First America – Playing Indian | Episode 2
OPEN
Do you remember where you were on the afternoon of January 6th, 2021? I remember where I was — climbing through the window of my then-boyfriend’s house. It was pouring down rain. He was at work. And I had two things that really sucked to have at the same time. COVID and bed bugs. I needed to isolate somewhere while my house was treated, but my boyfriend forgot to leave out a key. So in I went–through the window.
I remember sitting down on his couch, exhausted and wet, and pulling up Twitter. And there I saw a stream of images of an angry mob storming the US capitol. Lawmakers were barricading themselves into their offices. It wasn’t clear if all of them were safe. It was scary. It felt like maybe there wouldn’t be a peaceful transition of power. Like our democracy was going off the rails.
And then I saw this image that made me stop and go–wait, what the…?
It was this one rioter. He was bare chested. His face was covered in paint. He carried a spear. And on his head sat a fur and feather headdress–with horns.
CLIP: He was among the first to break into the building, and headed for the US Senate chamber, where he sat in the presiding officer’s chair that was vacated by Vice President Mike Pence, and scribbled this note: “it’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”
It was the Q Anon Shaman.
I remember how much people talked about him the days after Jan 6. People found him funny and strange, but also confusing. Why would a white guy, storming the capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, dress up like a Native American?
The answer to that question actually explains how the whole thing happened in the first place.
BILLBOARD
You’re listening to First America–the true story of how the United States came to be. And how our current political moment is 250 years in the making. From Pushkin Industries and Critical Frequency, I’m your host Rebecca Nagle. Gohini daqwadoa. Tsalagi Ayetli gela. Citizen of Cherokee Nation.
A lot of people felt confused by the QAnon Shaman’s outfit. You know how I felt? Tired. Whether it’s sports mascots or Coachella or Halloween, I see white people dress up like Natives all the time.
It’s exhausting to see this racist caricature of your culture constantly reflected back to you. But it’s also defeating. That despite all the advocacy Native people have done, it keeps happening. And I wanted to know why. Why do Americans keep doing this?
And so I tried to find where it all started. And the beginning was a lot earlier than I would have guessed.
[music cue]
Last episode we talked about how the American Revolution started in Pennsylvania over Native land, not in Boston over taxes. Well for this episode, we are going to Boston. And we’re covering one of the most famous events leading up to the Revolution–the Boston Tea Party.
Reenactment: Fifes Up.
One, two, one. (fifes play)
You’ve probably heard of the Boston Tea Party, but there’s a part of the story I bet you haven’t heard. And that’s the Native part.
Earlier this year, I visited the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum with my producer Kim. Through the magic of historical tourism and reenactments, I was able to travel back to the year of the Boston Tea Party, 1773. And I met someone who’s going to help us tell this story. Well, someone pretending to be someone.
Archibald McNeil: So my name is Archibald McNeil. I’m a ropemaker here in Boston. [duck]
His real name is Jeff. He works at the museum as a tour guide.
I’ve been living in Boston my whole life. Um,
Kim: Will you tell us what you’re wearing?
Archibald McNeil: I love getting to talk about my outfit. So! I‘m wearing my striped green and white trousers, my trusty boots, and then I’m wearing my linen shirt. And then I have my short jacket here which is made of wool. It is quite cold. And I have right now a linen cap [duck]
In his little outfit, he kind of reminded me of a news boy, but I know the time period is off. As a tour guide, Jeff seemed really earnest.
Archibald McNeil: I might not look like I have much money, but my family does own land here in Boston [duck]
At the museum, he tells the story of the Boston Tea Party. See if you can catch the Native part.
[music cue]
It starts in 1773, when Boston is boiling with anger.
Bostonians have been at the forefront of fighting against tyrannical taxes and oppression…
They are mad at George III, the King of England. George had started imposing taxes on the colonies, to pay for that huge world war we talked about last episode. To enforce his unpopular laws, George sent in troops.
I witnessed the protests and some of us even consider it an invasion by British forces in our own town…
When a crowd of colonists threw snowballs and ice at British soldiers, the soldiers fired into the crowd,
Five men were gunned down outside the statehouse…I was there and watched some of my, my dear friends get killed
This was the Boston Massacre.
