Every year, the Kansas City Indian Center puts up billboards in the fall that call on the Kansas City Chiefs football team to change their name and stop the so-called “tomahawk chop.”
Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the Center, said that the billboards could be seen a little earlier and more widely than usual this year because of the World Cup.
“It was a little more than we normally do just because of the opportunity based on the number of people that we were expecting to be able to see them,” Crouser told KCUR’s Up To Date.
For decades, activists have demanded the Chiefs and other teams that use Native American imagery intervene against stereotypical practices like the “chop” — when fans raise and lower their arms in a chopping motion while chanting along to fake words.
Crouser said people have come up to her to ask what exactly is being said in the chant, because they think it means something. Although the chant is fake, she says the damage is real.
“Our songs do have meaning and hundreds of languages, but that (chant) doesn't. It's a stereotypical Hollywood kind of chant and it freezes us into kind of this primitive image,” Crouser said.
The Indian Center started as a grassroots organization in the 1970s and serves Indigenous Americans in the Kansas City metro by providing youth programs, a food pantry, counseling and cultural events.
The Center is also part of the Not In Our Honor Coalition, which began in 2005 when students at the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University organized at a Chiefs game to protest Native American imagery in sports.
Crouser said she thinks that as plans move forward on a new Chiefs stadium in Kansas, which the team says will be open by the 2031 NFL season, now is a prime opportunity for to re-examine its name and practices.
- Gaylene Crouser, Kansas City Indian Center executive director and citizen of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
