In the NFL, two teams retain Indian-themed names. The Kansas City Chiefs play on land that once belonged to the Osage Indians. “The truth is,” Thomas Jefferson admitted to the secretary of the Navy in 1804, the Osages “are the great nation South of the Missouri.” Along with the Sioux, he explained, “we must stand well, because in their quarter we are miserably weak.” By 1825, however, a demographic tidal wave had rolled in from the East, and the tables had turned. The Osages were “weak and pitiful,” one Osage leader admitted. That year, the Osages ceded 4,650 square miles, an area slightly smaller than Connecticut, in exchange for 1,200 cattle and hogs, 1,000 chickens, and goods totaling $140,000. That’s roughly $3.4 million in today’s dollars, or a little more than a dollar per acre.
Of all Indian-themed sports teams, the Washington NFL franchise has come under the heaviest criticism, and has asserted most vociferously that its name honors Native Americans. The team’s official history page includes a description of Darrell Green’s goal-line stop in the 1987 NFC Championship Game and a feature on the franchise’s 80 greatest players but not a word about the native peoples who lived where the team plays today.
The website could describe the epidemic disease, dispossession, dispersal, and survival of Maryland’s Piscataway people. In 1623, Virginia colonists invaded Piscataway country and, in the words of the colony’s governor, “putt many to the swoorde,” despite the Indians’ best efforts to appease the newcomers. A generation later, the Piscataway were forced onto reservations and subjected to colonial law. Disease and alcoholism became widespread, and at least a few individuals were forced into slavery to toil on one of the Chesapeake’s many tobacco plantations. In 1701, the surviving Piscataway abandoned the region altogether, settling on a reservation in Pennsylvania. Yet, a core identity persisted among Piscataway families, and in 2012, the state of Maryland formally recognized two Piscataway bands. Their history, like that of other indigenous Americans, is complex and belies the stereotyped, featureless warrior that appears on the Washington team’s helmets.