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The NFL's Chiefs, who call their version of the racist gesture the Arrowhead chop, have also received complaints from Native American groups and have also rebuffed them by deferring to the fans.
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Officials from another championship-contending franchise have made similar claims. “No matter what the decision is from our vantage point,” Schiller told The AJC, “this started as a fan initiative, and the fans are likely going to keep doing it anyway.” Meanwhile, Atlanta officials continue to claim impotence. And so they don’t think too much about how offensive it is, because they don't really understand that we are still here and that we exist.” And I think most people don’t realize that we’re still here. And so American Indians are objectified as relics of the past. In the public education system, you learn one unit in third grade, one unit in seventh grade social studies and then you learn a little bit on Thanksgiving, and usually what you learn is horribly inaccurate. “So then the question is, Well, why don't people understand that for American Indians? And it’s because we don’t learn very much about Indians. “If we had an African American team and were doing a Black minstrel dance, that would be very obviously racist,” he says. He imagines 50,000 people in a stadium dressed as Jesus Christ or screaming gibberish in mockery of the national anthem. “It’s like if someone denigrated Christianity or 9/11 jumpers,” says Brett Chapman, a Native American rights attorney and enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation who is a vocal opponent of Native American mascots. All seven of Georgia’s members of Congress voted yea. The Indian Removal Act was one of the most contentious pieces of legislation to that point it passed the House of Representatives by only four votes. That law led to the Trail of Tears, the forced migration of some 100,000 people from the southeast to territory in what is now Oklahoma. It was largely due to the state’s influence that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed. Georgia, though, has a lot to do with Native American culture. Asked before Game 2 of the 2021 NLCS whether his feelings on the matter had evolved, he declined to comment. The chop salute, he argued, ridiculously, "doesn’t have anything more to do with Indian culture than the wave.” Kasten now holds the same role with the Dodgers. “We don’t discourage any of that,” Stan Kasten, then Atlanta’s president, told the Los Angeles Times in ’92. The chop is widely believed to have followed outfielder Deion Sanders from Florida State when he joined Atlanta in 1991. “I’m sorry it offends them and I’m not going to do it anymore,” she said. Although nothing much changed, they did get the attention of at least one prominent fan-actor Jane Fonda, then engaged to Ted Turner, who owned the team.
#Cherokee tomahawk series#
Thirty years ago this week, before Game 1 of the 1991 World Series between Atlanta and the Twins, some 800 people protested the chop outside the Metrodome in Minneapolis. If this seems like an old complaint, it is-and that is an indictment of the team. Sign up to get the Five-Tool Newsletter in your inbox every day during the World Series. And the spectacle travels: During Game 4, which Atlanta won 9–2, a few chops broke out at Dodger Stadium. During each pitching change, the team went so far as to darken the stadium to set the mood, as fans used their cellphones while they chopped to create a racist light show. Roughly half of these were instigated by fans the rest were team-initiated, complete with music piped over the PA system and graphics splashed across the jumbotron. Game 1 of the NLCS featured 14 chops Game 2, 20 Game 6, 24, including three on consecutive pitches. “Whether people understand it or not, it’s overtly racist.” “It is overtly racist,” says Aaron Payment, secretary of the National Congress of American Indians and chairperson of the Sault Ste. In large, they say that, given those serious issues, it is especially cruel to have thousands of people making fun of Native Americans at a baseball game.
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“I’ve been asked previously, ‘Are you offended by the tomahawk on the uniform?’ Like, why? A tomahawk is an inanimate object. “There are huge issues that are facing Indian country, and I get a little bit frustrated when it seems to be the only thing that people are outraged about is somebody swinging their arm at a baseball game,” he says, citing the disproportionate rates of poverty, sexual assault and substance use that Native Americans face. Sneed, who says he does not believe that his financial relationship with the team presents a conflict of interest, says he does not personally find the chop to be disrespectful.