…March 5th of 1770
Three years later, the British Parliament passes a law called the Tea Act. It gives this one British company a monopoly over all tea shipped to the Americas. To add insult to injury, the tea it wants to send is bad. It’s old, it’s moldy.
And then there’s the tax. For every pound of moldy tea, the colonists have to pay a 3 pence import tax. Three ships of moldy monopoly tea are docked in the Boston Harbor.
Archibald McNeil: we can not send the tea back. the moment that tea hits the dock, the tax has to be paid. And in that moment we know what has to be done.
They decide to throw the tea into the harbor.
And so December 16th in the middle of a snowstorm–it’s quite cold–about 150 approximately of us stormed down to Griffin’s Wharf, we board the ships. There are thousands on the shoreline watching us. [duck]
And here’s where I want you to pay attention: to what Archibald and his fellow colonists were wearing.
Archibald McNeil: We cover ourselves in cloaks, coats, blankets, anything to disguise our figures. Some folks might smear some lamp light soot on their faces just to help obscure their faces a bit, that we wanna make sure. This is going to be treason, after all, when we throw this tea into the harbor. We wanna make sure that none of us are recognizable.
There’s an important detail missing in Jeff’s story, but we’ll come back to that.
Archibald McNeil: Actually, we perform this entire night–three and a half hours of tea destruction–in almost complete silence. The only thing you can really hear is the breaking of chests and the splashing on the water.
The heaviest of these chests weigh about 400 pounds. It’s a lot of tea to get all the way up above board.
Archibald McNeil: It’s packed in so tightly that if we were to just throw it in the water, nothing would happen. So we’re having to hit it and scrape it with our axes, boots, anything that we can to. Great, get it loose. scoop as much out as we can to make the chest light enough to then toss into the harbor.
Archibald McNeil: and it takes us about three and a half hours to destroy across all three ships. 92,616 pounds of tea. This is quite a bit. It’s about. 10,000 pounds of British sterling worth of tea, which I, I believe in your day is approximately $1.5 million worth of property damage.
We had to cut our interview with Jeff, the actor, short because it was time for him to start another tour.
Guide: unfortunately I do have to give my office back
Kim: I should get a photo of you two
Guide: he’s actually about to ring the bell
Rebecca: That was great. That was great. Thank you so much.
Archibald McNeil: Of course.
Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Yeah,
As a tour guide, Archibald takes visitors through the museum. And it is an experience. I went on a replica ship, drank actual tea, paintings came to life and yelled at me.
Museum: Parliament is the supreme constitutional authority of the empire.
That part was a little Harry Potter-esque.
On the tour, I was watching out for how the museum tells the Native part of the Boston Tea Party.
And it was there, sure. In the museum there’s a cartoon on the wall and a book in a glass case. Near the entrance, there’s actually a big sign about it. Museum staff pointed it out to us.
Evan: We wanted to make sure that this message was communicated to all of our guests,
// Kim: I could also imagine though, kind of walking past it.
Evan: You can. Yep, yep. People are oblivious sometimes, you know?
My sense was that unless you were really looking, the Native part was easy to miss.
Rebecca: Would you mind saying your name and where you’re from?
Tourist: Sure. My name is Jenny. I’m from Dublin in Ireland.
I wanted to test my hypothesis. So as people left the museum, I stopped them outside.
Rebecca: This is gonna sound like the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked, but from going through the museum, did you pick up on like what the rioters were wearing when they stormed the ship?
Tourist: ] I think I have a picture in my head,
Rebecca: What’s the picture in your head?
Tourist: Um, I don’t know, like leather boots and sort of like loose pants, like britches and maybe loose shirts maybe I’m confusing it with Shakespeare, but you know, waist coats and hats. Like Mel Gibson in the Patriot is kind of my reference here.
Rebecca: So, so at the actual Boston Tea Party, they, they dress up like native people.
Tourist: Oh! Oh, I didn’ t know that at all.
Tourist: That’s really interesting.
I talked to about a dozen people as they left the museum. Homeschooled kids, tourists from Germany and Florida and none of them picked up on the fact that the rioters were wearing Indian costumes.
But I find it fascinating. Why in the world would 18th Century colonial rioters dress up like Indians?
—————MIDROLL———————
To try and understand why the heck colonists dressed up like Native people to throw tea in the Boston Harbor I met up with a historian from Harvard.
