.

[HonestChieffan]

telling 78000 people, many tanked, they cant do the chop.

ill watch this

[Hammock Parties]

the star keeps rolling this shit out like anyone cares

sweetie, the only ones who care are your SJW moron friends in the big cities you are trying to so hard to be like....maybe one day you can join their libshit cool kids club if you virtue signal hard enough in your midwestern fishwrap

[neech]

Does anyone on here actually subscribe to The Star?

[vonBobo]

Originally Posted by scho63

So the will have the "Chop Police" out in force to arrest and toss anyone out doing this?

No! It is just to help identify the jackasses.

[dlphg9]

yes such pressure from Florida Indigenous Rights and Environmental Equality. A group so influential with it's 880 Facebook likes. They're constantly posting shit to their FB page about the Chiefs and they consistently get 5 or 5 likes. They have a petition to make the Chiefs change their names that's signed by a whopping 3000 people.

The media keeps exaggerating the size of these groups to make it seem like people care.

[dlphg9]

https://kansasreflector.com/2021/01/...fl-teams-name/

We’re not going to debate whether Kansas City’s NFL team should change its name. It should.

What we’re going to do, as the team and its fans celebrate their second trip to the Super Bowl in as many years, is spend a couple of minutes listening to the people who’ve been peacefully protesting before games near an entrance to Arrowhead Stadium since long before the team was a contender for anything.

Sometimes it’s just a handful of people, sometimes it’s 50. Rhonda LeValdo, who now teaches journalism at Haskell Indian Nations University, organized the first such demonstration when she was a student at the University of Kansas. It was October 2005.

“I got some KU students and some Haskell students to protest a game when Kansas City was playing Washington. I thought that would be a big hit-two-nails-on-the-head kind of thing,” she remembers. “Man, there were a lot of people who came in from across the country for that protest.”

They branded their action Not In Our Honor, a rejoinder to the eyerolling argument that making cartoons based on a group of people pays homage to them.

It’s been more than 15 years now.

“We’ve been out there every single time if Kansas City was playing Washington, at least once a year, to make sure our voices were heard,” LeValdo says. “This year we’ve been out there for every game.”

As a mass communications teacher, LeValdo knows how to properly exercise First Amendment rights. The group protests on a sidewalk — a public space near a bus stop — where she knows they’re allowed.

“At Haskell, I teach about freedom of speech and the incitement standard,” she says. “So seeing what happened (at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6) was a whole teaching thing for me to use. I teach my students: You don’t want to be inciting something because you’re going to get arrested. We’re peaceful protesters.”

The same can’t always be said for football fans.

“It’s name calling, they do the tomahawk chop in front of us, flip us off, it’s all sorts of things,” LeValdo says. “Before the election they were saying ‘Trump,’ which was kind of weird. Last time we were out there, a guy pulled up in his truck right in front of us, stopped and yelled at us to F off, go home and F ourselves.”

It’s scarier when fans have clearly been drinking. LeValdo appreciates the fact that there’s always a group of helpful and friendly police nearby.

In one way, their efforts don’t seem to have made a difference — the whole world could see that last year. And even as Washington announced it would finally change its racist team name, the Kansas City situation grew absurd as the NFL tried to promote social justice this season in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“At their first game, in the endzone they had (painted) ‘End Racism,’ right above the Chiefs name, which is just dumb,” LeValdo says. “They’ve had baby steps with banning the headdresses and the makeup, but they still have the tomahawk chop, the drum they beat, the spirit leader who bangs the drum, the horse Warpaint. It’s all still bad.”

Yes, the team has been working with a group of American Indians to try to make its “traditions” less offensive. But, c’mon.

“One of the things I’ve always said is you can’t just be a little bit racist,” LeValdo says. “You are racist or you’re not. This is racist.”

Away from the front office, their effort seems to be working.

“Recently some veterans groups started coming out to stand with us,” LeValdo says. “And we’ve had a lot of people reach out to us.”

She’s heard from someone in Hays, where there’s a petition to change the high school mascot. An 11-year-old girl is pushing Shawnee Mission North High School to change its mascot. But as Haskell journalists reported in December, “nearly 1 out of every 10 schools in the Kansas State High School Activities Association (KSHSAA) appropriates Native imagery or culture.”

The team name and mascot situation isn’t technically about life or death, like Black Lives Matter or the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous people that some Kansas Legislators are trying to address. But it’s a related example of how white people are so weirdly unwilling to respect the experiences of people of color.

“I just wish people would understand from our perspective why this is so hurtful to us, to have that constant chop and the drum and everything out there,” LeValdo says. “I hear it on TV, on the radio, on billboards, walking down the street, people are saying ‘Chiefs!’ ”

There’s no escape from it.

“It’s totally nuts,” she says, “that people are so committed to their name and things they do at their games that they’re not willing to give it up.”

I’ll put it to my fellow white people another way. If someone tells you you’re hurting them and asks you to stop, why do you want to keep hurting them?

...
...

That last paragraph is comedic gold. $1000 says this broad managed to get less than 100 people to show up to her "protest". She says several veteran groups come join them, but never mentions the names of these groups or how many people show up.

She just wishes why people could understand why this is so hurtful, but can't even give a reason why she's hurt.

[mr. tegu]

Drums are hurtful you animal. That’s all you need to know.

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by displacedinMN

Chiefs under pressure to ditch the tomahawk chop celebration. http://strib.mn/3oN5T2M

Man, I'd be fine with that. It's dull and unoriginal.

[njchiefs]

It’s pretty simple. If something used by a minority of the majority is truly offensive to the majority of a minority, then get rid of it. As much as I would hate to see it go, we would survive it. So the questions remain: Is it offensive to the majority of the minority, and how do you enforce its abolition if so?

[OrtonsPiercedTaint]

The chop is from a time of futility. Things come & go

[stevieray]

So very important.

Get lives people, stop trying to live other's for them.