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DR. PHILIP DELORIA: Welcome to the last session of our symposium on Racist Stereotypes and Cultural Appropriation in American Sports. Today we’ll be closing the symposium with is a community conversation about the Washington NFL football team name. My name is Phil Deloria. I’ll be the moderator for the panel today. I’m a professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan and the associate dean for undergraduate education. My scholarly work has to do with cultural appropriations and representations of American Indian people in the broader world of American culture. We have five distinguished guests with us today. I’m going to say only a very few quick words of introduction. I think some of their comments will perhaps lead you to know more and understand more about them. Judith Bartnoff, Esquire, is the deputy presiding judge of the civil division of the District of Columbia Superior Court, attended Columbia University Law School, worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, was the Justice Department representation on a task force concerned with American Indian religious freedom issues, has worked for the Navajo tribe, in private practice for a few years in 1994 then moved to the bench as an associate judge and now of course deputy presiding judge. To her left Mr. Erik Brady, sports reporter, USA Today. He’s been active over a three-decade career since 1982 doing features. He’s written on everything in sports as far as I can tell. When you Google him what you get is a page that has links to all of his clips and it’s not one page, it’s 64 pages long. He’s written on everything including football and including some of these issues. To his left the Reverend Graylan Hagler of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ. He’s the immediate past president of Ministers for Racial, Social, and Economic Justice, received his Master’s of Divinity degree from Chicago Theological Seminary, 12 years as a pastor in Boston committed to empowerment, opposition to racism, anti-apartment movements. He even ran for mayor while he was there. To his left Mike Wise, sports columnist at the Washington Post. He’s been a writer at the New York Times. He’s examined the mascot issue in several thoughtful, well-written pieces, has considered team names and mascots not only here but in Illinois and elsewhere, and finally to his left Robert Holden, who’s the deputy director of the National Congress of American Indians. He is Choctaw/ Chickasaw, active in a number of issues in American Indian country. He was very active with post-Katrina Louisiana tribes, for example, environmental emergency issues, sacred sites, voting issues, ranging across the board Native American issues. What our panelists will do is speak to us for somewhere in the range of seven to ten minutes, not really very long. What we’re really trying to do here is to balance the expertise that we have on stage with the notion that we can have more of community conversation. Each will speak from somewhere in the seven to ten minute range. That gets us kind of closing up on an hour. That leaves us about an hour to talk collaboratively and collectively about this as an audience. Just to lay down a couple of quick ground rules for when we move to that community conversation--first of all everyone who would like to ask a question or make a short statement should move to the microphones at the back. We’re doing this because of course our session today is being webcast and it’s also being webcast up to another room where I had the pleasure of watching a little bit of it this morning. Please just think a little bit about our opportunities if this is our situation to maximize the conversation, to maximize the number of voices. I’m in a university context. A lot of times we have this exact set-up with the microphone in the back and every once in awhile someone will get up and want to talk for 15 minutes and it’s just not really very good for anyone. That’s a quarter of our collective time. If four of us did it only four people would talk. We’d rather hear more kinds of voices. It makes everyone a little nervous and itchy to have this going on. Try to be sort of aware of the fact there may be many, many people who would like to…might like to speak on these issues. I’ll say a few words in closing and then we’ll have a delightful reception I believe out in the front of the atrium part of the museum. With that I will turn to Judith Bartnoff. Please make her welcome. HON. JUDITH BARTNOFF: Thank you very much. It is a real honor to be here. You’re going to hear that I’m sure from each one of the panelists. Let me begin by making it clear that I’m not here in any official capacity representing the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. My comments this afternoon should not be taken as any official position of the court on the issues we’re discussing, but I am here as a long-time resident of the District of Columbia and my experiences as a judge on our local trial court for the past 18 years certainly do inform my perspective. The primary point I want to make to begin our discussion today is that the District of Columbia is a real place. Those of us who live here understand that for much of the country the District is the nation’s capital, a place where people may come for a short time to serve in the government, or a place with marble monuments and museums for tourists to visit, but for many of us the District--and in saying the District I mean the surrounding communities as well--the District is our home. It’s where we live, work, go to school, the grocery store and the dry cleaner and the doctor and the movies. It’s where we conduct our day-to-day lives. The Superior Court itself is emblematic of that. Because of the unique laws establishing the District’s government, it is a federal court and our judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. We also, by the way, are required by federal law to live in the District of Columbia, which is not a requirement for judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. What Superior Court judges deal with every day reflects the regular life of the city. Everything from simple assaults to drug deals to murders, divorces, protection of children and the elderly, car accidents, landlord and tenant matters, consumer complaints, tax liens, and all sorts of other things in the you-can’t-make-this- 00:06:34 stuff-up category. I start from the premise that the District is not just the nation’s capital but a real place, and there are no symbols more important as a unifying force in the District of Columbia, and confirmation that this is a real place, than our local sports teams. We do have a soccer team, a hockey team, and a basketball team and thank goodness now a baseball team, but there’s no real question that the most prominent symbol of the real Washington is the local football team. A symbol, by the way, that also unites Washington and the adjoining Maryland and Virginia suburbs. I well remember an article that appeared in the Washington Post in the early eighties when the local football team finally had made it to the Super Bowl. The article said essentially that the team being in the Super Bowl had special importance to the District because it was proof to the rest of the country that this is a real place. The football team has become a symbol of our legitimacy as a community. Last fall my husband and I attended what turned out to be unfortunately the last play-off game for the season for the Nationals. The feeling of being in the stadium with over 40,000 people all screaming at the top of their lungs was both exhilarating and I will confess a little bit scary, but part of what was so exciting about it was that we all were there, that is with the exception of a few lone Cardinals fans, including one very loud one near us, and I’m happy to say that nothing bad happened to him although I was a little bit worried about it. We all were there as equals and Nationals fans and no one cared if there were celebrities or politicians there too. They were welcome to join the party but it was our party until it stopped being a party. This was our team that was on its way to the World Series even though as it turned out we may have to wait another year. I could only imagine what it would be like to be at a football game at Fed Ex field in a crowd of closer to 90,000 people all screaming at the top of their lungs when what they are screaming is a racial slur. I will leave it to others to discuss the sociological and psychological impact of all this, and I expect that we’ll be addressing some of those issues in this panel this afternoon, but I do think there is something both troubling and anomalous that perhaps the strongest unifying symbol of the Washington, D.C. community and the most tangible proof that this is a real place is called by a name that is disrespectful and derogatory to Native people. What we can do about that may be an open question, but I don’t think we seriously can claim anymore that it isn’t true, and to the extent we don’t acknowledge it we’re in serious denial. This is a community that includes people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds, and I think we all recognize the importance of treating one another with dignity and respect. That our most powerful unifying symbol is directly opposed to those basic values undermines the community itself and that warrants serious reflection and conversation. MR. ERIK BRADY: When I was a sports- mad kid growing up in Buffalo, Saturday nights were always reserved for the college basketball double- headers at the big arena downtown. The local Catholic schools were the Canisius College Golden Griffins, the Niagara University Purple Eagles, and the St. Bonaventure Brown Indians. The teams played and the mascots pranced, and it all seemed like so much magic to a boy who would one day grow up to be a sports writer. In my mind’s eye I can still see that cloud of cigarette smoke that would form in the rafters as the nights wore on in an era where that seemed more atmospheric than carcinogenic. My father was a professor of English at Canisius so the Griffins were our team, but we always watched the Eagles and the Indians, our great local rivals, with enormous interest if not always great affection. The most common nickname in college sports is Eagles, as at Niagara. The seventh most common in those days was Indians as at St. Bona, though when all such mascots were grouped together from Braves to Chiefs to Warriors, those nicknames were the most common in all the land, and this seemed natural enough to me. Our Buffalo Bills played against the Kansas City Chiefs, our morning paper carried headlines about the Cleveland Indians that would say the likes of tribe on war path, scalp yanks, and twin bill, and then when I was in grammar school my sister Moira began dating a man named John Roberts, whose maternal grandfather was Seneca. Moira and her future husband would take my brother and me to the college double-headers, and it was John who would take us aside and point to the student dressed as the Bonaventure mascot, and explain why a drunken white kid whooping it up in buckskin and war paint was so deeply objectionable on so many levels. A lot has changed since then. There’s no smoking in public arenas anymore, and the Brown Indian is long gone. St. Bona’s athletic teams have been known exclusively as the Bonnies since the mid-1990s. That school is one among many hundreds from middle to high school to college that have swapped out their mascots in the last 40 years or so, but a lot has stayed the same, too. No professional team has ever changed its Indian-themed nickname though the Golden State Warriors did the next best thing by ridding itself of its indigenous imagery. Still, the role call of pro teams continues to include Cleveland’s Indians, Kansas City’s Chiefs, Chicago’s Blackhawks, Atlanta’s Braves and, as everyone in this room and this region knows very well, Washington’s Redskins. This is most egregious of all. The other names in other contexts are not offensive. This one, except when applied to potatoes, always is, but you needn’t take my word for it. As Casey Stengel would say, you could look it up. Find it in the dictionary between red shirt and red snapper, and you’ll find redskin characterized as disparaging and offensive. The Washington pro football team argues that the name is meant to glorify, not to disparage. The late Jack Kent