If recent reports hold true, the Washington NFL team name is finally on its way out. Despite a lot of grand declarations about tradition, legacy, and tribute, it seems that the winds have shifted enough to make the rich people in charge of such decisions a little less eager to be attached to a slur franchise: Three owners, with a combined 40 percent stake in the team, have said they intend to sell if the R-word remains. Nike, Amazon, and Walmart took a stand at the last possible second, pulling their Washington merchandise. Even head coach Ron Rivera told The Washington Post that the team must find a new name, with the paper reporting that his preference is for something that is “respectful of Native American culture and traditions and also is a tribute to the military.”
It’s uncertain what will happen next, but it would be a mistake to treat whatever it is—a new name, a new logo, some pat apologies from the people who fought to maintain the slur for so long—as the end of the issue. The Washington franchise was the most public facing and egregious example of the problem, but more than just a set of derogatory or reductive names and symbols, the phenomenon has always been in service of maintaining a fantasy version of history and a practice of tokenizing or mythologizing Native people and communities. As put to me by Bryan Brayboy, a Lumbee citizen and the President’s Professor of Indigenous education and justice at Arizona State University, “It’s a myth that has become a truth, one that gets re-instantiated with each telling, and the telling is frequent—the telling that we don’t exist anymore.”
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