Tomahawk chop braves series#

It’s for celebration and supporting your Chiefs family and friends and our team.”Īnderson, the Haskell professor, hopes that Chiefs PR is prepared for national eyes. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s freedom of speech,” he says. Daryl Ash has been outspoken on fan forums about his intent to keep chopping. While this conversation continues, there are tens of thousands of KC fans who will keep chopping despite controversy. “My family’s main focus is real-life human issues.” “We don’t focus all our attention on sports logos or radicalizing everything that comes along,” Morton says.

Morton says the issues with Native American depictions in sports culture is minor compared to problems his people face, pointing out that Native American women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average. He does, however, feel that the controversial name of the Washington NFL franchise and the old mascot of the Cleveland Indians are offensive. In the early 1990s, FSU alumni brought the chop to both the Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs.Ĭody Morton, Chiefs fan and member of South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota Nation, says the tomahawk chop doesn’t bother him.

The tomahawk chop started with Florida State, which was granted permission from the Seminole Tribe to partake in the chant and other such rituals. “Some of this thinking has become so institutionalized that we don’t even really stop to try to unpack it.”Īnderson says the tomahawk, historically, is merely a weapon and suspects that the chop is a nod to battles in indigenous societies, albeit one that distorts views of indigenous people. “There’s a tendency for people, non-Native people in particular, to think of this as fairly innocuous,” says Anderson, a member of the Potawatomi Nation. Will the Chiefs face similar scrutiny over the tomahawk chop in the playoffs?Įric Anderson, professor of Indigenous and American Indian studies at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, says the Chiefs could face similar criticism during the playoffs. Louis Post-Dispatch that the tomahawk chop is “a misrepresentation of Native Americans” and that it “depicts them in this kind of caveman-type-people way who aren’t intellectual.”Īfter the statement, Atlanta’s SunTrust Park stopped distribution of foam tomahawks and didn’t play tomahawk music or graphics on the jumbotrons. Ryan Helsley, a relief pitcher for the Cardinals and member of the Cherokee Nation, told the St.

Tomahawk chop braves series#

In October, the chop made headlines during the MLB series between the Atlanta Braves and St. That’s because it’s seen by some to be offensive to Native Americans.

Look around and you’ll find a few fans, hands in pockets, choosing not to participate in the Chiefs tradition. The banging of the drum starts, and you perform the familiar gesture and chant known as the tomahawk chop. You’re standing in a crowd of 76,000 red-shirted Chiefs fans at Arrowhead.