Cook, when he owned the team colorfully explained that the name would never change on his watch. He’d say, “There’s not a single solitary jot tiddle wit chance in the world that the Redskins will adopt a new nickname.” Few will recall that when Cook’s estate sold the team it was originally to be sold to real estate magnate Howard Milstein, and his young lesser-known partner Daniel Snyder. There was a news conference when Milstein was named provisional owner and a chance for individual reporters to speak to Milstein and Snyder one-on-one for a few minutes. When I got my chance I asked Milstein about changing the name of the Washington football team and to my surprise he said he’d consider it. Snyder sat next to him and didn’t say a word but the look on his face suggested there wasn’t a solitary jot tiddle wit chance that could happen in his world. When Milstein’s financing fell through, he withdrew his bid and Snyder forged a bid of his own that was ultimately accepted, and so here we are. Just a matter of weeks ago, before the Washington pro football team played a post-season game at Fed Ex Field, one of the local TV stations asked viewers to send in video clips of them and their friends and families singing “Hail to the Redskins.” Some of them used the original lyrics with some of the since-sanitized lines about scalp them and wampum, and no one on the air seemed to notice or care. When I began writing about this issue at the Buffalo Courier Express in the 1970s, I quickly found it makes people very angry. When I interviewed Suzan Shown Harjo about this in the 1980s she said whenever she brings up this topic she’s made to feel like the skunk at a garden party, and in a column for USA Today before the 1995 World Series between the Braves and the Indians I wrote that people would look back in 50 years and marvel that these names and images survived for so long. That got me an invitation on the old CNN shout-fest Crossfire, where the late Robert Novak scoffed at the notion that his beloved Chief Illiniwek would be gone from the University of Illinois sidelines in 50 years. Turned out it only took 12. Changes come at colleges because they have a moral center and are sensitive to pressure. Neither dynamic applies very well at the pro level. Billionaires are not accustomed to hearing what they don’t want to hear or doing what they don’t want to do. When the Washington professional football team says that its nickname honors, I’m always reminded of what Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass. When I use a word Humpty Dumpty says in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less, to which Alice answers the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things. Daniel Snyder owns a football team. He doesn’t own the dictionary. The word he wants to change the meaning of is a racial epithet. He can’t change its meaning anymore than he can change its shameful history. Where does that leave the rest of us? Well, we could take Suzan’s advice, be the skunks, make a stink at the garden parties, and at the tailgates and the luxury boxes. Mascots are not trivial to me. My father was the one who started the Griffin as the Canisius mascot and when I went to school there I was the one who wore the Griffin suit at the arena where I’d gone to those double-headers as a child. The cigarette smoke in the rafters was but misty memory, but the Brown Indian would remain for 20 more years, and when at last he was shown the door, I considered it a victory for Griffins everywhere. A couple of years ago William and Mary retained the nickname “tribe” but jettisoned all of its indigenous imagery. That meant the nation’s second oldest university needed to find a new mascot to patrol the sidelines at its athletic events. Happily William and Mary came up with a mascot I can readily endorse, a Griffin. REV. GRAYLAN HAGLER: Good afternoon. First I want to just greet everybody who’s visiting with us in Washington, D.C. because we are truly a reservation in Washington, D.C. but without sovereignty. So welcome, and we’re obviously here to speak about the Washington professional football team that does not reside in Washington. A whole lot of contradictions here, but as I approach this subject, you know, one of the things that just hits me, it’s very interesting to me that if somebody says ouch that somebody else is going to ask them to define how it hurts and how bad it hurts. I grew up believing that when somebody says ouch, they’re hurting. It’s not up to my interpretation to interpret their hurt, but it is up to that person who has been offended, that person who has been injured, and one should not second-guess and play all types of word games and try to dance around the subject and make something that is racist, not racist, or make something that disparages somebody, not disparaging. The reality is the reality, a person looks you in the eye and says I’m offended and therefore we should regard their truth as truth. But we also come back to this. If you look at the history of this country, people of color have always been put there for the entertainment of white folks, and when people of color could not entertain white folks, they got some imitation people of color to entertain them like Al Jolson in Black Face. The reality is if you understand what we’re talking about the fact is Tarzan, I grew up on Tarzan. There’s Tarzan a white man born in Africa, can beat up any African tribe, and even the wildlife is on Tarzan’s side and not on the indigenous people’s side. Isn’t that amazing, but that is the paradigm that folks want us to think in all the time that somehow people of color are the dominant culture’s trophy. It’s the dominant culture’s collection of an artifact that we are to be defined by somebody else, that we are to be manipulated by somebody else. The reality is all of these things seeks to take away our humanity, and obviously when we talk about the Washington football team it is something that continues not only to take away the humanity of Native Americans, but it is also something that offends me and I’ll say this sitting up here with sports writers offends me as a person of color about professional sports in this country because the reality is that I don’t care whether somebody is paid a few million dollars but the idea of being able to trade another human being or to sell another human being is offensive to me coming out of the history that I come out of. Slavery even at a high price is still slavery. Just look at what just happened in a sense during the recent football game was that RG3, left in the game beyond injury because he was a commodity to be used, maybe a high priced commodity but a commodity just the same to be used for the entertainment of someone else. We’ve got to begin to think about the images not only that we use but the language that we use because it is a history that we are continuing to reinforce of slavery and annihilation and ethnic cleansing, and all the words that we use, and we need to begin to reassess it and begin to change our language system and begin to understand that when folks say ouch they mean ouch. I was glad to hear Mayor Gray at his State of the District address where he did not make that reference to that team by that name but called it the Washington football team, avoiding that. I think that one thing that we need to do is begin to avoid, boycott the word. I start boycotting the word from the pulpit of my church. I will not say it. I will not use it because the reality is once we begin to banish the word maybe people will start to get the idea and we’re called to do a full reassessment of how we speak as a people because how we speak as a people is the way we see the world. Let us change our viewpoint on the world and let us change our view point on each other. MR. MIKE WISE: Why do I have to follow the preacher? The guy’s an orator. I don’t know what I’m doing up here. DR. DELORIA: It’s worse than that Mike because those were two beautifully written pieces before you as well. MR. WISE: I don’t have anything in front of me. I’m a sports columnist for the Washington Post. I hosted a radio show in Washington the last three-and-a-half years. I mean I’m honored to be here and I can’t tell you, and I’d like some of you to give yourselves a hand I’d like to say that there’s something about being around some like-minded people on this issue. I’ve always felt like I’ve been in a vacuum and to actually see Native people’s faces amongst white, black, Asian, Hispanic, it’s very heartening for someone who’s thought that he’s written a lot of columns that went into waste baskets for the last ten years, so thank you for being here. It means a lot. Believe it or not, I came to this issue in many ways because of Erik Brady, another white man, and Erik obviously had a social conscience. I was getting out of school. I actually look older than him now but he’s actually a couple years ahead of me, and I’d read an article in USA Today while I was getting out of school at Fresno State in California and it was a particularly touching article about this issue, and it mentioned the name of a man named Phil St. John, who is a Minnesota Sioux Indian and he actually became motivated by this issue when he took his five-year-old to a high school basketball game and this five-year- old turned away in shame at halftime when a white kid in war paint began doing the whoo-whoo sound in the child’s face, and Phil St. John didn’t know what to do with this and he asked his child what was wrong and he said, “Daddy isn’t that what we do at powwow and he’s making fun of us,” and he was so moved by his child’s reaction and what it did to his self- esteem in that moment that this guy didn’t become a militant in the way of you’re racist and you need to abolish your name. He went around to 39 high schools in Minnesota and gave thoughtful presentations of how this imagery hurt his kid, and I remember thinking to myself all 39 of them changed their mascots because of this, and I thought what if my—I have a two-and-a-half year old now—what if that was my child and someone was making fun of what I think, my ethnicity or who I am as a people mean? I always say I don’t have black, white friends. I have friends, some of whom are black, some of whom are white, Asian, Hispanic, Hawaiian, Native American, and I always try to put myself in their shoes. Well what if that was your kid, and I’ve been told off on and off again that there are bigger issues in the Native American community that they need to worry about than mascots and images, and I can’t help but go back to that moment and that child because what more contributes to the highest rates of alcoholism and suicides on reservations per capita in this country than a child’s self-esteem and who you are and what you believe, and so coming to this issue myself you’re often told you’re a leftist social engineer or you have white guilt. What is white guilt? I don’t feel guilty for what my ancestors did and what they didn’t. I feel that I need to make changes in my own life and I don’t feel that white guilt…to me there’s two other words, human compassion. It’s called human compassion and I don’t understand and I reject the notion that this is an American Indian issue. We’re all members of a tribe. It’s called the world’s tribe, and until we realize that if one person is offended we should all be offended; we’re not going to move forward anywhere and I think we need to understand that. I am told roundly every time I write an article about this issue that there are polls done by Sports Illustrated and the Annenberg Institute at the University of Pennsylvania did a poll that said nine out of ten people who identified themselves as American Indians on the telephone out of 770 people in a nationwide poll says that they are not bothered by these images, and then you go back to the Indian Country Today pol1s and it’s exactly the opposite, but either way I thought, what the heck. I’m going to do my research. I call up Adam Clymer, who many of you may know as a former reporter of the New York Times and was the head of the Annenberg Institute for awhile and directed this poll, and I had worked at the New York Times where I’d also gotten in touch with this issue some more. They sent me out to the University of Illinois to do a story on Chief Illiniwek and I said to Adam Clymer, I go, “Is that right? Is your poll like nine out of ten? How did you guys come up with that,” and he goes, “I don’t know what the plus-minus percentage of it is and I don’t exactly…I’m not going to say it’s 100% accurate.” He goes, “I’ll say this though. Let’s just suppose my poll was right and nine out of ten people contacted that identified themselves as Native people of this country didn’t have a problem with the mascot. Well, let’s take the analogy that you invite ten people to dinner, you have a big dinner party and nine out of the ten people have the most swell time imaginable. They love the food, the company, the conversation, and one of them you completely offend to the point where the other people are a little uncomfortable. Are you really a social success?” No is the answer. I don’t know what this is going to take. