The documentary film-maker Ben West hails from Washington DC, and thus grew up rooting for its football team. He wore the gear, watched the games, cheered on an organization named for a slur against Native Americans. Even as a kid, West, who is Cheyenne, felt the dissonance between the team he rooted for and the supposedly “honorific” idea it represented – that Native Americans were a symbol of war and violence, a costume to be donned in the name of gladiatorial sport. “Is that me on that helmet?” he recalled thinking. “Is that me on that jersey? And does that name have anything to do with me?”
West credits a community of Indigenous people for helping him navigate such confusion, including his father, W Richard West Jr, founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the activist Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), whose decades-long fight to change the Washington football team mascot is partially chronicled in West’s film Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. That’s no small feat – as the film, released on DVD and streaming this week in time for another Super Bowl featuring another team with a Native American logo, explains in swift and at times galling detail, the use of Native American mascots for sports teams is rooted in self-serving fictions, distorts a whitewashed history and does real psychological damage to Native American youth. “It’s a public health issue for Native people,” said West, citing the research the Dr Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip), among others, who have chronicled the quantifiable negative impact of Native American mascots and stereotypes on Native teens’ self-esteem.
West and co-director Aviva Kempner were already working on the film in 2020, when pressure from the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests on the Washington team’s major sponsors finally forced majority owner Daniel Snyder to cave to decades of calls to remove the mascot. The team rebranded as the Washington Commanders in 2022. (The film makes a point that Native American mascots are interconnected with the oppression of other people; George Preston Marshall, the original owner of the Washington football team scapegoating Native Americans in a majority Black city, was the last owner to integrate his team, and insisted on playing “Dixie” before every game.) “We see Washington as a great test case that the corporations who own these teams can move on, and can still have a very strong fan base,” said Kempner, as was the decision by the Cleveland baseball team to change to the Guardians and discontinue its obviously minstrel-y “Chief Wahoo”.
But the the problem is far from solved. “We had so many people say to us, ‘ok, so this is over then. Washington has changed its name, so no problem,’” said West. “And that is so not the case.” There are still three major sports franchises in the US with Native American mascots: the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team; the Atlanta Braves, with its particularly offensive and contrived “tomahawk chop” (“it reminds me of a Nazi rally,” said Kempner, who is Jewish, “and it’s just got to end”); and the Kansas City Chiefs, whose “Arrowhead” stadium and symbol have been widely publicized in recent months owing to a certain player dating a certain massive pop star. Perhaps more significant in terms of psychological impact is the more than 2,000 secondary schools with names imitating these franchises, where mock headdresses, Native American faces, war chants and face paint are tradition.
A good portion of Imagining the Indian goes to dismantling the many, many myths, enshrined in public school and national history, undergirding the false belief that such mascots could be honorific: that Native Americans are an extinct people, that the continent was a blank slate, that Indigenous people were either bloodlust killers or noble savages. “We had to dedicate 25 minutes at the beginning of this movie just to get people to a baseline understanding of what actually happened on this continent,” said West. “There was a genocide. I like to call it an attempted genocide, but through no fault of anybody’s, we are not taught accurate history of what happened to Native people on this continent.”
The film offers a succinct, if wide-ranging, view of how the “Indian,” in popular imagination, was created through myth, stereotype and erasure. How such myths built Hollywood, through tropes of “cowboys and Indians” – mute, terrifying, almost always parodied by white actors – in massively popular Westerns. How racist conceptions of Native people undergirded the popular character of Tonto, in the Lone Ranger, or extremely racially characterized cartoons (a particularly offensive example from Bugs Bunny delights in counting killed Native Americans with tally marks). “Everywhere you look in American culture, you find non-Native people imagining Indians,” says the historian Philip Deloria in the film. “These imaginings are white fantasies, and they bear almost no resemblance to the real lives of Native people either historically or in the present.”
So, too, do the supposed “honorific” histories of professional sports franchises. The Kansas City team, as the film points out, was named not in honor of a specific tribe, but for a nickname for former mayor Harold Roe Bartle, who in the 1920s formed a fake Native American tribe, complete with mock rituals, costumes and honorifics, as part of his work with the Boy Scouts. The film’s second half follows Indigenous activists working to expose these histories and change customs on the franchise and local level, including Amanda Blackhorse (Navajo), Rhonda LeValdo (Acoma Pueblo), Gaylene Crouser (Standing Rock Sioux) and Harjo, awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 2014. “I don’t think even in the environment that we were in in 2020, [that] the issue of Native mascots would have been visible enough if not for those decades of work that people have put in to recognizing that this is an issue,” said West.
Such work – which, as Blackhorse and Harjo explain, faced stiff and angry opposition; legal action to change the Washington team name claimed the better part of their lives – has finally broken through, on some fronts. Washington and Cleveland did change their mascots. So, too, did a handful of secondary schools, spurred in part by a 2015 California law banning the name “Redskins”. In 2020, the Kansas City team banned Native American costumes – headdresses and face paint – at its home games and announced it was “considering” ending the tomahawk chop (it hasn’t, nor has Atlanta). That ban is “not at all effective”, West noted. “Part of the problem here is that you can’t half-step things. Banning war paint and headdresses doesn’t keep people from engaging in the behaviors that they have become accustomed to and attribute to some sort of tradition.”
On Sunday, ahead of the Super Bowl, another group of Native American activists and allies are expected to protest the continued use of Kansas City’s nickname, as they did last year to little national fanfare. The fight, West acknowledged, will likely be lifelong, owing to the slow, difficult process of re-education and the intransigence of fans to look at their beloved team clearly. “Somehow this fandom causes people to react in such an, honestly, violent way to people who are not confronting them personally,” said West on the typical response to protesters calling for change.
“The film is not just a film. It’s a call to action,” he added. “We try never to come at people with ‘we’re right, you’re wrong, smack you on the wrist with a ruler if you don’t change your mind.’ But let’s talk about this, let’s have a conversation.”
Imagining the Indian is available to rent digitally in the US
