Chiefs' new stadium keeps the traditions activists want gone
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One of the many billboards across the metro. Photo: Courtesy of Gaylene Crouser
Billboards asking the Kansas City Chiefs to change their name and end the tomahawk chop are up across the metro.
Why it matters: Native residents say the name and the chop shape how Kansas Citians see them, and the team is incorporating both into a new stadium meant to last generations.
Driving the news: The Kansas City Indian Center usually posts its "Change the Name. Stop the Chop" billboards in the fall.
- This year the group put the signs up early and bought more of them to catch World Cup crowds, the center's executive director, Gaylene Crouser, tells Axios.
Context: Native groups have pushed the Chiefs to drop the name since at least the 1990s, and two other franchises have already made the switch.
- Washington retired the Redskins name in 2020, and Cleveland's baseball team dropped the Indians in 2021.
Zoom in: The chop is the gesture in which fans raise and lower an arm while chanting. Crouser says people approach her asking what the words mean.
- "It's a stereotypical Hollywood kind of chant and it freezes us into kind of this primitive image," Crouser told KCUR.
What's inside: Concept renderings for the enclosed Kansas City, Kansas, stadium opening in 2031 label the building "Chiefs Stadium," a name that isn't final.
- They also include a Drum Deck, the perch high in the stands where an invited honoree pounds a drum to start the crowd chopping before kickoff.
- Six years after the team said it was reviewing both the Drum Deck and the chop, the deck is in the plans and the chop continues.
Flashback: The team dropped a tomahawk-wielding caricature as its logo, banned headdresses and Native-style face paint in the stadium in 2020 and retired Warpaint, a horse ridden by a man in a feather headdress, in 2021.
- Crouser says those incremental changes have made the name easier to defend and that the stadium ban doesn't reach tailgate lots or watch parties.
The other side: The Chiefs haven't publicly addressed the name or the chop this year. Their July stadium release says only that the club worked to incorporate and improve fan traditions.
- Crouser says the center has had no direct contact with team leadership or the NFL since the move was announced. The Chiefs did not respond to a request for comment.
Follow the money: Kansas is covering up to $1.8 billion of the $3 billion stadium, roughly 60%, through STAR bonds, repaid with sales tax diverted from across the metro.
- "Taxpayer dollars should not be spent on a stadium filled with race-based branding that is harmful," Crouser says.
What's next: Crouser says the campaign continues in Jackson County, but she is most hopeful for a change once the team crosses the state line. She wants Kansas officials to ask the team to change its name.