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I believe in my lifetime that symbol will disappear from this town, and when it does there will be a lot of people to thank but most of all the people that were here before us who believed harder and stronger than anybody that it was time that they were identified by who they wanted to be, not who we wanted them to be. Thank you. MR. ROBERT HOLDEN: At this point it’s going to be difficult to not go about this without restating all the wonderful things that have been said by some very astute people who have been tracking this issue and been the advocates on the front lines for decades, particularly Kevin Gover and Suzan Harjo, who worked so diligently in pulling this together, and the panelists. It’s really an honor to sit here with these folks. This is the part about a community dialog and this is sort of like politics. It’s a local issue but it’s being played out on a national stage. There are some communities dealing with this issue and it’s interesting how they have resolved some of these problems in reporting it, particularly the Kansas City Star you may be aware of doesn’t use the R word in their newspaper reporting about the Washington NFL team. Supposedly it was named after the…and even so the Kansas City football team is called the Chiefs, but the origin is my understanding was not about Natives. It was named in honor of Mayor Harry Bartle at one time, and even that dialog they had in the community about the name Chiefs, one person wrote in, if the Chiefs were named for the mayor why don’t they have an overweight middle- aged white guy with glasses on their helmets? There are advocates at every level seeking change about these stereotypes. Lois Risling was on the panel, some of her relatives were involved in this as well because Hoopa High School changed its mascot and Indian headdress to an H in 2003. Student council representatives went to Sacramento to support an assembly bill to ban reservational authorized mascots that were not authorized by reservation-based communities or tribes, but they had Native kids posted at every entrance and side- walk at Sacramento in the legislature stating, “I am not a mascot.” That’s strong language for kids that age to be sending a message to the legislature where they will hopefully sit someday, and we’ve got to build that path for them, and they will take it and run with it. This is a community like any other community where you have common bonds. What better common bond can you have than to have a sports team that you want to support wholeheartedly? I’m a sports junkie as well as a news junkie. I like to watch sports of every kind, but I cannot in good conscience support the football team. No one else Native in this community can do that too and many of you, and I appreciate what you’re doing by being here and listening and for your efforts in this matter, but we cannot feel a sense of community in that regard. Some people talk about these—the alumni particularly—talk about these traditions and modern practices, but those things can change as well. I watched on ESPN and then I read in an LA newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, which is a community newspaper, about the desegregation of football. In the ‘20s, there were no black players at colleges and universities. That began to change, I think it was around 1940 Southern Cal had a full black backfield. Even in this area on the East Coast there was no desegregation within the colleges and universities until 1963 when there was a player named Darren Hill who was recruited. He said he didn’t want to be like Jackie Robinson but he was forced into that role, subjected to slurs, taunted, called every name you could imagine. Excellent football player, talented, he couldn’t go and play everywhere he wanted to without under death threats. I won’t mention the schools in particular but there were some that they had to escort him every step of the way in and out of the stadium. When he came back home he could not play in front of his relatives and friends at the home stadium in Maryland. No black people were allowed inside the stadium, but there was a hill where people would gather to watch the football game and watch them and they cheered when he made some of these great plays. That hill was called I’ll say Negro Hill because that’s the way it was printed in the newspaper but you and I know it was something called much different than that. I don’t know whether that icon to racism still stands there, probably not, but certainly it wouldn’t be called that in this day and age. Those things have changed and to the benefit they should change, and Native people would stand aside them to make sure those changes were made. There are a list of supporters from every imaginable business association that you can imagine from the NAACP to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Washington Post that’s opposed this name since 2006. The Post endorsed that effort. I don’t think the people, the owners, understand that they’re not honoring us. If they still intend to say that, please take it back, please, honors like that we don’t need, we don’t want, thank you very much. DR. DELORIA: I want to thank our panelists for their brevity, their clarity, their passion. I’m a professor. I have to get up and talk all the time. I wouldn’t want to go after any of you guys. It was quite wonderful. The microphone is in the back. People who have questions or comments can go and stand. Sometimes we’re going to get a few things via the Internet and I believe our first question falls into that category. FEMALE VOICE: Yes, I want to acknowledge all of the online audience members and a lot of questions are coming in online internationally so that’s what I’d like to start with. I’d like to actually ask a couple of them at once. A question from Italy: What can people do internationally to support this cause, what can people do locally, what organizations are doing things right now that people can support? So we’ll start with that general category of questions. MR. WISE: This is one of the frustrations in my existence in following this issue and reporting on it is there’s Suzan Harjo has been out in front as much as anyone has. I remember attending a meeting in which many people, likeminded people wanted to see how they could get this movement going and out there including the little stickers that they gave, love the game, change the name, they had a little Ghostbusters sign across the Redskins name and I loved it and I put it all over, but it was a very small group and I actually felt like if I asked and she wasn’t reporting on it my boss would find out I was there and excommunicate me, but it’s frustrating because I don’t know of the…I know what you can do. I can’t foment a protest myself but I’ll write my butt off if you show up in front of the team’s facilities and issue a protest the day before training camp begins, and I’ll tell you what--that will be on national news and one of the things that people I think don’t realize is the people that feel strongly that they want to keep the name, they’re not going to have their minds changed and all the education in the world won’t do it. They have to be embarrassed into it. It happens with our political officials all the time. Things have to mean something to somebody and it has to become politically expedient to get rid of the nickname and until letters to Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, Dan Snyder himself, although he’s probably thrown a lot our way already, are read and people actually embarrass the organization into taking the issue seriously it’s…at present moment the NFL pays the Redskins’ legal bills against any trademark infringement suits. Therefore, Dan Snyder hasn’t spent a penny out of his pocket to defend his nickname. NFL Inc. has, Roger Goodell’s lawyers have, and until that changes, it’s going to be really hard to get the team to change its nickname. MR. HOLDEN: I’m not sure how much we can do in terms of going after the sponsors in the same regard. There are sponsors’ logos all over the stadium, all over the media that support the team. I think it’s like any other campaign, you send messages to them about buying or not using their product. I have a significant belief in those things you learn in basic psychology about spheres of influence. Each one of you has significant sphere of influence and you can utilize that and let’s try it out. REV. HAGLER: The resistance to changing the name really has to do with money and we need to stop buying things that bear that logo and the fact is that with anything that is racist, you need to remind your friends who fall into that bad habit of buying the logo and flaunting it that they need to cease. That if they don’t change the name you basically begin to and make sure you, your friends, your neighborhood withhold the cash that is being poured in in terms of the purchase of those items bearing that logo. MALE VOICE: Two quick points actually. If there’s a Fed Ex representative in this audience I would love for him or her to explain to me why they want to have their name associated with a racist symbol and how that promotes their corporate responsibility policy that’s on their website, and two, I challenge Dan Snyder if he honestly believes his name is honorific to attend the next meeting of the National Congress of American Indians and use the word Redskins to your face. MALE VOICE 2: Yes, I’d like to thank the National Museum of the American Indian for this very, very important event. I also like to…I would also like to recognize the online community for tuning in. We have come full circle. We are living now in a time cycle and a season where awareness is rising. I think one strategy since we’re dealing with a sports mentality, strategy and solutions are constantly talked about in locker rooms and on the field. The more we learn about the people that genocide was committed against in this country, the more we will find out the solutions and the strategies to deal with this situation. When we find out what is going on in Pashela [phonetic], South Dakota, the heart of everything, Pashela. When we find out what is the Badlands Guardian in Canada we will learn more. I urge everyone in this audience and the online community to log into Pashela and find out what is going on in South Dakota and to log on to Badlands Guardian. I’ll conclude by saying this event to me personally is on the level of two other events. One was called Woodstock, where a young man named Jimi Hendrix played an instrumental version of the National Anthem, and changed consciousness without saying anything. He played a guitar. The other event was an actor by the name of Marlon Brando. In front of millions of people at the Academy Awards, he sent Sacheen Little Feather to deny the Academy Award. I’m referencing these events because to me this event today is on that level because we are in the nation’s capital and this is the good news. Feel good when you walk out of here today. We are on our way. Thank you. MALE VOICE 3: I have to admit sometimes I feel discouraged. Thirty years ago I was playing a drum in front of the stadium when we started protesting this name, that wasn’t even the first of it, and we were spit on and we were cursed by people of all ethnicities—except maybe Native folks—but Latinos who did not know they were Native. Since then I’ve talked to thousands of people and maybe one in fifty I’ll reach. How do we reach these people? How do we say something so they do get embarrassed, so they do have a conscience? Something about football, I mean we have this team, Washington goes crazy over it. A few miles away Baltimore is going crazy over their team. D.C. people say or D.C. area people don’t have any respect for the Baltimore, et cetera, et cetera. People go crazy over their