Rebecca: Hey, Phil.
Phil Deloria: Hey. Welcome to chilly Boston.
This is Phil Deloria. He is a descendant of the Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux tribes.
Rebecca: Um, where are we standing Phil?
Phil Deloria: We’re in front of the Boston Tea Party ship, um, ships and museum. The fifes and the drum music is playing.
Rebecca: What’s a, what’s a fife?
Phil Deloria: Oh, it’s a little flute.
Rebecca: What’s that building called?
Phil Deloria: That’s called Ye Old ATM.
Phil wanted in on the fun. And so we boarded a ship. It’s part of the museum and docked in the real Boston Harbor.
Phil Deloria:, I love this stuff. It’s super cool, right? It’s full of ropes and riggings. It’s surprisingly small for a ship that’s gonna be sailing on the open ocean. I mean, to me, I would be scared to be on this ship, frankly.
Phil Deloria: Can I throw a box of tea over?
Guide: Yeah.
Phil Deloria: Okay. Fantastic.
Phil Deloria: I’m standing here holding this, uh, this crate of tea or replica of a crate of tea, and I’m about to toss it overboard. Here we go. Listen for the splash.
Phil Deloria: Alright. I feel very American right now.
Rebecca: If you can put yourself in the shoes of, you know, a young lad who’s like throwing the tea overboard. What do you think is going through his mind?
Phil Deloria: Oh, I think he’s having so much fun, right? I mean. You know, we talked a little bit about this before, right? It’s dark. You’re in disguise. It’s, it’s, you know, you’re doing something that’s crossing the, the, the boundaries of the law. You’re with your friends, right?
Phil Deloria: The ways that, like when we jump outside of civil order, you know, it can be incredibly liberating.
Phil wrote about all this for a book called Playing Indian. In it, he says that the American tradition of white people dressing up like Indians? It starts with the Boston Tea Party.
Phil Deloria: They were wearing something that they thought of as Indian costume more or less. Right. And, but what does that mean? You know, some lamp black on their faces,
Which is basically soot, to darken their skin.
Phil Deloria: you know, um, maybe a feather or two, some blankets. Blankets are even at this moment associated with Native people.
Phil Deloria: they actually attach a tribal name to this. They, they call themselves Mohawks.
The way this story gets told a lot, is that the rioters dress up like Mohawks for disguise, the way a burglar would wear a mask. After all, they were committing a crime. Phil and other historians think that’s wrong.
Phil Deloria: it’s pretty clear that if you knew Boston Street politics, the identities of most of these people are not really secret.
Phil says the rioters weren’t wearing a disguise. They were wearing a costume.
Phil Deloria: You know, Boston is Boston. The tea is the tea, and to sort of call it a party. The costumes make that possible. Right?
That’s what’s strange about the Boston Tea Party. I mean, it’s part protest, part riot, but large part party.
To understand why 18th Century rioters would want to wear a costume, Phil says we have to go back to Medieval Europe. And to this thing called misrule.
Phil Deloria: Misrule itself is about inverting the social order. So you can go to old church festivals and find that sort of, the bishop suddenly becomes mounted backwards on a donkey and dragged through the church. Horrendous, right? Uh, you know, sacrilege.
At this time, for peasants, laws are really harsh. For poaching a deer from the King’s forest, the punishment was death. So they’d find ways to push back, like ganging up on a sheriff.
Phil Deloria: Sometimes you can think of these as little baby riots, right? Little baby riots that have a kind of a, um, a traditional folk character to them.
To add to the fun of their civil disobedience, they’d wear a costume while they did it.
Phil Deloria: y’know when they were exercising these, um, rituals and visceral, they would, men would put on women’s dresses
Banging pots and pans in the streets, riding someone out on a rail, even tarring and feathering, all these things go back to Medieval Europe.
Phil Deloria: And they make their way to the new world.
So by the time we get to the Boston Tea Party having a little baby riot to protest the King’s unjust tax is not new. Even putting on a costume for your baby riot is not new. What changes is the costume. Phil says Colonists decide…
Phil Deloria: we don’t wanna dress up like women. You know, in the way that they used to do it back in the old country. But we need to dress up. We wanna do something. and like, and here’s this Indian costume and it does all the right stuff.
And that costume of the Indian, it starts to mean something to the colonists. And that meaning is connected to the land.
