Photo by Brian Allen
Most Native Americans aren’t offended by the Washington Football Team’s name, according to a new poll. The Washington Post asked 504 “ordinary” Indians throughout the country a series of questions to determine if the R-word bothered them, and 90 percent of them said they don’t mind the team’s use of the name.
Just over half of the respondents are football fans, according to the poll. In general, 70 percent of them said that the R-word is not disrespectful to Native Americans, and 80 percent of respondents said that they would not be offended if a non-Native American person used the word to refer to them.
In 2004, the Annenberg Public Policy Center polled 768 self-identified Indians or Native Americans, and got similar results, indicating that respondents were overwhelmingly unaffected.
“We’ll never change the name,” the team’s owner, Dan Snyder, told USA Today in 2013. “It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.”
Still, opposers of the name have rallied for decades to see the Washington Football Team change its mascot. Last July, a Federal judge in Virginia sided with them by upholding a ruling that cancelled the team’s trademark.
In a petition last October, the team appealed the cancellation by pointing out a litany of other trademarks with vulgarities and slurs. And last month, the team requested that the Supreme Court hear its case if it chooses to take another case involving an Asian-American rock band with a controversial name.
In response to the poll results, leaders of the Change the Mascot campaign said that respondents aren’t unbothered, they are “resilient,” according to a release. They say the results are encouraging, in fact, because Native Americans have “not allowed the NFL’s decades-long denigration of us to define our own self-image,” said Jackie Pata of the National Congress of American Indians.
She further points out that children, who were not polled, are in a “particularly vulnerable position to be bullied by the NFL,” and in the 21st century, “it is long overdue for Native Americans to be treated not as mascots or targets of slurs, but instead as equals.”
According to a Washington City Paper poll from January, 58 percent of D.C. residents consider the name offensive.