football team. It’s a sports thing. How do we reach through to them? As Ms. Bartnoff said we are the nation’s capital and yet we have this disrespect. How do we deal with that? How do we reach out? Anybody? MR. WISE: The Reverend Hagler had it earlier. He hit the nail on the head as well as anyone when he said it has to be some economic impact. I wrote a column a couple of weeks ago essentially saying that Dan Snyder would only listen to one person and that would be Robert Griffin III, and maybe in hindsight that’s a little too much for a 22-year-old to be asked to be taken on especially one that’s undergoing ACL surgery and trying to get back on the field, but he’s the one who said no pressure, no diamonds, not me. And if he really wants to lead, and I understand that there are no Jim Browns or Mohammed Alis left, and Arthur Ashes and Kurt Floods, that was another day and those battles were fought and won in many ways, but I reject the notion that this has to be all about economic empowerment and that has to be the new blueprint for Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. At some point you have to have a social conscience and stand for something or fall for everything and one athlete with the courage and the will to say that my brothers…I’m sorry… you marched with my relatives in Selma years ago. It’s time I march with you now, that has to happen, and if one athlete can hit Dan Snyder in the pocketbook whether it be a free agent or someone on his roster right now, I believe he will begin to look at the issue differently. MR. BRADY: I think too that in the media we have to bring this up. A lot of times it’s forgotten about and we just had the Super Bowl and every year the commissioner has a news conference and this is not a question he’s ever asked but my colleague Mike Wise did ask him about this just a few days ago, and his answer was sort of a non-answer. I guess you’d say he punted on that one. He said no one wants to offend anyone was about the gist of his remark, but these are the questions that have to keep being asked. REV. HAGLER: And one thing also is not only withhold some of our economic enthusiasm but clearly in terms of the articles that are written if they cease to use the name and folks who are reporting on sports on TV if they stop mentioning the name then that eventually gets over to people that it’s something that is really incorrect, and again it’s like I said if somebody says ouch they mean ouch. HON. BARTNOFF: I think one other thing that probably shouldn’t be--I don’t know how much of an impact it has and I think time will tell—is that people need to continue to talk about it. There have been more articles about this in the Washington Post in the last couple of weeks than I think I’ve seen in a very long time, and I know that in a different way and the sports writers here probably know more about this and I may know enough to be dangerous but we may remember that there was a big, big concern in the District of Columbia for many, many years about gun violence and the murder rate, and no one’s blaming that on the basketball team. On the other hand it was disturbing that the name of the basketball team was the bullets, and the name of the basketball team was changed in part, I think in large part to response to a concern about what it meant in the community for the name of the team to be the Bullets when all of this was going on, and from what I can tell the team is doing just fine if not better since the…and you would know that better than I would. MR. WISE: Actually the Wizards are still lousy. HON. BARTNOFF: But I’m still right. MR. WISE: But you’re still right. HON. BARTNOFF: But I’m still right, and the point is that community pressure and community recognition of a problem is something that at some point reaches a critical mass that has to be listened to. MR. HOLDEN: There was some discussion earlier today about using K-12 school systems and presenting these issues to school boards. You as parents, grandparents, you have that opportunity to talk with teachers, educators, principals, superintendents, school boards, about these issues, and it can also come in the context of something we deal with every year. Let’s say Thanksgiving for instance. You see kids running around with the same faux regalia as you do with the Washington football team. It’s not right, it’s derogatory but how much of a big deal do we make it because the kids are trying to do something to mimic and do something complimentary and I give them more credit than I would someone who’s an adult who’s jumping up and down like a fool in the middle of a stadium, but that’s still an opportunity and still a place to make those points known. MALE VOICE 4: I’m an actual native of D.C. I was actually born in the hospital a few miles from where the team plays, but I drew my first breaths just off Bladensburg Road in D.C. I’ve grown up with, but I’m not a sports fan. I grew up with a team and I didn’t care about them, but I guess I’ve been energized recently by just being more aware. I guess I say I’ve had my consciousness raised about this particular issue only recently, and my part in it is being a nerd. I’ve been editing the Wikipedia articles on the subject and so I’ve been reading all this information. I became aware of the 2001 Civil Rights Commission opinion, and all this body of knowledge that says this is a civil rights violation so I don’t understand why all of these public and private policies against discrimination don’t just automatically kick in and disallow saying Redskins in a public place. How can the Washington Post print that word? How can a radio station say that word or a TV station say that word? REV. HAGLER: Partly it’s because we have not made it culturally unacceptable and that’s what I’m getting at because I grew up not too far from here in Baltimore, and I remember how people used to call in on the radio shows and they would use the N word and it would go out over the air because it was an acceptable thing to do in a place like Baltimore when I was growing up until we made it unacceptable and the reality is that’s what we need to continue to push towards is to make it unacceptable because as long as folks sort of wink and blink and give it permission to exist it will continue to exist, and when we get to that place where we start chastising our friends, our relatives, and our neighbors for using that word, making it unacceptable, that’s when things will change. MR. WISE: I don’t know if everybody remembers Do The Right Thing but there was a great--in Spike Lee’s movie, that was about 25 years ago-- there was a really telling scene in which each ethnicity in the movie made fun of other ethnicities, and a Korean man made fun of the Italians and the blacks, and the blacks made fun of the Italians and the Korean men in the most despicable worst slur ways imaginable, and when they did the audience screening they said that everybody laughed their butts off until their ethnicity came up, and the moral of that story to me is I’d love to see somebody depicted their own race in that way. I know Daniel Snyder would probably be upset by a team named the Hebrews and a mascot named Ira with the Dead Sea Scrolls in one hand and the Torah in the other, he’d probably be very angry. MALE VOICE 5: My question is a follow up to the one before but I want to ask it a little differently. I teach Native American politics, and we end up discussing this in class every term. Mr. Wise, we read your articles in the class. My classes visit this museum. Mr. Holden, you remember us a couple of months ago coming to NCAI, and in politics we’re thinking of cause and effect and it reminds me—Baltimore was brought up a moment ago—that 20 years ago the NFL forced a team in Baltimore that was playing in a different league to stop using the name of the Colts, and that maybe the impetus has to come from the league. In looking at cause and effect, what would create that action by the league, and Mr. Holden you mentioned that there was a newspaper in Kansas City that refuses to use the name, and so along the lines of the question that was just asked, Mr. Wise, how close is the Washington Post to not using the name because if the hometown paper did that I believe that would spread to print and then television media and eventually the league would notice. MR. WISE: I don’t want to punt on the issue because I took it up with my own editors when I…it’s funny, if they had known that they hired a sports writer that couldn’t stand the team’s nickname I wonder if I would have got the job in hindsight, but I stopped using the name for about a year after I first got to Washington. I think it was 2005, and what happened in my case I believe a newspaper-wide boycott would be different, but was that almost the story became about me more than it did the issue and I would get all these nasty emails and you’re trying to spite us, and it was clear it’s kind of hard to write around the nickname when you’re writing a story about the team, but I did it for a year and I enjoyed it. In fact I loved it because people sent me angry emails and it made people think but it really I did feel like it became about me. We have a new editor. His name’s Marty Baron. We will be meeting with him as a sports department tomorrow. I will bring this issue up. I assure you. MALE VOICE 6: I’d like to comment on a couple of things that was said today. One was like why would an Indian school have an Indian insignia or whatever they call those mascots. I’m from Red Lake, Minnesota, and we have the Warriors but it’s not in this type of thing here where you’re making fun of somebody and you have crowds of people just as Indians hollering and laughing and having a good time. That’s one reason I don’t go to a Redskins game because I’ll be in jail for assault in ten minutes, but in Red Lake, Warriors to us, the Apichidaw [phonetic] they call it is the word for it, Warriors in our culture means a guy who takes care of his family, teaches his kids, loves his kids, loves his wife, does all that stuff and protects his family against anything that’s going to harm them, and that’s the symbol that the kids at Red Lake High School are honoring when they play their games, and when they go to school that’s what warrior means to them. During the game they sing their Ojibwe song and that’s it. You don’t see kids or anybody else parading around in Indian outfits or anything like that because we do it in respect. We don’t do it to mock the ground with American Indians the way that stadium full of whoever’s out there in Washington or in Landover do. We don’t do it that way, and another thing was I also had an incident in Minneapolis. Actually it was the Oreno [phonetic] Indians against the Cooper Hawks, I think it was, and I lasted about ten minutes in there with my two kids because that’s what they were doing and my kids said the same thing. He said Dad they’re making fun of us. I told him let’s get out and we went, but a lot of them have changed their names, and one other guy here talked about evil before and I think that has a lot to do with it, the evil and the hatred, and I believe that it comes through from history. My mother was born in 1914, a lifetime today, is like 80 years old and it would have been the time when 1914, put another 80 before that, and the Indian Wars were going on in like two-and-a-half lifetimes ago, and people still have that in them. It’s still in them. I’ve lived in Red Lake and I grew up there. People up there still have that thing of, we want to beat up Indians, we want to hunt for Indians, and time has stood still around there a lot when you go into the towns out of Red Lake, and so I don’t have as much hope about this thing changing as other people do because like I said it’s been like two and a half lifetimes since the wars were on, everybody’s still—at least where I come from—still feel that and if there’s one thing that will change Daniel Snyder I think is the money thing, but I am hopeful. I felt this way before Barack Obama was elected. I thought, it’s not going to happen. It just isn’t and I hope when I was wrong there that I am wrong here, too. MALE VOICE 7: Hi, I wanted to bring up the fact that you would give us such great support if we could show up at the next prepractice or when they start practicing again. Back in the early nineties I had made a promise in the - - that I would protest for four years and I did and it was easy to protest at RFK. Everybody was pouring out of the Metro and into the stadium and you