You have to remember in England, it’s illegal to hunt in the King’s forest. It’s illegal to collect wood.
Phil Deloria: To suddenly landing in New England, um, and in other places in North America and finding that yes, I can go out and hunt deer and there’s a lot of deer, right? If I wanna have a big fire and stay warm, I can do that.
So North America, in this very practical, material way, becomes a land of freedom and opportunity.
Phil Deloria: And Indian people, Native people end up, uh, I think being kind of exemplars of that. It’s like, well, what’s the symbol of this freedom, right? That we’re claiming for ourselves. It’s those Native people.
Rebecca: Were native people seen as more free or having more freedom than Europeans at the time?
Phil Deloria: Yes.
if we’re in Puritan New England, this is not a particularly free kind of society. So there’s lots of condemnation you have to wear a scarlet a if you’re an adult, right?
you’re looking out at native people, you might actually be envious. You might actually be desirous, right? of that kind of status.
So FREEDOM, this thing that is the cornerstone of American identity–when early Americans were trying to figure that freedom out–Indians represented it.
And it wasn’t just in costumes. The founding generation put the figure of a Native person in paintings, on political pamphlets, the figureheads of ships, on guns. 18th century White dudes had weird societies where they gave themselves Indian names and performed made up rituals. They were obsessed.
And one of the places this Indian symbol shows up is political cartoons. Phil brought one to show me.
Phil Deloria: It’s called the Female Combatants
In the cartoon, England is represented by the figure of a white woman. She’s wearing this long flowing robe
Phil Deloria: So here’s Britannia Wearing these very heavy robes with a very ornate sort of hairstyle. There’s a shield behind her and she’s like literally holding out her fists as if she’s boxing.
And who she is boxing, but of course, the colonies in North America. And in the cartoon the colonies are represented by a Native woman.
Phil Deloria: There are feathers coming out of her hair. There’s a kind of breach cloth thing, no top. So her breasts are exposed, right? Long hair. And she’s literally sort of reaching out to punch Britannia in the face, right? And Britannia is saying, uh, I’ll force you to obedience you rebellious slut.
Rebecca: Does the Native woman in the picture, does she represent Native people or does she represent white people?
Phil Deloria: She absolutely is not representing Native people. She’s absolutely representing American colonists who are rebellious.
Rebecca: Okay? So in this cartoon, they’re not Indigenous people have nothing to do with the political struggle. It’s just a stand-in for the white colonists.
Phil Deloria: Exactly. It’s a symbol,
Rebecca: It’s kind of weird.
Phil Deloria: It’s very weird. It’s very weird.
At the time of the Revolution, colonists needed a national identity. And they were in an awkward place. They were not English anymore, but they’re not American yet. Phil says playing Indian is the bridge that gets them to American.
Phil Deloria: imagine yourself standing on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, looking at England, and you are rebelling literally against the monarch And what do you say, I’m not that, I’m not that dominating kind of thing. No, no, no. I’m back over here. I’m Aboriginal, I’m of this land. this land of freedom and liberty and abundance, I’ve been made a new person.
Those lofty enlightenment ideals we all know from the Declaration of Independence, they’re great and all. But revolutions and regular people need symbols. They need something tangible that represents those big ideas. And for the founding generation, that symbol was Indians.
Rebecca: Do the colonists need to take on Native identity to become American?
Phil Deloria: They do, but they can’t fully take it on. Right. Because they also are repulsed by it, right? and I think it’s this sort of dynamic of sort of desire for something about being native or aboriginal to this place and repulsion right of thinking, these are savages. We have want to have nothing to do with them.
And so the way early Americans played Indian had this big contradiction baked into it. They despised actual Native people. We were the merciless Indian Savages of the Declaration of Independence. But the Indians of their imagination–they loved those Indians. Those Indians had all this freedom and all this land the colonists wanted for themselves.
[music change]
After Phil and I both took the tour of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, I told him what I thought.
Rebecca: I guess I just feel like it,to me, the museum feels like this metaphor or even kind of like this exemplar of like how Native History is talked about and like the story of America in general, where it’s kind of just like hiding in plain sight. Mm-hmm. Like it’s all right there. Mm-hmm. And if you know what to look for, you can findit. But also if you’re not looking for it, it’s really easy to miss.
