1 woman vs. NFL's Redskins

WASHINGTON - Suzan Shown Harjo still becomes tense when she recalls the only Washington Redskins home game she attended, nearly 40 years ago.

After she moved to Washington, she and her husband received free tickets. Fans sitting nearby, apparently amused that American Indians were in their midst, pawed their hair and poked them, "not in an unfriendly way, but in a scary way," Harjo said.

"We didn't know what was next," she said.

Harjo and her husband left the game, but they never left Washington, and the incident fueled her long battle to get the team to change its name. Since the 1960s, Harjo has been at the center of efforts to persuade schools, colleges and professional sports teams to drop American Indian names and mascots that some consider derogatory.

The fight has escalated in recent days as groups have intensified lobbying efforts and organized protests, even prompting President Barack Obama to weigh in on the issue.

The debate tends to settle on one central question: How many people must be offended by a team's name for a change to be warranted? The Redskins, of the National Football League, cite polling in which most respondents said they were not offended by the name, while those lobbying the team to drop its name dispute the accuracy of that data and say that, no matter, the word is widely regarded as derogatory.

More than two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 teams with American Indian mascots have dropped them, many voluntarily and without incident. Along the way, Harjo, the director of the Morning Star Institute, a group that promotes Native American causes, became something of a godmother to the cause of eliminating disparaging mascots.

"She has led this fight early," said Ray Halbritter, a representative of the Oneida Indian Nation, which has paid for advertisements calling on the Redskins to abandon their name. "We stand on her shoulders."

But Harjo, who prefers the term Native American, considers her work unfinished because professional teams, most notably the Redskins, have been vocal about keeping their names. In May, Daniel Snyder, the Redskins' owner, echoed his predecessors when he vowed never to change the name.

The Redskins, playing in the nation's capital and the country's wealthiest league, have remained steadfast as many other teams have changed their nicknames, dating to the 1960s, when the owner at the time, George Preston Marshall, opposed desegregation. Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the team in the 1970s, met with American Indians to discuss the team's name, but little followed.

"There are so many milestones in this issue," Harjo, 68, said Monday at an event held by ChangetheMascot.org, a group urging the Redskins to change their name. "It is king of the mountain because it's associated with the nation's capital, so what happens here affects the rest of the country."

Harjo, Halbritter, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., and others who attended the event said that they would continue to call on Snyder and the NFL to change the team's name. McCollum, via social media and letters, has received the brunt of the backlash from some fans who think the Redskins should not change their name. ("I'm offended by the name Vikings as I have family from Denmark," one person wrote on McCollum's Facebook page, imploring her to "concentrate on a budget and don't worry about the Washington Redskins.")

Last week, days before the league's 32 owners were to meet in Washington, the debate was inflamed when Obama said that he would consider changing the name if he owned the team. Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, also has called on broadcasters to avoid using the team's nickname.

In what amounts to a break in the stalemate, Adolpho Birch, the NFL's senior vice president for labor policy and government affairs, sent a letter last Friday to Peter Carmen, the chief operating officer of Oneida Indian Nation. Birch suggested that they meet before their previously scheduled meeting on Nov. 22.

"We respect that people have differing views," said Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL.

"It is important that we listen to all perspectives," he said.

still will be able to use the Redskins name. But the federal government would no longer be obliged to protect the team's trademarks, XXX and thus less likely to seize counterfeit goods, a potentially expensive exemption that could hit the team and league in the pocketbook.

"You're not just dealing with the Washington franchise, but the whole of the NFL," Harjo said. "It's one monolith after another laden with money and the power it represents."