could just hit them with all your flyers and your statements. Anyway then they…. Cook, he built a protest- proof stadium. I mean you can’t do it. I tried once at the first Dallas game. I went there and it cost $8 to get into the place and then you can’t carry anything with you. You can’t carry anything but sneak in maybe some paper, and then you’re in this massive crowd that like there’s no organization to, and then the band goes by and then you have to leave because the game’s ready to start and you have to wait about an hour-and-a half to kind of get out of there because there are no more buses going back to the parking lot. It’s a protest-proof building and now they’ve moved to Richmond. We can’t even go to Virginia to like do a little…hit them in…do you have any suggestions other than just you know, and I have to say I guess it was just you in the Post that promised that they wouldn’t use the name because I thought it had been the Post that had made that promise at one time. MR. WISE: I’m one of about three columnists now that have taken positions. Bob McCartney--Robert McCartney--took one today in Metro. Courtland Milloy has been a long-time advocate of abolishing the nickname and the Post actually had an editorial--I believe Robert Holden said 2006 was the last one--that said on the editorial page as a paper we don’t like that, we agree that the name is inappropriate, but the paper has never as such decided to actually abolish the nickname, and as far as the…it’s a utopian thing in many ways to get the media on many levels to disregard the name, but for instance there’s networks in this town, two or three that I can think of, that have deals, broadcast deals with the team, very lucrative deals, and for them to do that would be saying goodbye to the majority of their broadcasting revenue and it would be a hell of a courageous move. I don’t know if it’s realistic. I think it’s going to be more of a grassroots thing. Richmond is a training camp. It’s only a couple weeks. They’ll be in Ashburn, Virginia most days. I’ve got to think that there’s got to be some place if someone wanted to organize a protest. MALE VOICE 7: Too bad they’re not still at Carlisle. That was the perfect place. MR. WISE: Carlisle would have been apropos. MALE VOICE 7: And if you could just ask your colleague, Mr. Boswell, he used the name 18 times in one article last fall and it was like overwhelming. I mean maybe they could at least tone it down even if they can’t give it up. MR. WISE: I’m going to beat him with a rubber hose. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. MR. HOLDEN: I had an experience with a reporter like that earlier, but there are still we have to use any and all strategies. I mean that still doesn’t preclude you from writing letters to the editor of the Post. They still receive those and sometimes they get printed, most of the time they don’t, but nevertheless that’s one way. There’s two all news radio stations in this town. There used to be just one. The one that’s been here the longest I used to listen to them and still did until there was a couple of weeks ago or maybe about a month ago where they said something to the effect that why is everyone making a big deal about changing the name. It doesn’t need to change and they should just forget about it. Now I go to the newer station so there are things that you can show in terms of your support or non-support of some of these stations. MR. BRADY: The name becomes so much a part of the fabric of the community. My kids are grown now but when my son was in first grade the Redskins played the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl and he came home from school all wide eyed and said the principal says everybody has to wear Redskins stuff tomorrow. I sent him to school in Buffalo Bills gear and let me just say that’s character- building for a first grader. MR. WISE: I don’t know what to do. I have a two-and-a-half year old and he’s running around the house going RG3, RG3, and my wife and I were discussing no ‘Skins stuff in the house. I don’t want to see any of the paraphernalia. If he wants to like the team at some point that’s fine, but I’m not going to have any stuff in the house except my press pass. MALE VOICE 8: I’ve been here all day. I’ve listened to the other panels as well and I wanted to ask a question earlier and just couldn’t get enough time to do it, but it occurs to me that the first step in solving any problem of course is to define it accurately, and my sense of it is that we’re talking more about symptoms than we are a disease, and that the issue with the Washington football team—I’m a native Washingtonian, it’s hard for me to say that—the Washington football team is simply symptomatic of a larger issue if not dealt with will persist, and I think that issue within which all of this has to be defined is white supremacy. We wouldn’t be in this position if that weren’t the dominant, overriding, and most influential issue since the beginning of this nation, and it is singularly responsible though we participated and enabled it on occasion for all of the things that we’re talking about now, and yet in these kinds of meetings rarely is it pointedly brought up as a question to be dealt with, and I’m waiting to go to a conference that is titled something like “How do we define white supremacy and who believes in it?” MR. WISE: I don’t know if I want to be seen at that conference. REV. HAGLER: I’ll just say that’s a serious part because that’s what this is about. I mean it’s the whole idea of how you use and utilize people of color let me put it that way, because it is a framework that says that there is a group that’s in charge and there’s another group that is to be exploited, used for entertainment, used for work, used for everything else, but it’s a group that exists and that’s where you want to put them at. I was saying to somebody earlier when we all talk about image, this was years ago when I was in Mozambique and Frelimo had just basically come to power and in the biggest cathedral in Maputo they had an altar set up and on that altar on the wall was this fresco, and it was of a Portuguese knight with a Portuguese ship sitting out in the harbor with a Portuguese flag on it and the knight was all armored up, had a sword, had a Portuguese flag in this hand, and when you looked down he had his foot down on the side of the face of a black man in the dirt. It’s the images, the images that continue to reinforce that kind of superiority, that kind of disregard that you have for somebody else, and so that’s what this is really about overcoming. HON. BARTNOFF: At the risk of causing some dissention I agree with that, and let me be clear about that, but I think it’s a much more nuanced, complicated issue here because to put it…Washington D.C. had been--I’m not sure it is because the demographics are changing--but Washington D.C. had been a majority African American city, and that may be changing because there’s a larger Latino population as well, but I think that part of why this is such a difficult issue is because, let’s face it, a lot of the most supportive fans of the local football team are African Americans, Latinos, members of other minority groups as well and part of the issue is that--and I think there was a column recently, did Courtland Milloy write it?--about the name of a mountain that’s called Mt. Negro and why American Indians and Native Americans should be supportive of changing that name for the same reason that African Americans should support changing the name of the local football team. I think it’s much more complicated because that whole point that was made in the earlier panel about how people don’t appreciate that this is a slur until somebody says how would you feel if this team was called by whatever it is that’s an offensive derogatory term to whoever you are, and everybody has some derogatory term about them. I think that’s why this is so insidious and so difficult because it isn’t just about Native Americans. It’s about everybody, and it’s the way we’re all treating each other and that’s why it’s such a, I think, a difficult and a really insidious problem for the community. MR. WISE: Great point, one of the toughest things or one of the most interesting dichotomies to me is, if many of you are familiar with Chief Zee, Zema Williams whom I’ve met on occasion and is the nicest, most gentle man you’ll ever meet in your life and he goes out and does charity events for children all while as an African American man dressed up in headdress and feathers, and I had a hard time reconciling with what is this man doing wrong until I saw a documentary by Charlene Teters who was a graduate student in Illinois when she protested Chief Illinwek. She came out with a documentary called In Whose Honor, and she has in 1991 an encounter with Chief Zee in RFK in which she tells him, these are my people, how can you dress up like this? And he says I ain’t got nothing against your kin. I ain’t got nothing…and she says back something to him and he doesn’t know what to respond, and he finally walks away. He’s embarrassed and she starts crying and it’s the most powerful, moving thing you’ve ever seen in your life--a Native American woman and an African American man--and I thought to myself, what if she was dressed up like him? What if she had dressed up like a Zulu warrior and the head and on the side of the helmet was… Dan Snyder said he was honoring the warrior spirit of the African people, and I don’t think Zema Williams would dress up like that. I don’t. REV. HAGLER: What I get worried about is that we’re sort of dancing a little bit, and when I say we’re dancing a little bit is because there is the issue of consumer versus the issue of owner, and all the time people are seduced into this consumer status, particularly that’s how you keep people who are oppressed, oppressed. They feel good because they’re able to participate at a lesser level and make somebody at the top a whole lot of money. For example, black folks should not be going to Wal-Mart for example because of the way Wal-Mart produces its products and what Wal-Mart does in terms of voter suppression, but we do. Until we basically begin to deconstruct what is going on and therefore come up with a new understanding of what our participation in that really results in, but the fact is is that the fan is not Dan Snyder. Dan Snyder is the one that’s going to the bank. We’re going to the bank machine to get the money for the ticket and paraphernalia so we’ve got to begin to change that paradigm, and take the money out of Dan Snyder’s pocket and keep it in ours. MR. HOLDEN: These people are very smart in that regard. For instance, a company would sell paraphernalia of the Ravens and the other NFL team in this area, and I went to a corporate meeting and had a discussion with some of the top-tier executives about this, and brought it up that they will sell that here in D.C. but they wouldn’t dare go out to South Dakota or Oklahoma and sell the same things where you have a significant Native American community, but nevertheless it’s the same company with the same money going to the top. FEMALE VOICE 2: Hello. Obviously the term that we’ve been talking about, the R word, obviously has a very negative connotation. I wanted to suggest the idea of the petition on the White House. I think that they require 100,000 signatures and if we can get people to sign up to perhaps change the football team’s name we might be able to get a lot more national attention, and the White House has to respond if we get 100,000 people. MR. WISE: Great idea and I can’t personally sign you up as you leave the building but someone could possibly give you a sheet. MALE VOICE 9: Even easier than that is Sign On rather than…so the White House, sure, but I’m not sure that the President’s going to necessarily take up this issue but Sign On has a much lower threshold for sending that out, and I just actually was interested in saying the same thing, and I Google-searched and there’s one petition already up that suggests they change the team name to the Piscataway. It’s only got 30 signatures so no worries, but if we launch one right now you can start to put those kinds of numbers together, and I don’t know Mr. Wise if you really are interested in bringing this to your department meeting tomorrow, but I suspect we could get a couple hundred signatures right now and you could click on the page and show it tomorrow. MR. WISE: I would do that and it would probably bring my argument