The Kansas City Chiefs announced on Thursday that the team is prohibiting fans from wearing ceremonial headdresses and Native American-style facepaint, at the team’s home stadium, Arrowhead Stadium.
What We Know:
- The Cheifs said that they have been discouraging fans from wearing headdresses for the past several years but after discussions with Native American leaders, the team decided to ban the headdresses from the stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, effective immediately. Fans will still be allowed to wear face paint, but the team said that any face paint “styled in a way that references or appropriates American Indian cultures and traditions will be prohibited”. Fans will be asked to remove any such face paint before passing through security checks outside the stadium.
- The team also shared they will be reviewing other aspects of the Chiefs fan culture. For one, they said they will be reviewing the “Arrowhead Chop,” a tomahawk-like arm motion that fans perform at games with a made-up war cry. The team also shared it was also exploring changes to the “Drum Deck,” an area in Arrowhead Stadium where Chiefs players and others bang a large drum to kick off games. The organization said it hoped to find another way to unify both players and fans while also better representing the spiritual significance of the drum in American Indian culture.
- The Chiefs share that the decision to make these fan-focused changes comes after a series of discussions with a group of local leaders from diverse American Indian backgrounds, a conversation they started back in 2014. The sports organization said despite the changes, they plan to continue several traditions intended to honor Native Americans such as a Blessing of the Four Directions and a Blessing of the Drum. The team has also extended an invitation to tribe members to attend its American Indian Heritage Month Game.
- “As an organization, our goal was to gain a better understanding of the issues facing American Indian communities in our region and explore opportunities to both raise awareness of American Indian cultures and celebrate the rich traditions of tribes with a historic connection to the Kansas City area,” the team said in a statement.
- Earlier this year, Kevin Allis, CEO of the National Congress of American Indians, told an NPR affiliate that practices like chopping and chanting actually end up demeaning Native Americans and often wrongly portray them as being homogenous and mythical. “When you see this on TV or in person, this distortion in kind of dehumanizing imagery has lasting negative impacts for us,” Allis said.
- The Chiefs have become the latest organization to confront offensive symbols amid a nationwide discussion of racist imagery and iconography. The announcement from the Chiefs comes just over a month after Washington’s football team faced pressure from corporate sponsors and declared they were dropping its logo and the Redskins name. Other sports organizations with Native American mascots and logos are under increased pressure to re-evaluate their names and mascots such as the Chicago Blackhawks of the NHL and the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball, all of whom have resisted changes thus far.
The Chiefs did not announce any changes to the team name or the name of its stadium. The reigning Super Bowl Champions kick off the NFL season at home on September 10th against the Houston Texans.