Phil Deloria: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think hiding in plain sight’s a good way to think about it.
I asked The Museum’s Creative Manager, Evan O’Brien, what he thinks about all this. Why don’t they emphasize the Mohawk costume part more?
Evan: Yeah, sure. So, um, in all regards, we want to balance, um, well actually we wanna strive for balance in both areas. We wanna be as authentic as possible. And the complexity with the Tea Party is in order to be fully authentic, you cannot ignore the indigenous disguises that we’re involved. You simply can’t.
However, we also wanna be sensitive, um, and not make any offense, history is complex. Mm-hmm. We can learn from it, but we also don’t wanna repeat the same mistakes.
Rebecca: And so, do you guys think it would be like racist basically to have white folks today dress up like natives in your programming?
Evan: Yeah. I mean, we don’t, we don’t allow that. Yeah. Um, we don’t do that in any capacity.
Evan has seen volunteers show up to their reenactments dressed in Native costume.
Evan: When we first did it in 2012, there were a few gentlemen that showed up with fringe and all kinds of stuff, and we had to say, gentlemen, we’d love to have you involved, but you can’t wear that.
Rebecca: I understand why you don’t wanna just be like, all right, everybody dress up, you know?
Evan: Right, right.
Rebecca: But do you think there’s any risk then that folks who are, you know, watching the reenactment or kind of coming through the experience sort of miss that fact?
It’s not just that there’s this appropriation, but there’s also just this pervasive erasure. And for me, learning about this time period, what’s so clear is that like colonists knew about native people. Yes, they were talking about native people. We were omnipresent in their lives. But in the way that contemporary Americans tell that story, we’re absent. And so for me it’s sort of like the conflict. There’s another layer of the conflict, which is just like, how, how do we make sure that the native part of the story isn’t missed?
Evan: Yeah, that’s absolutely fair.
You know, certainly I don’t wanna water down, um, the content and the history. Um, but yeah. And what’s difficult about these sorts of stuff, especially in society today, is we tend to fixate on the stuff that stir up the most emotional reaction, right? The stuff that’s dividing us and um, making people angry with each other. I don’t wanna water down, um, the content and the history. but what we also don’t want to do is make those sorts of things the focal point.
I really sympathize with Evan. I think he’s kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I don’t think the museum is the only one that doesn’t know how to talk about this history.
But that history that we don’t know how to talk about–it explains so much of what is happening today.
The Q Anon Shaman and the rest of the mob on January 6th, their version of America and what it stands for is unrecognizable to many of us.
But you know who I think would recognize it? Those early Americans who also dressed up like Indians to riot. Who also took matters into their own hands. Who also wanted a version of freedom that was rooted in their imaginations, not in reality.
What that means for our country today. After the break.
————————–—–MIDROLL—————————————-
In my twenties I lived in Baltimore, and I was often the only Native person in the room. I felt this responsibility to advocate for Native people, but at the same time I would feel like I wasn’t Native enough, or Native in the right way. I’m mixed, I look white. That comes with a lot of privilege. And also, I’m Native because I’m a citizen of my tribe.
But for a lot of non-Native people that wasn’t enough. Once there was a group email where colleagues debated whether or not I was Native based on my physical appearance. I wish I hadn’t internalized all that, but part of me did. I was young and still figuring out who I was.
And then I would see those same people drawn to this cartoon version of being Native. Like, they would burn sage to kill bad vibes or have a dream catcher hanging from their rear view mirror.
Baltimore was close enough to DC that I was surrounded by merchandise for the Washington R-skins. I’m not gonna say the slur. I remember one time a colleague gave me a ride home. This was someone I respected a lot. I got in her car and looked down. The floor mats were the R-skins logo. Where I was supposed to place my dirty shoes was on a cartoon of a native person’s face. I didn’t say anything. I just felt really alone.
I started to wonder if these two things were related. How people loved the cartoon version of Natives, but not me.
[music cue]
I asked Phil Deloria about this, back in Boston. And Phil, being a professor, answered me with a story. This story starts in the early 1900s, but it explains the fascination Americans have with Native caricatures today. Back then, adults were worried about the youth.
