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- By Suzan Shown Harjo
Guest Opinion. Donald Trump is out of his closet. He is openly campaigning to revive the vile R-word by pressuring professional sports team owners and the District of Columbia government to take a ginormous step back into bigotry. This comes just as the Commanders are playing like champions, without carrying that burden of shameful history.
Remember, the team’s last Super Bowl appearance was in 1992 — back when they were the R*dsk*ns, with owners awash in their claimed privilege to call us hateful names, mock our cultures and rewrite history. That was 33 years ago! I remember it well because it was Sept. 10, 1992 that we petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to cancel the team’s trademark and fight the federal sanctioning of the Washington football club disparaging us and holding us up to public contempt and ridicule. I don’t claim that we did anything to make the owners fall out with each other or the team claw their way to last year’s winning season — although you have to say it’s a heck of a coincidence — but it’s a good example of how long it takes to shake really bad karma.
For those who are new to this story, back in the early ‘90s Donald Trump was still crying to Congress to stop tribal gaming operations, claiming that a tribal casino in Connecticut caused his casino in Atlantic City to go bankrupt, and saying that the Native peoples with casinos “don’t look Indian….I look more Indian than they do.”
First, only his businesses (yes, more than one) went bust, while other casinos on the boardwalk were doing well. Second, he was throwing around racist terms and trying to judge us on the basis of appearance, without understanding that our civil, human and treaty rights derive from our political and policy status as Native peoples (in terms of nationhood and citizenship). He thought then — and may still think now — that, because he took a racist position against us, that our status is race-based, rather than politically based. He, like many others who sling racial slurs, jump to the conclusion that we object to the color red — although it would be invidious discrimination to reference only Native peoples in sports, especially when there are no Whiteskins, Blackskins, Brownskins or Yellowskins in American sports and never have been.
It's the heinous practice of skinning Native people for fun, trophy-collecting and the business of bounties for scalps, genitalia and other body parts as proof of death of a tribal man, woman or child. That's the sorry chapter of history we do not want to return to—the era where white nationalists try to keep us with these "Indian" names, images, symbols, mascots and logos, and behaviors like the tomahawk or arrowhead chop, the dehumanizing wahoo-ish caricatures and the horseback “Osceola” mascot throwing a flaming spear at an "Indian" head.
Is that the era to which Trump’s supremacy movement wants to return? Make America Racist Again? Make America Bigoted Again?
Whatever you call it, the movement has spawned an idiot child, the Native American Guardian's Association (NAGA), which has a few actual Native persons, though it’s often a white man or a handful of “Natives” of questionable citizenship speak for them. NAGA tried to sue the Commanders’ owners to reinstate the R-word name, using the history laid out in our lawsuits to justify their hilarious claim that — with all the bad things actual Native ancestors endured — the team’s owners should not take away their precious R*dsk*ns name. Their case was quickly dismissed.
This is the White House adding insult to injuries already proposed and inflicted, using the historic whiteman’s tactic of “starving out the Indians.” Today’s version is slashing the federal funding for programs and services that are guaranteed perpetually for the vast land we ceded and in which we retain ancestral rights—our lands that now make up the United States. None of the white nationalists are proposing that they return our lands, from which they continue to benefit.
On his Social Truth platform, Trump also strikes a glancing blow at the owners of the Cleveland professional baseball team, urging them and the Commanders’ owners to make these changes “IMMEDIATELY.”
Commanders, keep up the good work, keep on the path of righteousness and don’t let any shiny objects distract you! Guardians, you were right to dump “Chief Wahoo” and scrap the “Indians” name and egregious behaviors.
Trump is right that the country has changed. Race supremacists are in charge, but he doesn't realize there are fewer bigots now—they just have the loudest voices and the biggest bully pulpit in decades.
Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne-Muscogee (Creek) activist, has dedicated her life to advocating for Native American rights. In 1990, she launched the Just Good Sports program to help eliminate the use of Native-themed mascots in sports. In recognition of her lifelong commitment to Native advocacy, Harjo received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
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