For once, powerful people seemed to be listening. Marquee sports journalists such as Bob Costas said they would stop using the name, as did more than a dozen news outlets and the editorial board of the Redskins’ hometown paper, The Washington Post; civil-rights groups and sports figures came out against it; 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who admitted that the league needed to listen to “different perspectives”; and the Patent and Trademark Office revoked six of the team’s registered trademarks, calling them “disparaging.” In October 2013, a mere month after Change the Mascot began, President Obama (who overlapped with Halbritter at Harvard Law, though the two didn’t know each other) told reporters that if he were the team owner, he’d “think about changing” the name. The controversy even landed on episodes of South Park, The Daily Show, and Jeopardy.

In other words, Snyder—a man who’d made his fortune in marketing—was getting shellacked by a 1,000-member American Indian tribe in cow country 400 miles to the north.

Halbritter was the sort of adversary the Redskins had never seen before: a leader of an American Indian tribe, with media chops, A-list political ties (he sat beside Obama at a White House event in 2013 and hosted a golf fund-raiser for John Boehner this August), and a bankroll big enough to keep the NFL’s third-most-valuable franchise under a blistering spotlight. Snyder reportedly assembled a crisis-PR team that included Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, and Frank Luntz, the influential pollster. Already on board was Lanny Davis, a lobbyist and former special counsel to President Bill Clinton.

When I asked Bruce E. Johansen, a professor in the Native American Studies Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, what distinguished Halbritter’s anti-mascot juggernaut from the long line of earlier efforts, he said: “Money. When you have Halbritter’s wealth, it buys media access. It buys attention.”

The Turning Stone Resort Casino, a ribbon of white stone and dark glass located half an hour east of Syracuse, is one of the top-grossing American Indian casinos, raking in well over $200 million a year in revenue from its slot machines, golf courses, and hotel rooms. I met Halbritter there a few days before his Harvard talk, and we took a drive through tribal land known as “the 32 acres”—all that remained of the 6 million acres the Oneidas had called home before European conquest.

Our chauffeured black Yukon XL slowed, and Halbritter pointed to the spot where his aunt and uncle had burned to death in their trailer, in 1976, as calls to the City of Oneida Fire Department went unanswered. The fire is Halbritter’s road-to-Damascus story, the crisis that sapped the last of his faith in outsiders. The transcripts are chilling:

Caller: Please come up here. [Crying] There’s people in the trailer.

Fire Department: I’m sorry ma’am, I can’t do nothin’ for ya … We got orders not to go on there.

“One of the things that still haunts me is the smell,” Halbritter told me. “Of bodies, of people who have burned.”