Phil Deloria: Well, they were so worried that urbanization and modern technology was just taking American youth and, making them effeminate and non masculine. There’s a crisis around adolescence, which is a term that gets invented around this moment
Phil Deloria: This guy g Stanley Hall says, you know, look, um. The course of development of the individual human being echoes the course of social development of societies and civilizations.
Phil Deloria: And so the child has to pass through the savage state before they move on to something a little more civilized.
And so people created summer camps where white kids could spend time pretending to be Native.
Phil Deloria: But the idea is get all of these kids out of the city, get them into the woods, teach them how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to paddle a canoe, right.
Rebecca: What kinds of names would the kids go by?
Phil Deloria: flying Cloud rolling Hawk and, you know, things like that,
Rebecca: And at Camp, what would the kids be wearing?
Phil Deloria: Uh, you know, we can, I’ll just sort of look at this.
Phil pulled out a photo from his book.
Phil Deloria: Well, here’s one where they’re, um, you know, they’re in blankets, they’re in headdresses, they’re holding arrows, they’ve got buffalo horn headdresses, uh, a lot of feathers.
Here’s a kid with a drum, a lot of blankets, a lot of like no shirts,
Early Americans played Indian as a way to say we’re not British, we’re American. 100 years later, Americans know they’re not British. But they’re still playing Indian. Why?
Rebecca: What is it that they’re looking for?
Phil Deloria: I think they’re looking for authenticity right? In the face of the modern, So it’s like we’ve become a more secular society, but Indians have the spirituality thing going. Rampant capitalism has taken over, but Indians, you know, they operated in that barter economy where everything was a little more gentle, right? we have to live in cities, but they got to live out in the, in the woods in the wild.
So at every turn, at every step, Indians represent this new, authentic way of being.
And so Americans are still searching for who they are when they play Indian. But now it fills a different void. It’s the void created by an industrialized, modern, alienating world.
You can see it in the fringe buck skin and feather head bands hippies wore, in the weird sweat lodge ceremonies new agers performed, even in the weird back to nature, make-America-healthy-again ramblings of the Q Anon shaman.
At pretty much the same time summer camps became a thing, there was this other American tradition taking shape. Sports mascots.
Phil Deloria: You know, early 20th century, um, is when mascots in general start showing up in sports and, you know, and so you do get these Indian mascots kind of right from the very beginning.
Phil says mascots and the whole summer camp thing… they’re related.
Phil Deloria: the mayor of Kansas City at one point, uh, was also very big into the Boy Scouts
As a Boy Scout leader, this mayor liked to dress up like an Indian. And he kept dressing up even after he became Mayor. Which earned him the nickname Chief.
Phil Deloria: So chief in that sense might mean like the mayor, the boss, whatever, right? But also means, like, Indian chief. // And before you know it, right? All of a sudden you’ve got the chiefs.
Rebecca: So the mascot is paying homage to a white man who liked to dress up like an Indian.
Phil Deloria: I think you could say it that way. Yes.
Rebecca: That’s wild.
And that’s how the Kansas City Chiefs got their name.
It’s been over a hundred years since cartoon Natives started showing up in sports. And I wanted to know what the deal is. Why are people still so into them?
So, after leaving Boston, I got on a plane. And I went to a football game.
Loudspeaker: THE CHOP Arrowhead Drum The Los Angeles number 11,
In Kansas City I found a stadium full of Chiefs fans singing the tomahawk chop. I’m gonna warn you, it was a lot.
Rebecca: So the thing we’re asking people today is about the tomahawk chop. How do you guys feel about the chop?
Fan: Love it. Love it, love it.
I heard people sing the chop as they walked up the long stadium ramp to find their seats.
[AMBI]
People sang it in the parking lot.
Oh, oh, oh, ohhhhh
You know, most of the Native songs I’ve heard, they have words. It’s weird to hear this impression of our music that doesn’t even have a consonant.
I talked to fans who put the Chiefs logo in places you might not expect.
Tom: Lest anyone doubt our fandom, that’s my actual wedding ring.
Rebecca: can you just describe what it looks like?
Tom: it’s got a ruby background with the Chief’s Arrowhead logo in the middle of it.
I even went to a tailgate party that was also a memorial.
Fan: So we are here for our buddy’s uh, tailgate to celebrate his dad. We do this every year. This is the third or fourth year we’ve done this tailgate.
