Put the Redskins back in the game?

On or off the field, Washington, D.C.’s National Football League franchise just can’t win.

On the field, Washington went 4-13 last season, placing last in its division. That’s par for the course for the team now known as the Commanders, which has posted just nine winning seasons and hasn’t won a playoff game since its last Super Bowl victory more than three decades ago.

The team adopted the Commanders nickname in 2022 after two seasons as the generically named Washington Football Club. That rebranding is a big part of why Washington can’t win off the field, either.

During the racial tension–plagued summer of 2020, the team finally bowed to public pressure and dropped its controversial Redskins moniker, which the team had embraced—or stubbornly clung to (take your pick)—since 1933. Gone from the team’s helmets was its old logo, a proud, dignified Native American warrior’s feather-adorned head. Replacing it was a gold, military-style block capital “W” that remains on the team’s burgundy helmets to this day.

Fast-forward to the present: A group called the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) is suing the Commanders to resurrect the Redskins name. That perhaps explains why Dan Quinn, the Commanders’ first-year head coach, stirred up controversy at a news conference in May by wearing a T-shirt featuring a combination of Washington’s old and new logos: the Commanders’ “W” with two feathers adorning it.

On top of that, the descendants of John Two Guns White Calf, the chief of the Montana-based Blackfeet tribe whose proud visage football fans used to see every Sunday on Washington’s helmets, want their beloved ancestor’s face displayed again.

Wait a minute. Weren’t the Redskins name and logo supposedly racist and offensive toward America’s indigenous peoples?

Given the cacophony of high-profile voices that once called for the team to ditch the name, one might think so. Sports Illustrated ran a story in 2015 describing how a high school in Illinois abandoned its team’s offensive nickname, a commonly used anti-Asian slur, in 1980 after Illinois newspapers stopped using it for several years. Keeping with its school’s Chinese-themed origin, the school rebranded its teams as the Dragons. The SI story strongly implied that if other media followed the Illinois media example, then-Redskins owner Daniel Snyder might finally swap out his team’s name for something less objectionable, too.

Perhaps taking their cue from the SI article, media outlets nationwide—including my former employer, The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif.—did stop using the name Redskins. In Monday roundups of the previous day’s NFL action, newspapers would print a score along the lines of, “Eagles 20, Washington 17.” (Interestingly, I never saw the Chiefs referred to as “Kansas City.”)

The Redskins also undertook a yearslong legal fight to keep their name. The Obama-era U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tried to cancel the team’s trademarks on the grounds that the team’s name was disparaging to Native Americans. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the Redskins’ right to keep and use the name, declaring that the federal trademark law prohibiting disparagement violated the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees.

Snyder—who the NFL forced to sell the team for $6 billion last year following a scandal-plagued ownership tenure spanning more than two decades—once vowed never to change the team’s name no matter how much vehement opposition he faced. His tune changed when multiple sponsors threatened to disassociate themselves from the team.

After all that, now Native American groups want the team to change its name and logo back?

But are Native American–themed sports nicknames really that offensive?

It depends, first, on whom you ask. Teams at two major universities, Florida State and Utah, bear the names of regional tribes—the Seminoles and Utes, respectively. Both schools have the tribes’ blessing to use the names. The tribes, in turn, partner with the universities to raise awareness of tribal history and culture.

It may also depend on the name. Take Chiefs. It certainly fits for Kansas City’s NFL team, which has won three of the last five Super Bowls. Its name evokes royalty, supremacy, being on top—not much different from Kings, a name shared by Sacramento’s National Basketball Association team and Los Angeles’ National Hockey League franchise.

And is it truly Native Americans who are offended? Some are. But at Florida State, they’re planting flaming spears in the turf before football games. In Kansas City, they’re participating in the “blessing of the drum” before Chiefs games. And in both places—not to mention Atlanta Braves baseball games—they’re bellowing haunting war chants and doing “tomahawk chops” with their right arms alongside fans of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds who share their love of those teams.

NAGA claims it is suing to revive the Redskins nickname because many Native Americans feel “dishonored” by the name change. It’s also why NAGA wants Cleveland’s major league baseball team, now called the Guardians (which is in first place in the American League Central division and headed for the playoffs) to change its name back to Indians.

Back in 2022, when the Braves visited the White House to celebrate their World Series victory from the previous year, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “Native American and indigenous voices, they should be at the center of this conversation.”

I agree, Ms. Jean-Pierre. That includes the Native American voices calling to keep Native American–themed names, too.