At 10 o’clock Saturday morning, about 1,500 miles east of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, a group of 15 protesters stepped off a bus in windswept Northern Virginia to deliver a stack of petitions with 1,820 signatures, all recently gathered.

This was the second straight year that the group that calls itself Rebrand Washington Football: Fans for a New Name dropped by the headquarters of Washington’s pro football team, advocating a change from the “Redskins” nickname, which is considered offensive by many fans.

The delivery crew Saturday was four times larger than it was last year and the petitions carried 179 more signatures, said Josh Silver, a longtime fan of the team who is from Bethesda, Maryland, and one of the founders of the group. He saw those numbers as small steps forward.

“I’ll be honest – it’s not going to be easy, and it could take a while, but history is on our side,” Silver, a policy advisor for a fair-lending-advocacy organization, told the Guardian. “These are a group of people who are trying to take back their identities, to take back their homes.”

The group’s letter to Washington’s owner, Dan Snyder, included this: “The name is demeaning. It robs Native Americans of their identity. It is a dictionary defined racial slur that refers to scalping. While we appreciate that you think that you are honoring Native Americans, the name has the opposite effect. In our advocacy, we have met Native American parents who struggle with anger and disgust when they try to explain to their children why a team uses stereotypical Native American logos and names.”

Among those who attended the gathering was Jordan Marie Daniel, 28, an advocate for and grassroots organizer for the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota who now lives in Washington. She told the Guardian of the nickname, “It’s definitely in the dictionary as a racial slur, demeaning, degrading and belittling.” She added, “It brings out a lot of historical trauma for all of us.”

Compared to the protest against an oil pipeline at Standing Rock, the Rebrand Washington Football demonstration attracted little attention. Another nickname protest, the first of the NFL season, in Glendale, Arizona, before the Washington-Cardinals game Sunday was smaller than a similar protest two years ago because Standing Rock was a bigger issue.

But the change-the-nickname movement is not going away. Amanda Blackhorse, a social worker and Navajo member who organized the Arizona to Rally Against Native Mascots march on Sunday, told the Guardian that the anti-nickname movement has gained “absolutely great momentum in the last several years – more specifically, in the last three or four years.”

Awareness of either Washington’s nickname or the pipeline seems to be driving interest in indigenous issues of all sorts lately, Blackhorse said. In fact, she sounds as if she is much more determined to drive away what she regards as a “dehumanizing” nickname.

“What we’re doing hasn’t changed,” she said. “Our voice, and our movement, hasn’t changed.”

She said of Snyder, “I feel like now he’s digging his heels in – it’s become a pride issue, or an ego issue.”

The nickname issue has lingered for most of three decades but became hotter when Snyder wrote in an October 2013 letter to fans that he respected those offended by the nickname, but added, “We cannot ignore our 81-year history.”

The nickname actually predates the franchise’s tenure in Washington. The football team was known in 1932, its first season, as the Boston Braves, after the big-league baseball team, before changing its nickname in 1933, four years before the team moved to Washington.

Snyder, now 52, remembered attending a game at RFK Stadium when he was six with his father, writing, “how deafening it was when we scored. The ground beneath me seemed to move and shake, and I reached up to grab my father’s hand. The smile on his face as he sang the song ... he’s been gone for 10 years now, but that smile, and his pride, are still with me every day.”

Snyder wrote to the fans then, in part, because President Obama had just said if he owned the team, and if he had heard the nickname offended a “sizable” group of people, he would change it – the franchise’s history notwithstanding.

But exactly what defines “sizable?” In May, a poll of 504 Native Americans conducted by the Washington Post found that fewer than one in 10 respondents found the team’s nickname “offensive.” One in five of those polled said they would be offended if a non-Native called them by that name. The poll was conducted nationally, not locally.

In June 2014, however, the US Patent and Trademark Office terminated six federal trademark registrations held by the team because the nickname is disparaging to Native Americans – a victory for Blackhorse after an eight-year campaign.

Three months earlier, Snyder had written another letter to fans in which the team would launch a foundation for “original Americans,” addressing what he said were the “urgent challenges plaguing Indian country based on what Tribal leaders tell us they need most.”

Many collegiate and scholastic teams have dropped Native American nicknames in the last two decades, but not Washington. Blackhorse agreed that Snyder could benefit financially – as well as appearing to be sensitive – by scrapping the old nickname and conjuring a new name, even while keeping the team’s longstanding colors of burgundy and gold.

Redtails, Renegades and Pigskins have been among many suggested. (The winner in a 2014 readers’ poll of about a dozen possible nicknames in USA Today was, simply, Washington Football Club.) Blackhorse pointed out that the team has not won the Super Bowl for 25 years, anyway, so maybe a fresh look might help on the field.

Late Sunday, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe recorded a major victory when the Army Corps of Engineers announced it will not grant the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the Missouri River. Alternate routes would be explored.

More than 1,000 miles away, the pursuit for a new nickname for a old-time pro football team will continue. The owner, upheld by tradition, will still be a worthy foe.

“I have hope,” Jordan Marie Daniel said of the nickname. “I think it will change. Will it happen any time soon? I don’t think it will, but if can just keep up the momentum, just keep up the pressure, it could happen some day.”