People told me that the team name honors Native Americans
Fan: I think it’s just like the fighting spirit of like the Native Americans, you know, that never backed down mentality // I mean like from the male perspective, that’s probably the cooler part
I got the sense that the game, the stadium, the colors, even the chop isn’t just about football. It’s deeper than that. Fans used this one word to describe it.
Fan: It’s tradition…
Fan: …everything’s so tradition-based…
Fan: …I’ve always though of it as a tradition of the game. And a tradition of the Chiefs.
What I heard people say is that it’s part of who they are.
Rebecca: Would you guys be mad if the name changed?
Fan: The name of the Chiefs? Yeah. Oh yeah. I wouldn’t want it to change. I wouldn’t want it to change.
Rebecca: Why not? I mean, , it would still be football. if they were, you know, the Kansas City Wolves or something like that, it would still be the same team.
Fan: Uh, it, it’s just history
Fan: as a, as a, uh, a part of a, a, a nation, are you upset about the, the use of the Tom Haw chop and, uh, Arrow head and Chief, are you’re upset about that?
Rebecca: Y’know, there’s been some like research where they look at the effect of native mascots on kids. They have found that exposure to native mascots actually lowers those kids. Self-esteem and sense of pride in being native.
Fan: So I’m not dis, I’m like not discounting the research. But we need to like help them and educate them. So let’s not try to like, make your childhood bad because you see this happening in sports? Like, you have to help them through that and– Embrace your culture and have your kids engage is what your culture is.
Rebecca: it sounds like what you’re saying is that it’s like kind of on Native kids and Native communities and parents to correct whatever negative impact mascots might have on them.
Fan: You know, I’m an Italian American. There’s a lot of, we’re all in the mafia. We all love pasta. We have greasy hair. You just gotta expect that. And I do love pasta. Alright. I’m gonna go watch some football.
That same researcher who found Native mascots hurt Native kids, she and a colleague also looked at white students. And it had the opposite effect on them. Seeing a racist mascot gave white people a boost in self esteem.
I talked to Phil Deloria about this.
Phil: look, this whole mascot process and practice is super bad for native kids. The research that Stephanie Fryberg and others have done, which says, look, When native kids see the powerlessness of their parents and their elders and their leaders to stop this thing, they feel an incredible lack of efficacy for being native. That seeps into the, the blood and the bones, right? Of native kids. And I think it does this kind of damage.
Phil: This isn’t just a trivial thing.
When I was at the football game, I heard over and over that mascots honor Native Americans. But when I confronted fans with the harm mascots do to living, breathing Native kids they didn’t want to hear it. It reminded me of what I experienced back in Baltimore.
Rebecca: I think what feels really frustrating for me as a native person is that at the same time that like we’re everywhere, right? Mm-hmm. Like, you know, we’re mascots, we’re, you know, like a wooden figure outside of the gas station that we’re also nowhere.
Phil Deloria: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca: And just like how often I feel really invisible mm-hmm. In the United States. Um, do you think that those things are connected?
Phil Deloria: They’re just two sides of the same coin, right? I mean, Indians are everywhere because settlers have to imagine Indianness and appropriate for themselves and sort of take it and like always, always playing with it.
Phil Deloria: at the same time every time that there’s a real actual red-blooded Native person standing there in front of them, it is a reminder, right? That all of this land was once native land.
That dynamic of white people liking the Indian that exists in their imagination, but not actual Native people. It’s still around today. And the Indian of white people’s imaginations? That Indian only lives in the past.
Phil: That Indian is the pure Indian, the authentic Indian, the Indian of desire. And if you could just get access to that Indian who you’ve been trying to destroy for the longest time, then you could learn something.
Rebecca: you know, I get asked pretty offensive questions by non-native people a lot, they’ll ask me like if I grew up on a reservation, what my blood quantum is.
it’s this weird thing where people who don’t actually know what any of that means are trying to measure if I’m authentically Native enough. Um, and this thing clicked for me while I was reading your book that what they’re testing me against is this sort of imagined Native person that actually doesn’t exist.
Phil Deloria: It’s really interesting, right? Because at this moment, right, the framing of that Indian that we’re gonna desire is an archaic, ancient, timeless person who can’t exist within history at all, right?
Because who are the native people who are the most important shakers and shapers of stuff? They’re traveling the world. They’re global citizens. //They’re all wearing suits. // They’re buying cars and refrigerators and sewing machines, right? They are people living in history.