a little more weight. Thank you. MALE VOICE 7: If you want to Google that it will be up momentarily. MR. ANDRE HOLLAND: How are you doing? My name is Andre Holland. I’m a student at ACC. I’ve come here with my professor. He put us on this field trip which I did not know where I was really going, but I’m like, I’m in college, why am I going on a field trip? But basically I want to say that I think it’s really ignorant that the fact that us as humans are keeping the name Washington Redskins. Like first of all, when I walked in here everybody was staring at me with my cap on. I was like okay why…like I thought this was something good. That’s why I wore my Washington Redskins cap but this Native American man right here came to me and said, “Can you take off your hat? I’m offended.” And I was like wow, and at first I was keeping it on, but it made me think like how would it feel if they were called the—excuse my language—the Washington Niggers. I would be offended. I’m sure other people will be offended, too. I really think that they should really change the name because a few hours ago I was listening to the first conference meeting down here on the screen upstairs and I was tweeting. I found out you can hash tag. I was basically in a different state of mind, saying I don’t get it, why can’t we have the Washington logo? It doesn’t mean anything. I had like at least ten Native Americans come out of nowhere and start talking to me. I was like, what is this. I was like I’m ready to delete my account, but they were basically telling me that this is ridiculous and what it truly meant to the name Washington Redskins and how they got it, and I’m like wow, I’m just now knowing this so why can’t they just change the name to Washington Warriors. I found out I actually asked one of them that question. They said well actually Warriors was good because it meant that it was actually a job like there was certain things they had to do. Would it be bad if they just change the name to Washington Warriors? MR. WISE: That’s a good question because I’ve heard that before, too. I think if you deleted all the Indian imagery, and I always thought this would be win-win for Dan Snyder, you dedicate the new name to the wounded warriors and you have either a veteran or somebody on the helmet that is not an Indian and you retire the old nickname honorably. You’d have the old merchandise and memorabilia going like crazy on EBay-- and the Tennessee Titans weren’t in existence, three years later they were the hottest selling jersey in the league because it was new. There were new colors. I say keep the colors, call them Warriors. I think there might be an issue of do you want to name somebody after the military of the United States government which essentially tried to commit genocide on the American Indian. I mean it’s a really difficult issue. It’s a really difficult issue. How do you get around to coming up with the right new name, but the big thing is abolish the one that’s there first. MR. HOLLAND: Well, first of all I just want to apologize to any Native Americans because I’m not a racist. I know I’m not a racist so the fact that like I had to wear that hat and I had to take it off it makes me think. I actually have friends that are Native Americans and now I know why they were staring at me. They never told me but every time I came in in my Redskins stuff they were always staring at me, and every time I said bye to their parents they were like don’t talk to me, but I really think they should change the name and I think it’s really horrible that they are deciding to keep this name. MR. WISE: I’d just like to say that I was a little worried today that we were preaching to the choir but we do have one convert so that’s a good thing. MALE VOICE 10: First of all, to kind of follow up on that as a retired teacher, we just all witnessed the power of education, one mind changed one time, he changes someone else. I suppose I should direct my question to Daniel Snyder but interestingly enough there’s been a lot of people in and out today and he hasn’t been there nor anyone from the organization. So I’m going to direct it to the panel even though I’m asking it with Snyder in mind. If we talk about economics--and Mr. Wise you just addressed that—if they were to change, that economic picture for Daniel Snyder gets a lot bigger, new logo, new uniforms, the whole thing. A few fans get upset, 12 cancel their tickets, and 1,000 in line to get them. So based—if I’m correct in my thinking—what is it? Is it that Reverend Hagler said some kind of oppression, or I’m so big, or just the billionaire syndrome--I can do what I want. I’m just kind of at a loss to fathom, and again it’s an unfair question. You’re going inside someone’s mind. Why doesn’t he send a representative today? He comes today. I mean that might not be the place, but why not change the name if you’re Daniel Snyder? I think I would at least look at it even if I only cared about the economic end of it. Any ideas? MR. WISE: Because billionaires don’t like to be told what to do, and I think not only did he say he had a Ronnie Redskin belt buckle when he was a child, and that was sort of a big deal to him, but I also think that that name is…the name does mean something to him but I also think that the previous panel talked about these identities that people take on, and if you have to give that up it means that you are a bad person for holding it near to your heart to begin with, and he can’t admit that, and I think even more than that he thinks this is PC, and anything that’s PC is wrong, and the idea that there’s backlash against it should be right and you shouldn’t change something just because people are offended by it. Everybody’s offended by everything, but guess what? This is political and it’s correct. MALE VOICE 11: I’ve listened to all of this and I can tell you this, that you will never hear that word on WPFW, the station that I broadcast on, and I see Erik, I see you looking at me. I am the guy that you were on the radio with last Friday. I feel very deep down inside that maybe we’ve missed it. It’s called stubbornness and arrogance, and I’ve heard so many people talk about white privilege, white guilt. I don’t think it’s really about that. I think it’s about the almighty dollar, and I think it’s about a man that under no circumstances will he eat crow, and Reverend Hagler you were so correct in your analogy of how one group of people have to dominate everybody else in their minds, but I think we need to take this to a spiritual level because all of the fighting and infighting and name- calling and all the games that people play because they don’t like something that somebody does or somebody says, I think if we take it to a higher level or spiritual level because it’s what’s inside you that really means more than anything else. And I’ll tell you this, my grandfather used to always say something. It was actually my great- grandfather, and he spoke broken Cherokee, broken English, and a little Choctaw, but I’m going to put it to you the way he used to say it. It’s not about the pigmentation of my skin or the color of my eye or the texture of my hair or the clothes I wear. It’s not about my culture or my tradition or who I call my God. Does anybody in here know what it’s really all about? Can one person raise their hand and tell me what it’s really all about? It’s all about how you treat my heart. That’s what it’s all about. JOHN: My name is John and I’m often very, very lonely, especially around football time. I’m an ex-football player, a football coach that’s been humiliated personally and had my own son personally humiliated. I’d like to thank Mr. Wise. I did call in a few years ago to relate the story about my son’s experience and I felt less lonely that day. I feel less lonely this day. I’ve given 33 years of my life to this country in uniform and I often feel lonely and I often feel that my Indian heritage feels owned by others. I think that what this is about is ownership. “We own you” is what I’ve heard people say about my Native heritage. Don’t you understand? We can’t do what we used to do to the black African American people. The Latinos now have political power, but we own you. We will define how we honor you. Don’t tell us how to honor you because we own you. If we want to call you Redskins in the nation’s capital we will because we own you. If we want to nickname or have our code name Osama Bin Laden and call him the name that my son’s named after, Geronimo, we will do that and we own you. We won’t call him Martin Luther King or Caesar Chavez but we will call Osama Bin Laden “Geronimo” because we own you. That’s what this is about. We can talk about the economics. The team from Washington would make more money if they changed and they all know it. They wouldn’t lose sponsorship. They’d still have 70,000 people go to the games. It’s not about money. It’s about the last group that the dominant culture feels that they own lock, stock, and barrel and they can get away with it. When I was honored to be the director of the American Indian Education Commission in Los Angeles I naively thought through education the schools would change, and after death threats and 17 years they finally did but it was only after we videotaped what Joe Brave really was doing, and as a person got up and said we do nothing but honor you we put it up in a screen behind that person and they were embarrassed enough to say wow, that’s what’s going on. I guess we’re not honoring you. I thank everyone for being here. I appreciate being less lonely today. I thank Mayor Vincent Gray for standing up, which isn’t to his political or economic advantage, but it absolutely is the right thing. Thank you very much. MR. WISE: I might add a thank you again to Suzan Harjo who for years has been called by NFL Inc. in legal papers a militant. The only militant thing about her is her father was a code talker during World War II and had shrapnel in his leg until the day he died from a wound suffered in the World War in Italy, in the Second World War. This is a woman whose father served honorably in the military and is doing more for all of us in here than anybody could imagine, so thank you Suzan. MS. ANNE PARO [PHONETIC]: Hi, my name is Anne Paro and I’m from South America. This debate was really, really great and very informative and I just want to share that I don’t understand too much about football but I do understand about racism and prejudice, and especially via education, and this is sort of like educational. I just want to share that when I was growing up and as a teacher myself I was learning all the time how history is written by the winners. For instance in South America we always learn that when the Europeans come to America immediately the Native American culture is, like the Incas—which partially I am—we immediately worship them because they have white beards and white hair and we look at them so amazing figures, but that’s not true totally. That’s absolutely not true, so I just want to share these things because I think all about this is stereotypes, is about power. It’s about put the other person, the others, down and it’s a hidden agenda and it lets our evil side surface. That’s all I want to say. MALE VOICE 12: I thank this panel and the other panels for really encouraging our hearts and minds. I feel like this question is almost somewhat anti-climatic, but do any of the panelists know what the present state of the Washington football team supporting NRA-sponsored shooting events, and some of those events if I’m not mistaken were geared toward youth and this has happened over the last few years. I don’t know if the team has stopped their involvement with that or not, but I’d like to know if any of the panelists do know. MR. WISE: I’ve got to call my editor. That’s a good story. MALE VOICE 13: I spent about 40 years in the sports and entertainment business, and Mr. Holden, it was a beautiful thing when I witnessed you being interviewed out here, out through our last session by Channel Four, and the gentleman, even though you expressed to him that you found the R word offensive, he continued to say it right to your face over and over again with the disguise that he was going to get the best sound bites, go back to the studio and edit it. I can’t wait to see what that edit looks like. Congratulations to you, sir, for holding in there. But here’s what I’m really here for, in my sports—let’s call it career—I’ve had the opportunity to work for some NFL teams. My last venture