Community Corner
Chiefs Under Pressure To Ditch The Tomahawk Chop Celebration
A coalition of Native American groups has put up billboards in the Kansas City area to protest the tomahawk chop and Chiefs' name.
February 04, 2021
The pressure is mounting for the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs to abandon a popular tradition in which fans break into a “war chant” while making a chopping hand motion designed to mimic the Native American tomahawk. Local groups have long argued that the team's chop tradition and even its name itself are derogatory to American Indians, yet the national attention focused for years on the Washington football team's use of the name Redskins and the cartoonish Chief Wahoo logo, long the emblem for the Cleveland Indians baseball team. But in the past year, those teams have decided to ditch their Native American-themed monikers, and the defending champion Chiefs are generating more attention due to a second consecutive appearance on the sport's biggest stage. A coalition of Native American groups has put up billboards in the Kansas City area to protest the tomahawk chop and Chiefs' name. A protest is planned outside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, site of Sunday's game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the coalition has hired a plane to fly around the area. A few thousand people have signed onto two online petitions, one of them started by a fourth-grader.
