The Super Bowl’s Chief Problem

Chase Iron Eyes

Super Bowl week has come and gone, but for Native People, the images are indelible. It seems like many Americans won’t just take our word, but Native mascots attack the spirit. The purpose (intended or unintended) is a spiritual usurpation, an objectification, a theft of our humanity. The practice is a full assault on Indigenous dignity, a grotesque caricaturization of Native People to capture us in time and teach the world we ceased to exist in the late 1800s.

It has been more than 20 years since I last watched the Super Bowl; it has also been more than 20 years since I’ve been married. Is that coincidence or synchronicity? Maybe it’s destiny. I don’t have a favorite team. I have favorite players from when I was a kid, and I played fantasy football when I was behind bars, but no more. Because, as you already know and can read more about at Last Real Indians, football and most American sports have an appropriation problem.

It seems like many Americans won’t just take our word, but Native mascots attack the spirit.

It’s ironic to display corporate anti-racism messaging at a game featuring the Kansas City Chiefs. And it’s psychological violence for the American colony to perpetually perpetrate symbols demeaning the Indigenous nations which once saved young, ignorant Europeans from starvation. Now, here we Natives are living realities (viewing ourselves and creating ourselves through lenses) invented by foreigners who, in 2024, still present us with the Chiefs vs. the 49ers in the Super Bowl.

Why is that so problematic? Don’t Indians have bigger problems? Let me put it another way. One of these characterizations calls to mind the hyper-cartoonish representation of Jewish people by Nazi Germany; that famous image is nearly identical to “Chief Wahoo,” the former mascot (until just a couple years ago) of the now-renamed Cleveland Indians. It’s horrible.

It took 122 years to end the use of Chief Wahoo and the Cleveland’s baseball team’s Indians name, and it took almost 40 years for the University of North Dakota to switch from the Fighting Sioux to the Fighting Hawks. Within that time frame, UND, my alma mater, frequently squared off against its fiercest rival — the North Dakota State University Bison. It is recorded history that Native students (including me) had to see, depicted on the t-shirts of fans, a bison committing sexual acts on a Native American man (Sioux), apparently all in the name of fun.

That’s not entertaining for us, nor should it be for anyone else. Sports mascots are not the place to honor Indigenous nations. That’s why we’re so appreciative of your allyship in these efforts to educate our shared society about how we’re dehumanized through archaic thinking that, to this day, forces us to regularly confront Native mascots, racist nicknames, and offensive place names. Truth leads to reconciliation.

Wopila tanka — thank you for your understanding and advocacy!

Chase Iron Eyes is the Director and Lead Counsel of The Lakota People’s Law Project.