was with Mr. Craft up in New England when he recruited me away from the meadow lands in Jersey—Jimmy Hoffa’s there you know—anyway he sat me down and he said here’s your first assignment, run some numbers, see what the effect of a logo change will do for us. Ran the numbers, presented it to him, case closed. The big obstacle of course is as you Mr. Wise pointed out, the NFL owns a lot of the logos. It’s not the individual teams, so that’s where you really have to start, and you know why they’re hesitant to make changes? Because the reality is they’re worried about taking the violence out of the sport, they’re hesitant on concussions, they’re hesitant on sports injuries. Someone else said that earlier RG3, they threw him like a gladiator. Let’s not forget it’s a gladiator setting that we’re involved in here with the NFL. Because they’re afraid of the violence being diminished, they’re going to hold on to images that support violent thinking just like our television shows, just like our movies, the NFL is basically all about violence. MR. WISE: I think you make a great point about Dan Snyder probably is a bad target at this point. The target has to go beyond that and the target is probably Roger Goodell and the NFL. FEMALE VOICE 3: With all due respect Reverend Hagler I’m going to push back on your last statement. You make a comment that I think the lion’s share of blame, I guess, goes to Dan Snyder and I would say that that’s not true. I would say that there’s definitely personal responsibility in this, and if people say at this point this late in the game after 30-some years after this many people knowing about it, after Native people protesting. If they can say that they don’t get it, that is absolutely willful ignorance and they are working very, very hard to remain ignorant about it. There is absolutely personal responsibility here. Dan Snyder is not there in people’s bedrooms every morning when they choose to take that Redskins hat off and put it on, wear it to work or wear it out on the streets. I just want to make sure that I say that, and I’ll share a perspective. I’ve been in D.C. for about three years so this is the first time that I’ve been accosted with this stuff on a daily basis. I mean literally multiple times a day I’m at work. I work at a federal agency and I am literally accosted with this stuff. I’m also an attorney. I work with civil rights attorneys. We talk about this stuff. They can go through the legal analysis of what a disparaging work environment is. They know it inside and out. They see it for other people but they are complicit with it, and so if I cannot get other civil rights attorneys to understand this stuff, to care about it, who can I get to care about it? And so what this whole thing has taught me is that most people are just really, I don’t want to say morally lazy, but they’re just not willing to take on a fight. They’re just not. They see it but they’re just not willing to do it at all. REV. HAGLER: Let me come back at you for a second because, yes, I agree it is a personal responsibility, but it goes deeper than that. It’s personal awareness. We must choose to be aware. Things are set up and the paradigm is set up and the culture where we are drugged by more things that just drugs. We really don’t look at the effect of things as they affect our neighbors and our neighborhood and other people who live across town and around it. We don’t think of it. In fact there was serious push-back when I raised up the issue about folks going to see the team, folks wearing logos, in my congregation that was pushed back. Most of the folks, I discovered, had never even thought of it because one thing that happens in even a place like D.C.--We think D.C. is cosmopolitan. We think--but what you discover, and I’ve been many, many places, people really don’t know one another in D.C. and so they really don’t know somebody’s hurt, somebody’s pain, they don’t know somebody’s struggle. This is a place where it’s almost like in some ways a series of country towns, and it’s amazing what people don’t know, and it’s amazing what people never have thought about, and it’s amazing even with stuff being debated out there and discussions out there, what people have never even encountered, and that’s our job is to make folks encounter it, make folks change, make folks think about it, make folks come to a place where they go--the light goes on and they say aha, now I think I understand. After last couple…about four weeks ago, a church member that I have an ongoing argument with about that, finally went out in the church’s parking lot after service and ripped that flag off her car. Finally, but again you know I’m saying yes it’s personal responsibility but our job and particularly my job as a preacher, as an organizer, is to try to wake people up to see and to hear because people’s ears are really stopped up because they’re really satisfied with being consumers. If you can buy the things you feel good and you don’t need to think about anything else, and we’ve got to begin to create for people the dynamic where people have to look at the relationship of what they’re contributing to in a very non-thinking way and liberate them so that they can engage in the liberation of their sisters and brothers. FEMALE VOICE 3: I hear what you’re saying but again I guess I’ll say that if people don’t get this at this point they are making a decision to not get it. They just are. REV. HAGLER: I hear that loud and clear but I’ll come back to this place because the fact is that we live, in a sense, within our own communities and within our own debates, and we discover it all the time, and the issue is how do we break out the debate in a larger way because one of the things we really find out is that…I’ll give you an example. I still struggle with black folks using the N word on themselves. Don’t understand that that is so used to using it it just rolls off the tongue without second thought. That’s what goes on inside the community and folks who are inside the community know I’m accurate in that, and so it’s a part of getting people, waking up folks because what exists around us is a media culture and a consumer culture that dumbs people down and deliberately dumbs people down. MR. WISE: Having taken a lot of phone calls over the years on my radio show that I did for three-and-a-half years, that topic, the nickname topic, always took up all my hours and it was great because we’d have some all-time fights but I get what you’re saying. Some people wanted to hear what they wanted to hear and they would not give an inch to the idea of being educated. That to me told me there’s going to be a fight, and who’s on this side and who’s on that side of this issue, and it’s going to come and it’s going to come soon. MR. HOLDEN: I think that the other part of that equation in terms of personal responsibility is that once you’re aware is what do you do with that? It’s not just well maybe I stop buying or maybe I stop watching or something of that nature but also what do I do? I’ll take that to the next step. Personal responsibility to tell other people, to tell your neighbor that we’ve talked about here today to write that letter, to do the things that are going to make that change and that sort of personal responsibility as well and I think many of you have done that and I appreciate that. MS. EBONY ELLIS: Hi, I’m Ebony Ellis. I’m a D.C. student. I go to Wilson High School and my school was here on a field trip. I’m here with my history teacher so we’re learning about the Trail of Tears and stuff of that sort with the Native people, and I just wanted to make a comment on like this is a perfect time for awareness. I have lots of friends and family that are huge fans of the team. My family and I personally aren’t from the D.C. area so we don’t really support the Washington football team but I think the biggest target at this point it should really be the youth because at a point they are the biggest supporters of sports. They’re crazy about football and like my friend over there just posted a picture on Instagram like I’m at a debate about whether—excuse my language—the Redskins should keep their name or not, and there’s about ten comments going no they shouldn’t. They should never change it. Like I’m interested in this type of stuff but I think if discussions like this go out into our communities and schools and like enlighten our youth about it, I mean they’re the future. We can bury this name now so it doesn’t reach out 20, 30 years from now and still being used. Dan Snyder and all these people are going to soon be gone, the name can be gone, and we can start over so that’s my comment. MALE VOICE 14: Good afternoon. I want to thank the panel for your comments. I’ve learned an awful lot this afternoon and this morning as well, and of course I want to think Suzan Harjo and the museum for this forum. I think it’s been excellent and I hope that it keeps the ball rolling. I just wanted…I come from the perspective of a long-term Indian educator, 40 plus years, and I’ve seen a lot of different things from a classroom teacher to an athletic coach, to a principal, to a tribal college president, and I don’t know if I heard Mr. Holden right but I heard him say a couple times that this is a local issue. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that but simply because of where this team plays and what it represents in the city, but I think there’s one ingredient that I haven’t heard today at all, and that is where are our tribal governments. I think if we’re going to say ouch we need a bigger ouch. We need 500 sovereign nations talking about this issue. MR. HOLDEN: I didn’t mean for that to sound like it’s a purely local issue but certainly my point also was that it was played out on a national stage so it is getting coverage and there’s people all over the country that have vested interest in this, but also in terms of response from tribal governments or support of tribal governments, the National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution in 2005 against mascots and logos and we have cultural committees that deal with this on a regular basis so we do address this within our education committees. MR. WISE: To Reverend Hagler’s point earlier I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there is something to do with white supremacy in here. You can’t make up what we’ve heard today. Earlier in this symposium Lonestar Dietz, the team’s first coach, was discredited to be a fake Indian. He was the person that was originally named for the team. George Preston Marshall named the team for him. He assumed another Indian’s identity. George Preston Marshall was a known segregationist who refused to integrate his team until 1961. 