By KEN BELSON
Published: October 9, 2013 Comment
WASHINGTON — Suzan Shown Harjo still becomes tense when she recalls the onlyWashington Redskins home game she attended, nearly 40 years ago.
After she moved to Washington, she and her husband received free tickets. Fans sitting nearby, apparently amused that American Indians were in their midst, pawed their hair and poked them, “not in an unfriendly way, but in a scary way,” Ms. Harjo said.
“We didn’t know what was next,” she said.
Ms. Harjo and her husband left the game, but they never left Washington. The incident fueled her existing opposition to the team’s name and lent new urgency for her to get the team to change it. Since the 1960s, Ms. Harjo has been at the center of efforts to persuade schools, colleges and professional sports teams to drop American Indian names and mascots that some consider derogatory. The fight has escalated in recent days as groups have intensified lobbying efforts and organized protests, even prompting President Obama to weigh in on the issue.
The debate tends to settle on one central question: how many people must be offended by a team’s name for a change to be warranted? The Redskins, of the National Football League, cite polling in which most respondents said they were not offended by the name, while those lobbying the team to drop its name dispute the accuracy of that data and say that no matter, the word is widely regarded as derogatory.
More than two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 teams with American Indian mascots have dropped them, many voluntarily and without incident. Along the way, Ms. Harjo, the director of the Morning Star Institute, a group that promotes Native American causes, became something of a godmother to the cause of eliminating disparaging mascots.
“She has led this fight early,” said Ray Halbritter, a representative of the Oneida Indian Nation, which has paid for advertisements calling on the Redskins to abandon their name. “We stand on her shoulders.”
But Ms. Harjo, who prefers the term Native American, considers her work unfinished because professional teams, most notably the Redskins, have been vocal about keeping their name. In May, Daniel Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, echoed his predecessors when he vowed never to change the name.
The Redskins, playing in the nation’s capital and the country’s wealthiest league, have remained steadfast as many other teams have changed their nicknames, dating to the 1960s, when the owner at the time, George Preston Marshall, opposed desegregation. Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the team in the 1970s, met with American Indians to discuss the team’s name, but little followed.
“There are so many milestones in this issue,” Ms. Harjo, 68, said Monday at an event held by ChangetheMascot.org, a group urging the Redskins to change their name. “It is king of the mountain because it’s associated with the nation’s capital, so what happens here affects the rest of the country.”
Ms. Harjo, Mr. Halbritter, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota and others who attended the event said that they would continue to call on Mr. Snyder and the N.F.L. to change the team’s name. Ms. McCollum, via social media and letters, has received the brunt of the backlash from some fans who think the Redskins should not change their name. (“I’m offended by the name Vikings as I have family from Denmark,” one person wrote on Ms. McCollum’s Facebook page, imploring her to “concentrate on a budget and don’t worry about the Washington Redskins.”)
Last week, days before the league’s 32 owners were to meet in Washington, the debate was inflamed when President Obama said that he would consider changing the name if he owned the team. Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has also called on broadcasters to avoid using the team’s nickname.
In what amounts to a break in the stalemate, Adolpho Birch, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for labor policy and government affairs, sent a letter last Friday to Peter Carmen, the chief operating officer of Oneida Indian Nation. Mr. Birch suggested that they meet before their previously scheduled meeting on Nov. 22.
“We respect that people have differing views,” said Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the N.F.L. “It is important that we listen to all perspectives.”
Ms. Harjo, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, spent her first 11 years on a farm in an Oklahoma reservation. Her family’s home had no indoor plumbing or electricity, and her idea of wealth was to have ice cubes in her drink, she said. Ms. Harjo’s great-grandfather was Chief Bull Bear, who battled the government over land in the 1800s. As a teenager, she lived with her family in Naples, Italy, where her father was stationed in the United States Army.
After returning to the United States, Ms. Harjo moved to New York to work in radio and theater production. There, she met Frank Ray Harjo and had two children. They worked to promote religious freedom and civil rights and co-produced “Seeing Red,” a biweekly radio program devoted to Native American news and analysis on WBAI-FM. Ms. Harjo also produced hundreds of plays and other programs and helped an improvisational theatrical group.
In 1974, she left for Washington to work as a legislative liaison for two law firms involved in American Indian rights. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed her a Congressional liaison for Indian Affairs, which allowed her to help draft legislation to protect Indian lands and tribal government tax status. She also worked for the National Congress of American Indians.
Ms. Harjo has spoken regularly on the issue of team names and held protests, including one at the Super Bowl in 1992, in Minneapolis, when the Redskins played the Buffalo Bills. At the time, Stephen R. Baird, a young lawyer who had clerked in federal court in Washington, was preparing a law review article on an obscure part of the Lanham Act that forbids trademarks that disparage people.
“There was really no precedent,” said Mr. Baird, who now works for Winthrop & Weinstine in Minneapolis. “So I asked, Why hasn’t anyone challenged them on that basis?”
Mr. Baird approached Ms. Harjo, and in September 1992 a legal battle began when Harjo et al. v. Pro Football Inc., the corporate name of the Redskins, was filed with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. After the three-judge panel agreed to remove the protections, the case was appealed, and a federal judge overturned the decision, saying that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file their case, something that Ms. Harjo and others call a technicality. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
“Those of us who were plaintiffs have passed on, and many of us have become grandfathers and grandmothers, and our hair has turned grayer, and still we haven’t been heard on our merits,” said Manley A. Begay Jr., a co-plaintiff who teaches at the University of Arizona. Referring to a once common term for blacks, he added, “After Sambo was removed years and years ago, we still have to deal with these mascots.”
To get around the court’s argument that too much time had passed, Ms. Harjo organized another case with younger American Indian plaintiffs. Oral arguments in that case were heard in March, and Ms. Harjo and others expect a decision perhaps by the end of the year. They are optimistic because, among other things, both sides agreed to recycle the records from the Harjo case as the foundation for this one.
Even if Ms. Harjo and her compatriots prevail in that case, Mr. Snyder will still be able to use the Redskins name. But the federal government would no longer be obliged to protect the team’s trademarks, and thus less likely to seize counterfeit goods, a potentially expensive exemption that could hit the team and league in the pocketbook.
“You’re not just dealing with the Washington franchise, but the whole of the N.F.L.,” Ms. Harjo said. “It’s one monolith after another laden with money and the power it represents.”
