US president takes new swipe at Washington’s NFL team at Tribal Nations Conference and says he supports Adidas effort to replace high school mascots

Barack Obama has taken a fresh swipe at Washington’s NFL team for using the word “Redskins” despite the team name causing offence to American Indians.

Addressing a White House Tribal Nations Conference on Thursday, the US president welcomed an initiative by Adidas to provide the country’s 2,000 high schools which currently have Native American mascots with free design resources to replace them.

“If you walk into a school the first day and you’re already feeling that stereotypes are embedded in the culture and the cheers and all that, right away that kid is feeling set apart and different,” the president told the gathering in Washington that included traditional drumming and a few feather headdresses.

Adidas has “really come up with a smart creative approach which is to say, all right, if we can’t get states to pass laws to prohibit these mascots, then how can we incentivise schools to get rid of them? And so what Adidas has done is it’s said to the 2,000-plus schools that still have Native American, Alaska Native mascots, ‘You know what, we will work with you to redesign your entire sports brand.’”

He added, to laughter: “I don’t know if it’s made the same offer to a certain NFL team here in Washington. But they might want to think about that as well.”



American Indian campaigners have been fighting a long legal battle to force the removal of the Redskins’ name, arguing that it is a racist stereotype that should become as extinct as the team’s cheerleaders performing a mock rain dance or threatening to scalp opponents. But team owner Dan Snyder has stoutly resisted, once telling USA Today: “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER – you can use caps.”

Obama made his feelings clear in a 2013 interview with the Associated Press when he said: “If I were the owner of the team and I knew that the name of my team, even if they’ve had a storied history, was offending a sizeable group of people, I’d think about changing it.”

On Thursday his intervention was welcomed by conference delegate Aaron Payment of the The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan. “It’s time to get past this. History is on our side: we know we’re going to win this eventually,” he said.

“There was a time when the black sambo was popular in the American lexicon and you look back at some of the earlier literature where people found it entertaining, and black people were less threatening because they were the black sambo and doing a little dance, and now we look back at that as just so objectively racist. I think the time will come when we will look back and say how foolish.”



Adidas executives were present at the annual Tribal Nations Conference, attended by representatives of America’s 566 federally recognised tribes, where Obama was widely praised as the best ever president for serving American Indian interests. The German company said it would offer financial assistance and “design resources” to any high school that wants to change its mascot “from potentially harmful Native American imagery or symbolism”.

But the Washington Redskins swiftly responded, noting that Adidas supplies teams that use Indian symbolism. Maury Lane, a team spokesman, said: “The hypocrisy of changing names at the high school level of play and continuing to profit off of professional like-named teams is absurd.



“Adidas make hundreds of millions of dollars selling uniforms to teams like the Chicago Blackhawks and the Golden State Warriors, while profiting off sales of fan apparel for the Cleveland Indians, Florida State Seminoles, Atlanta Braves and many other like-named teams.”

However, this argument was challenged by the campaign group Change the Mascot. “In response to the admirable decision by Adidas to take a stand against offensive Native American mascots, the Washington NFL team’s spokesman listed a number of ‘like-named’ teams, but only the R-word is a dictionary-defined racial slur,” spokesman Joel Barkin said.

“The Washington NFL team is trying to create a false comparison to other sports teams because slurring Native Americans with the racist R-word epithet is completely indefensible. The issue is not complicated—no sports team should be promoting, marketing and profiting from the use of a racial slur. Dan Snyder and his cohorts are finding themselves increasingly isolated because they insist on clinging at all costs to a blatantly racist mascot.”

According to Change the Mascot, about a dozen schools have dropped Native mascots over the past two years and another 20 are considering a change. Some states have taken action at the high school level. Last month California governor Jerry Brown signed a law that prohibits schools from using the term “redskins”.