I’m 40 now. Most of this stuff hurts less than it did when I was younger. And of course, the garbage people say to my face pales in comparison to what native folks without my privilege get. But, it still felt good to have an elder validate my experience. To say it’s them, not you.
Phil says that weird dynamic of liking cartoon Natives more than real ones goes back to this thing called settler colonialism.
Phil Deloria: This is the difference between sort of regular colonialism and that thing we call settler colonialism. Yeah. You know, regular colonialism is kind of a binary thing, right. You’re gonna send me to India, oh, I’m gonna stay British. There’s no way that I’m gonna become India Indian, right?
What do I wanna do? I’m gonna send my kids home to Eaton and to Cambridge and Oxford. What do I wanna do? I’m gonna get the hell outta here and go home and retire to North Umbria. Am I gonna stay here? No. Am I gonna embrace these people? Absolutely not.
Phil Deloria: I just wanna extract their labor. Alright. And their resources, that’s like classic colonialism but the settler colonial kind of structure is a different position. They’re not gonna go back home to the mother country, right? Because settlers come to stay. That means they care more about land than about labor, right? And they find ways to take and appropriate the identities of the indigenous people who are there.
Settler colonialism is complicated, of course. It spans continents and centuries. But Phil says the easiest way to understand it is this. You want to build a country on a piece of land. But you have a problem. People already live there. So you come up with all these ways to get rid of the people living on the land you want.
But at some point, you need to claim that you belong. How do you do that? You take on the identity of the people you pushed out.
Phil Deloria: The dilemma of the settler right, is always to be on the edge of feeling bad about yourself. Right?
Phil Deloria: the United States is founded on a certain premise that we can hear in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
Phil Deloria: so if you take that as the vision document, as the foundational document, right, you have embedded within yourself, right? Something that must necessarily speak to other people who you have not treated in those particular kinds of ways. Right. And that is an inescapable kind of conundrum.
And that inescapable conundrum, it left us in an awkward place. Where, not unlike early Americans, Americans today are still struggling with who we are.
Phil Deloria: Americans are always uncertain about their identity, which means they over and excessively overperform, right?
Phil Deloria: I think the sort of inclination to do kind of, you know, performative Americanness, you know, which always feels kind of overwrought and overstrained, um, you know, the renaming of french fries, freedom fries, I mean, that kind of thing that we do all the time. A confident country doesn’t do that. France doesn’t do that because the French know who they are.
Phil Deloria: We can see this in this moment right now around certain forms of white nationalism, right? Which are claiming a certain set of things, but which have an air of desperation about them because of the uncertainty of what it actually means.
Phil Deloria: what is American identity? I think part of my sense of it is American identity is unfixed unfinished,
When I learned how early Americans built a national identity, it kind of reminded me of January 6th. And actually it helped me understand it in a new way. I mean, some of the parallels are obvious–dressing up like Indians to riot. But I found something deeper than that. Something so deep in the character of America it’s below the surface. Almost subconscious.
At first, for me, what I didn’t understand about January 6th was how the rioters could claim they were defending American democracy, while also tearing it down. They denied the results of a democratic election. They stormed the capitol building. Once inside, they broke stuff. They basically went to the seat of our government and trashed it.
But after I learned all this history, I realized our founders did the same thing. Our founders built a national identity on playing Indian at the same time our government was rounding up and killing actual Native people. We built our national identity on the thing we were trying to destroy. It’s the type of thing a serial killer would do in a horror movie. Kill someone, move into their house, and then pretend to be them.
Today, it feels like we’re experiencing these big ruptures in our national identity. In what it means to be American. Like its falling apart or breaking in two. And I think there’s this natural impulse to try and find where things got off track. But it’s always been this way.
Just imagine someone did kill a family, move into their house, pretend to be them. Wouldn’t you expect that person to lose their mind? To one day snap?
Of course American identity is broken. We all live in that house.
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What happens when you put Native people back into the founding story of America….
Rebecca: In terms of sort of the fight in the US over sort of, are we a democracy? Are we sort of not living up to those ideals? Um,
Maggie: it’s even a harder question, I think.
Rebecca: Do you?
Maggie: Do I have a position on it?
Next time on first America.