Of course, I was rooting for the San Francisco 49ers. They’re the hometown team, and an exciting one at that, notwithstanding the heartbreaker overtime loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. Yet, quite apart from the final score, and far more significant, is the social injustice woven into the two teams’ names and logos.
Kansas City is the more blatant case. The team’s name and logo might seem to have an Indigenous provenance, but that’s an illusion.
The name actually came from H. Roe Bartle, who was mayor of Kansas City from 1955 to 1963 and the founder of the faux-Native Tribe of Mic-O-Say in the Boy Scouts. Even though his ancestry was Euro-American, Bartle was nicknamed The Chief for his Boy Scouts work. He claimed a connection to Wyoming’s Arapaho people to justify the nickname, but that link fails to check out. Bartle was a white guy playing Indian, the conqueror appropriating the culture of the conquered.
In the early 1960s Mayor Bartle lured the Dallas Texans of the American Football League to Kansas City by offering incentives too lucrative to refuse. Since the relocation from Texas to Missouri meant the team had to change its name, Lamar Hunt, the team’s owner, decided to honor Bartle for his role in swelling the team’s coffers. So it was that the Dallas Texans became the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Chiefs remain a holdout against the recent wave of successful campaigns against faux-Native names and mascots from school sports to the professional leagues. In July 2020, as racial awareness rose in the aftermath of the George Floyd and Brianna Taylor killings, the Washington NFL franchise finally dropped the racist slur from its name and logo, largely because major advertisers threatened to stop supporting the team. Thus it became the Washington Commanders. Likewise, the Cleveland Major League Baseball team deep-sixed its cringe-worthy Chief Yahoo logo, cut the word “Indians” from its name, and became the Guardians. Despite the trend, though, the Atlanta MLB club remains the Braves, and Kansas City’s football team the Chiefs.
Even the Chiefs recognize their name’s racial diceyness. Fans used to come to Arrowhead Stadium decked out in face paint and feather headdresses to cheer the team on. That stopped after the team established the American Indian Community Working Group, which comprises tribal representatives from the Kansas City region, and implemented its recommendations. Still, fans continue to celebrate touchdowns with the notorious “tomahawk chop” chant. And the team’s name and logo remain in place despite ongoing protests and online petitions against them.
What’s at stake here isn’t painless nostalgia. According to a 2005 report from the American Psychological Association, names and mascots drawn from racial stereotypes do harm, particularly to young members of the targeted group. The Chiefs’ name and logo come at that price.
Admittedly it takes years and costs millions to change the name of a professional sports team. No matter; it’s high time Kansas City got to it.
In the case of the San Francisco 49ers, the team’s name and Sourdough Sam mascot also testify to injustice, but in a more subtle way. The name and the mascot aren’t overtly racist. Rather, they gloss over a terrible racial slaughter that still haunts California.
The fortune seekers who landed soon after the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills picked up the 49ers nickname for their 1849 arrival in such greedy multitudes that they amounted to an invasion. Interested only in making as much money as possible as soon as possible, the newcomers overran Native Californians and occupied their homelands by force. Tribal people had no rights, in the miners’ view, so they could be killed whenever and wherever they got in the way.
Since almost all the new arrivals were men, sexual assault and rape of Native women were whisky-fueled, Saturday-night commonplaces. Native men who intervened to save their mothers, wives, sisters, or daughters were shot down. Many tribes fought back against the invasion and the outrages, but that struggle pitted their spears and bows against the miners’ rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Most of the time, they lost.
The violence grew even worse after gold was found in far northern California, and men from Oregon streamed over the border to cash in. Many were Cayuse War veterans who hated Indigenous people on principle and killed them on sight. Some mining camps even took to paying bounties for Native scalps. If a miner’s dreams of gold didn’t pan out — more often than not they didn’t — he could make a living killing and scalping tribal people.
This legacy of racial violence in California’s first years as an American territory laid the foundation for the clearest instance of government-sponsored genocide in the United States. More on that in an upcoming post.
In the meantime, Super Bowl LVIII reminds us how history — often its meanest and nastiest episodes — clings to things we take too much for granted and fail to question, even when we should.
“The past,” William Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The Super Bowl proved him right yet again.