Suzan Harjo fought for decades to remove the Redskins name. She’ll wait to celebrate.
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Version 0 of 1. For Suzan Shown Harjo, 75, the prospect of ever seeing an end to the racially offensive name of Washington’s pro football team was slim to none. She had spent 17 years as lead plaintiff in a lawsuit to change the name. But to no avail. In her role as an activist and leader of the National Congress of American Indians, she’d made repeated calls for a name change. That didn’t work, either. As a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by Barack Obama, she said that changing the name was the right thing to do. That had no effect. And as a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall, she offered the museum as a more appropriate home for such relics as the team mascot and logos. But she had no takers. Instead, team owner Daniel Snyder famously declared that he would “never” change the name. Then, two months ago, Harjo tested positive for the novel coronavirus. After that diagnosis, a name change wasn’t foremost on her mind. She was just hoping to stay alive. “At my age and with my co-morbidities, I was at great risk for experiencing the worst consequences of covid-19,” Harjo, referring to the disease caused by the virus, told me recently. But the odds be darned. Harjo did not become ill. “I’m asymptomatic, knock on wood,” she said. Then on Monday came another near-miraculous development: Snyder, bowing to pressure from investors and corporate sponsors, announced that a search was underway for a new team name. Washington’s name change happened fast, but it was decades in the making The old name had died. And Harjo had lived to see its departure after all. Her response showed that she was still coming to grips with covid-19, sounding philosophical and grateful. “It is very strange having a deadly disease with no symptoms,” Harjo said. “But what covid-19 is giving me is a greater sense of mortality and a renewed urgency to do what I can do — now. I think others are feeling the same way, even if they have not caught the virus. “There is a greater need to get some things settled — on the streets, in the boardrooms, in the kitchens — because more of us have become aware that our country is on shaky ground,” she added. Harjo, who lives in the District, was born in Oklahoma. She is Cheyenne and Muscogee. Her father was in the U.S. Army stationed with NATO in Italy for some of her high school years, but she returned to Oklahoma in 1962 for her senior year. That’s when she heard a Native American activist named Clyde Warrior speak to her class about the demeaning use of Native Americans as sports mascots. “Clyde was organizing protests against ‘Little Red,’ the mascot at the University of Oklahoma,” Harjo recalled. Little Red was a white man painted red and dressed in Indian-style clothing who performed imitation tribal dances during football games. “Many of us just called him the ‘dancing idiot’ and left it at that,” Harjo said. “But Clyde put the stereotypes and caricatures into a historical context, connecting them to the genocide and ongoing oppression of Native Americans. He went through a long list of demeaning mascots, and at the end, he says, ‘And the worst one of all is located in Washington, D.C., in the nation’s capital.’ And it was as if he had opened the dome of the Capitol to reveal all of the people inside calling us that awful name.” When Harjo joined the protest movement that year, there were more than 3,000 schools and sports teams using Native American imagery for mascots. In 1970, Little Red would be the first of 2,100 that have been removed so far. There were about 900 remaining when Washington announced that its team name and logo would be next. Harjo came to Washington in the mid-1970s and worked as a congressional liaison for Indian affairs in the Carter administration. She immediately became involved with other activist organizations that had been protesting the team name since the 1930s. “This was a mighty movement that had been successful all along, which is what made the Washington case so infuriating at times,” Harjo said. “We’d already won this fight in terms of gaining a societal understanding of the issues. There were thousands of people involved, spanning generations. The Washington team could have joined with the people of good conscience a long time ago.” I had spoken with Harjo in 2013, after Snyder had said the name would never be changed. “It’s the stuff of Custer,” she told me back then, referring to U.S. Army General George Armstrong Custer, defeated by Native Americans in 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer’s Last Stand, it was called. “Arrogant and shortsighted, he’s alone on a hill, intent on killing Indians after leading his men into a battle they cannot win,” Harjo said of Custer. With FedEx threatening to sever ties with the team if the name wasn’t changed, FedEx Field came to represent Snyder’s Last Stand. Harjo conceded that she remains skeptical if also hopeful about Snyder’s announced plans for a name change. “I’m pleased with the progress, but we’ve been close before,” she said. “We’d made the case. We had respected members of the community, the Congress, on our side. Then as soon as we let our guard down, we learn that the only thing the franchise had in mind was tinkering with the imagery — changing the skin tone of the mascot, muting the facial features, enlarging the spear. They were always trying to see how much racism they could get away with — willing to change the package but never the content.” She added: “We’ve learned that you don’t dance in the end zone just because you got close to the goal line. You dance after you score.” To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy. Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.) Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news |