As NFL Draft rolls into Kansas City, activists continue push to rid sports of Native American imagery: 'This is by no means over'

Some fans crowding around downtown Kansas City beginning Thursday night for the NFL Draft will have the opportunity to meet and maybe even learn from Rhonda LeValdo.

LeValdo isn't the mother of a potential draft pick. She isn't a rising star in football analytics. She is a teacher, radio host and activist who is also a proud Acoma Pueblo Indian — and she's tired of seeing and hearing people in her home state of Kansas and nearby Missouri in face paint and headdresses bellow a highly offensive chant in support of a football team with a culturally inappropriate name.

Yes, painting your face red is offensive. Yes, wearing a sacred headdress is inappropriate. Yes, the "Chiefs" name is foul. And as emphatically as possible, the tomahawk chop done by Chiefs fans and Atlanta Braves fans is racist.

So with the league in Kansas City for its traveling NFL Draft show, she and others in the Not in Our Honor Coalition will again bring attention to the anti-Native racism that the NFL and other leagues and teams continue to permit in the name of sport. At Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Chiefs, the franchise banned Native American-themed headdress and face paint in 2020. Outside of the stadium and at Chiefs road games, Levaldo says the imagery still persists.

"It was illegal for us to be Native," Levaldo told Yahoo Sports. "We were not allowed to speak our language. We were not allowed to wear our traditional clothes. We were not allowed to do our ceremonies. So why is it OK for them to [pretend to] be Indian, and we were not allowed to be Indian?

"Our kids were stolen from us and taken to the boarding schools and made into little white people, and that was a systemic racism that was occurring in this country. But now it's OK for them to be Native and do this chop and bang the drum?"

LeValdo and over 100 others were in Phoenix in February, when the Chiefs were there for Super Bowl LVII, protesting in the parking lot in the hours before kickoff. Few Kansas City fans were receptive to their pleas, which is par for the course. Chiefs executives have never spoken with the Not in Our Honor Coalition or its parent organization, the Kansas City Indian Center, LeValdo said.

The team didn't respond to a request for comment for this column.

Documentary gives voice to movement

Not in Our Honor has been fighting this fight for years, and is one group in the wider effort to end the use of Native names and images as mascots. The battle is at the center of a captivating award-winning documentary, "Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting."

The film, originally released in 2021, will have a screening in Kansas City on Thursday night as part of the Athletic Inspiration Film Festival. It will also have limited runs in theaters in that city, San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona next month.

While brainstorming with friend and filmmaker Sam Bardley, longtime journalist and Washington D.C. native Kevin Blackistone had the idea for what became "Imagining the Indian" nearly a decade ago. His initial idea was more along the lines of a biography of Native American civil rights icon Suzan Shown Harjo, whom he had become enamored with. In much the same way that many Black Americans like Blackistone revere Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so do many Native Americans revere Harjo. Now 77 years old, Harjo was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2014 for her years of advocacy on behalf of Native people.

But there were other memories that Blackistone, a co-producer on the documentary, held that helped shape the film: the recollection of his days at the Dallas Morning News and the battle at a Texas high school to remove Confederate imagery, and the memory of seeing a group of Native Americans protesting the "Redskins" name before Super Bowl XXVI between Buffalo and Washington in Minneapolis. Blackistone says he got his bosses to let him attend as a fan, even though by that time he was a sports columnist at the newspaper.

Seeing the Native protesters as he walked to the Metrodome before that Super Bowl, Washington's logo emblazoned on his hat and his chest, "I began to get sensitized to the issue that Native Americans had with what the Washington franchise was doing. Because had it been Black folks treated the same way, I would have felt just as they felt.

"And then as I began to think about it and study and read and talk to people, I realized that Native folks have been caricatured in marketing and had their culture appropriated and misappropriated by others extremely insensitively. As I say in the film, you can't talk about systemic racism in this country without talking about what first happened to Native Americans when Europeans arrived on the shore. When you talk about racism in this country, you have to begin with the racism that was brought upon Indigenous people here before everybody else."

Watching "Imagining the Indian" and speaking to LeValdo and Ben West, a Cheyenne man who is a co-director of the film, the parallels between the injustices done to Native Americans and Black Americans are stark. For centuries, the mistreatment of both peoples in this country wasn't just accepted, it was entirely legal.

Chief Wahoo, the longtime former logo of Cleveland's baseball team, is incredibly similar to the Black coon caricature image that spread during the Jim Crow era, both images of a grinning dullard, Chief Wahoo with comically red skin and coons colored with skin so unnaturally dark it is truly black. Politicians with old pictures of them in blackface generally face public reprimand, but there's little to no backlash for ridiculously painted and dressed supporters of sports teams with Native mascots at or around games.

That kind of disgusting anti-Black imagery is largely gone from American popular culture, but the fight to eradicate the anti-Native ones wages on. Some states, like California and New York, have banned Native American imagery and mascots for schools and sports teams, and there's a glimmer of hope in LeValdo's home state of Kansas, where the state Board of Education voted last November to end Native mascots for schools not on Indian land within five years.

And despite team owner Daniel Snyder's repeated insistence that he would never change Washington's team name, he did in 2020 — after major sponsors threatened to pull their money.

"For my family and those close to me it was a huge win and validation for years of activism and advocacy," West said Tuesday. "But you know, there are still major sports franchises and there are about 2,000 schools across the country that need to have this same reckoning that Washington did as a result of financial pressure from FedEx.

"So this is by no means over. There's more work to be done. It was a huge step and a highly visible step, which I think will end up facilitating a lot more change on the horizon."

But the Chiefs and many of their fans are steadfast. LeValdo and other Not in Our Honor members protest frequently outside of Arrowhead Stadium before home games, often she says verbally abused by passersby and told to "go home," blithely ignorant of the fact that the Natives are the ones who are home.

"Indians do not do the tomahawk chop," West said. "It's completely made up. It's something that riles up the fan base to engage in all sorts of offensive behavior. Headdresses; they're supposedly banned now, although they're still seeing them all over the tailgate and in the parking lots. Headdresses, fake face paint, and the [chop] gesture itself ...

"Native people wear headdresses, war bonnets and face paint, this is all ceremony for us. And for your average Jane or Joe to feel that it's appropriate and make it pure spectacle is wildly offensive."

Those kinds of images and behaviors are also damaging. In "Imagining the Indian," West recalls being a young boy and realizing how his people were portrayed and how it made him feel.

After data showed the detrimental effect such racist imagery had on Native people, the American Psychological Association recommended in 2005 that all American Indian mascots and symbols used by teams, schools and universities end immediately.

Nearly 20 years later, Rhonda LeValdo and others are still demanding that advice be followed.

She scoffs at the idea that the NFL dares to paint "END RACISM" in its end zones while turning a blind eye to the anti-Native racism it has done little, if anything, to curtail.

"Their 'hashtag end racism': you guys look like fools. You look like clowns," she said.

There was a mix of anger and exhaustion in her voice, but as West noted, the work continues.

LeValdo knows she must keep showing up.

"We're always going to be there. It's always going to be a problem. You're always going to have Native people continuing to try and make people aware of the historical atrocities that happened to our people," she said.

"I would love to live a day where we don't have to deal with this racism."