1961 he waited, and why? Because of business, because the Redskins—pardon my term—were the team of the South, and when the Atlanta Falcons and the Carolina Panthers had no franchises they had the radio rights locked up in the South so the team of the South became the ‘Skins. To this day I’ll go to cover a game in Atlanta, in Tampa, in Carolina and half the stadium will be burgundy and gold because that’s the team they grew up loving, and that team was supported by an owner who when he died left millions of dollars to a school only on the condition that they remain segregated. This is the team that has this nickname. Symbolism is so important in this country and when they opened this museum they had thousands of American Indians marching a certain way, towards the same way the Trail of Tears went and in this town that symbol and this name still stands. You can’t make this up. FEMALE VOICE 4: Something the young woman who’s an attorney mentioned made me think of the NFL’s policy regarding personal responsibility so I looked it up and it says it’s important that the NFL be represented consistently by outstanding people as well as great football players, coaches, and staff. We hold ourselves to higher standards of responsible conduct because of what it means to be part of the National Football League. I just wondered do you think that in the various ways that people talked about kind of bringing attention to this issue that this would be one way that you could get the NFL’s attention to the fact that they are not holding themselves to a higher standard of conduct. ANDREW: Basically my name’s Andrew. I’m from Soligaa [phonetic] Nation in Montana and I notice when we talk about Native Americans we talk about them in one singular way. We say Native Americans. We say American Indians and Redskins. That doesn’t even come close to naming all the different tribal names as they were really known. We’re known as the Crow by a lot of people because of the way of just looping the Crow tribe of our different clans into one name so it’s easier to call us. Just like the Sioux. There are a lot of different bands of Sioux that were looped into one name that makes it easier for white people to say and explain and keep together. A lot of people don’t know that the name Sioux actually means just “snake,” just a little person who’s not to be trusted and down below you. I think the Redskins remain the same way. It takes all the tribal names into one way of calling Indians and it’s very easy to keep going in society because people I know in the military go in and they’re called by their tribal names. People in Blackfeet are called Pikuni, people who are Crow who are in the military are called Apsaalooka because in the military they understand the sacrifices Indians have made all through the military for their country. I just wonder why the moment they leave the military and come to Washington D.C., people seem to forget all the sacrifices Indians have made for this country and just call them Redskins. I think that’s another piece of history that needs to be said more is Indians and their sacrifices, mothers sacrificing their sons, people sacrificing their lives for this country which allows people to just shout Redskins 80,000 plus. HON. BARTNOFF: There’s no way to respond to that except to say that--for me at least—except to say that I think one of the things that will contribute in some way to alleviating that problem is this building and the programs that happen here and the fact that people continue to come to visit it and how important that is. Suzan Harjo and I have been friends for a long time and I remember when she first was talking about how important it would be to have this museum, and she said it wasn’t just important to have this museum. It was important to have this museum here so that when members of Congress were in the Capitol looking out at the Mall, this was the first building they saw and because of where it is they can’t build any others that are going to block the view. DR. DELORIA: We’ll take one last comment. FEMALE VOICE 5: The program today has been absolutely marvelous and I think of--similar to recent momentum that is building on the gun issue--how there are so many people of eloquence in the room here and that they’ve spent the whole day certainly testifies to their great interest, but it seems there needs to be a sign-up sheet and some kind of a gathering of email addresses and so forth for any kind of group activity that might follow this because while everyone in their personal spheres can do their part, group action is really needed on all fronts on all of these major issues to effect change, and I don’t know if there’s a way that a sign-up sheet can be put outside or several that people can put their emails and at least have some linkage with one another if there are any group activities to follow. DR. DELORIA: I think we should absolutely explore that. So I want to say a few quick words here to wrap up the day and wrap up the panel. I teach at the University of Michigan, which has a stadium, largest stadium in the country. And we--115,000 people and we cram a few more in. And it’s quite a thing, right, to be in that stadium. The feeling of community, of solidarity with other people is incredibly, incredibly powerful. When the team runs out, right, everybody feels it. And I think most people in the room have had those kinds of experiences, the way that we can come together as a community. What we’ve been talking about of course is a moment when we come together as a community around a certain set of symbols and practices that actually destroy our community. And it’s not simply that these things are disparaging for American Indian people and dehumanizing, they are at their core, because we practice them in this context, they were dehumanizing of us, no matter who we are when we’re sitting in that stadium. So these kinds of struggles that we’re talking about here, struggles that exist in the realm of culture and meaning and experience and practice, actually really matter a lot. There was a moment, you know, when Karl Marx said well, look, you know, the economy, the economics of it determines everything, right. It determines what happens with culture floating around in the super- structure. But I think one of the things we know now is that this isn’t really, truly the case, right? Economy determines a lot. We can always go to the economic argument and we always should. But what happens in people’s hearts and minds, what happens in culture as we become people in all the instances and places where we become people, including sitting together in stadiums or in auditoriums like this, right, these things produce meanings in the minds of individuals. And in conversation with other individuals and all the personal networks that we have, right, they produce our collective sense of culture and meaning and what is right and what is not right. So it’s important for us when we’re engaged in these kinds of struggles to fight them on all possible realms, the social realm, the economic realm, the cultural realm, the legal realm. One of the questions I think that we always ask in these kinds of circumstances and it was the main question, it’s the implicit question that we all ask, what am I to do? Right, what are we to do. How are we to live our life? What are we supposed to do if we care about this? I started keeping a running tally of some of the ideas that were floating around here today. And I want to thank everybody for being incredibly smart, engaged, eloquent, the panel fantastic, the audience amazing. This is an event that I think really touches us all. So here’s just a quick list. I’ll read fast, right? Economic strategies, boycott, sponsors, FedEx, team merchandise, personal pressure, conversations with other human beings. That turns into community pressure at some point. We’ve had a tweet conversion. Today we’ve heard other tweets that are not about conversion but maybe they will get there. We have civil rights attorneys, who don't actually see civil rights instances right in their own practice, right in their own home, in their own house. Language-- refuse the word, reject the word, watch it grow if this can happen. Is there an economic profit model that can be used to convince team ownership, the NFL itself, that yeah, you know, let’s get rid of this stuff, make it collectors’ items for two years. Fine, we’ll accept that trade-off and then we’ll have another fire sale and we’ll sell off this new stuff. Could one be convinced around the economic kind of model? Is it possible to imagine that young athletes, that some young athletes, perhaps RG3 during rehab time, will think a lot about this kind of issue and think about the legacies of people like Arthur Ashe or Curt Flood or other folks, Mike, that you raised in that quite wonderful column you wrote actually. Protest, we kind of forget about the stuff that we used to do called protesting. What if we showed up at training camp, if not necessarily the game in the stadium, which seemed to be absolutely prohibitive of this? Mike says that this might show up on national news, this might actually be part of this bigger, broader kind of front. Letters and emails, we should write the NFL. Quit supporting this. We should write the Washington Post and I believe the name was Marty Baron, not to sort of like put you in a position, Mike, but we could write-- MIKE: [Interposing] I’m going to be fired tomorrow. DR. DELORIA: Yeah exactly. Mike Wise told me to just don't use Mike’s name on this right? We write the NFL and we say you say you should be held to higher standards. We want you to be held to higher standards. What about the legal realm? Of course there’s the trademark lawsuit that has made its way through, been refiled, these kinds of things. Other people have suggested lawsuits against those broadcasters who have deals with these stations who have deals with this team. Are there other legal avenues that we have not yet explored? Of course there’s a moment of popular culture. Someone mentioned Marlon Brando going to the Academy Awards or Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. And this makes me think of something we haven’t talked much about which is social media. We talked a little bit about Sign On and existing petitions and these kinds of things. But in fact social media, if we’re talking about youth, this is one of these things that I think we absolutely must engage. It’s a sign in some ways of where we were sitting generationally in relation to this dialogue. Ebony, we should engage you, right, around these kinds of issues and we should think more about how we use this stuff. And we should talk about the media itself so Erik and Mike, you’ve done these kinds of things but we should ask the Washington Post about this. We should think about education, things that happen in the K-12 classroom can contribute to this kind of effort. Civil rights issues and decisions themselves, there is a body of stuff out there that we can continually use and mobilize around this. Perhaps we petition the White House or perhaps we sign online. We need to perhaps psychoanalyze Daniel Snyder and figure out just what it is that makes the man tick ‘cause I don't get it. All the arguments lean, you know, in a certain direction, and yet he leans in the opposite direction. Psychologists, we need your help here. There is a sense that this also needs to engage in a spiritual level and I think we can say at this institution, we begin each of our meetings with a prayer, we close each of our meetings with a prayer. We take this seriously here. So thinking about prayer. But also moral and ethical seriousness and the ways in which we as a collective group of people bring these things to bear on the world. So going back to the youth, Ebony, back to the youth. And mobilizing tribal governments, right, yes, this is exactly right. Tribal governments don't need to be silent on this particular issue. What we’re thinking about then and what we can think of collectively and collaboratively is a broad-based struggle across all the different kinds of realms of action in which each one of us has some particular role to play, whether it’s sending that small email or doing that small Twitter feed or whatever it is, the collective kind of mass in action can perhaps establish the conditions for history to change. So I’m a historian, right? And one of the things a historian knows is that stuff actually does change. Stuff changes over time. Nothing remains the same. And one of the ways in which things change is good-- meaning and committed people end up establishing the conditions for unexpected things to happen. History changes in many, many instances because of stuff that we can’t predict. Right? It’s contingent. This is what historians tell us. History is contingent and guess what? The future is contingent as well. We establish the conditions, we make our best effort, and we are open to the thing that we did not expect to have happen and maybe it’s RG3 sitting, you know, with his whirlpool, with ice on his knee and sort of just thinking a little bit more about this conversation and about the world as a whole. Here at NMAI we are committed to education, we host discussions like this discussion. I want to thank you all for participating in it. We make knowledge through this enterprise and the kinds of scholarship that we do here around our fantastic collections. We educate people and we’re committed to the educational project and we host awesome receptions out in the Potomac Atrium. Let me tell you, you have not been to a reception until you have been to an NMAI reception and we’re going to have one in about ten minutes. So please stick around, continue the conversation, and we’ll be out there. FEMALE VOICE: Professor Deloria, we just want to respond to the idea of an email. We just created one. Please everyone email us at [email protected]. That is also our hash tag. I work for the museum and we will make sure that you get on the list and get all the resources, the links to this symposium, and everything else we plan to do in the future. [email protected]. Plural. DR. DELORIA: I love this brave new world. Thank you all so much. We’ll see you out there in the Atrium for one of the best receptions ever. Thank you.