Kansas City Chiefs face new call to drop ‘insulting’ name and symbol

The Kansas City Chiefs may have won the Super Bowl in an epic game, but for some there will be no victory until the football team changes its name and symbol and its fans stop performing an insulting gesture and chant.

A small but loud group protested outside the stadium hosting the Super Bowl in Arizona on Sunday, aggrieved that the team from the city that straddles the Kansas-Missouri border continues to refuse to drop its name and arrowhead symbol, which Native American leaders class as a racist mascot and symbol that devalues Native traditions.

“When we’re mocked and reduced to a caricature and not seen as human beings, then that affects everything else,” Gaylene Crouser, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center, said on Sunday evening outside the stadium. Crouser, 48, had traveled 1,200 miles from her home for the protest.

Music reminiscent of old-style western movies was played and many in the stadium crowd reveled in using an arm gesture and singing chant known as the tomahawk chop, which has long echoed around the team’s Arrowhead stadium in Kansas City, angering Native Americans and others.

For this year’s Super Bowl, which moves from place to place and this year was held in Glendale, on the outskirts of Phoenix, the Arizona state capital, the National Football League took significant steps to represent Native communities, especially as there are an estimated 43,000 Native Americans living in Phoenix, making it the US city with the third largest Indigenous population.

The league commissioned Lucinda “La Morena” Hinojos for the branded art for the event. It was the first time an artist who identifies as Chicana – of Mexican descent – and Native American