by Antonia Gonzales
Members of the Washington, D.C. based-grassroots Rising Hearts group say they were behind Wednesday’s online campaign aimed at the Washington football team’s name. Fake articles on website parodies of The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, the Bleacher Report and the Washington football team showed an updated logo and mascot noting the team ditched its R-word name and changed it to the Washington Redhawks.
Rising Hearts released a statement taking claim for the action, crafted as a culture jam. Culture jamming is a tactic used in social activism creating fake or hoax stories, logos and products to draw attention to an issue and/or critic it.
Website parodies show updated logo and team name of the Washington football team.
“One of the reasons we used this tactic is because we feel as Native people we face this giant wall of erasure and invisibility where it is really difficult to get accurate representation of ourselves in mainstream media,” said Rebecca Nagle, Cherokee Nation, a member of Rising Hearts.
The group said the action was a way to show the NFL team how easy it would be to change the name, a move Native advocates, many tribes and national Native organizations have long asked team owner Dan Snyder to do, calling the R-word a racial slur.
“In the first 12 hours of the website launching all our websites received over a half million visitors, the people who visited our websites Wednesday could fill FedEx Stadium five times over,” said Nagle. “Beyond the visitors to our website, people saw the culture jam on social media and in the news.”
The Washington football team released a statement Wednesday in response to the websites. The team said the name remains the Washington R******* and will remain for the future.
Reaction on social media included comments from people celebrating. Others expressed confusion or were upset over the dupe. Nagle believes there is support for the group’s Redhawks action in Indian Country, but acknowledges there are people who are not pleased.
“We’re open for dialog and feedback with people,” said Nagle. “Our goal is to take this platform this culture jam created to shed more light on this issue and in this moment of that sort of vail of invisibility being lifted really use it to get our message across to the non-Native world.”
