PHOENIX — As followers of the Kansas City Chiefs flock to Arizona this week for the Super Bowl, they’re bringing with them not simply their jerseys and caps, but in addition the baggage of a controversial celebration: the tomahawk chop.
The chop — through which followers prolong their arms in a chopping movement whereas chanting a made-up battle tune — has for many years been a staple of Kansas City video games. And for a lot of that point, it has been a supply of satisfaction for a lot of followers.
But for practically so long as the chop has been related to the group, it has additionally been criticized by some Native Americans who say it’s an embarrassing caricature of their cultures and is lengthy overdue for retirement. And now, with the N.F.L.’s championship sport happening in a state with considered one of the largest Native American populations, the concern is effervescent up anew, with a protest deliberate for Super Bowl Sunday.
“They may not be intentionally making fun of our culture, but that’s what we take it as,” mentioned Rhonda LeValdo, an teacher at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., who mentioned she has been protesting the group’s chop for practically twenty years.
LeValdo, a citizen of the Acoma Pueblo, plans to journey to attend the rally exterior the stadium in Glendale, Ariz., on Sunday, the place protesters will name for an finish to the chop. They can even search an finish to different options of Chiefs video games, together with a big drum used to hype up the crowd and the group’s identify itself.
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Still, the chop and the pretend battle cries are all however certain to be a function of the group’s matchup towards the Philadelphia Eagles, simply as they had been throughout Kansas City’s Super Bowl appearances in 2020 and 2021.
Amid a reckoning over racism in 2020, the group mentioned it will prohibit followers from getting into the stadium whereas sporting headdresses or face paint that appropriated Native American cultures. The group additionally mentioned it was “engaged in a thorough review process” of the group’s chopping custom, in addition to the drum.
Still, the chop has endured, at the same time as groups together with the N.F.L.’s Washington Commanders and the M.L.B.’s Cleveland Guardians have moved away from names, logos and different traditions that many thought-about offensive.
The Chiefs, whose representatives didn’t reply to requests for remark, usually are not alone in retaining the chop. Teams in different leagues and sports activities, corresponding to the Atlanta Braves and Florida State Seminoles, proceed the custom, too, and the view that it’s offensive is much from common amongst Native Americans. In some circumstances, Native Americans have argued that an excessive amount of consideration has been educated on sports activities chants and mascots slightly than on extra urgent points dealing with tribes.
Richard Sneed, the principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians inside North Carolina, mentioned in 2021 that he was extra centered on lowering poverty and crime than he was on how followers cheered at Braves video games.
“I’m not offended by somebody waving their arm at a sports game,” Sneed advised The Associated Press. He declined to remark additional when contacted this week.
Amanda Blackhorse, who lives in Phoenix and is an organizer of Sunday’s protest, mentioned she views the chop as worse than a caricature, however slightly a reminder of colonizers’ mass killing of Native American individuals.
“For Native people, we’re sitting there thinking, ‘How is this even happening?’” mentioned Blackhorse, who had lengthy pushed the Washington Commanders to drop their earlier identify.
The Chiefs have lately established partnerships with Native American teams, and have had representatives bless the drum used to invigorate the crowd at Arrowhead Stadium. The Native American individuals concerned in these efforts have praised them as a approach to assist educate followers about their tradition, in entrance of a captive viewers of practically 80,000.
Blackhorse, on the different hand, sees them as an try to make followers really feel higher and to keep away from making extra drastic adjustments to the group’s identification.
“There’s no way to appropriately appropriate a culture,” she mentioned.
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