There's still a tomahawk chop in sports. And it could be headed back to the Super Bowl.

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Theresa McCarthy always roots for the Buffalo Bills, but this week her rooting interest is about more than football.

She is interim chair of the University at Buffalo’s new department of Indigenous studies. And she is astonished that fans of the Kansas City Chiefs still perform the so-called tomahawk chop.

“I’d like to see them try it in Haudenosaunee territory,” she says. “They would meet a lot of resistance.”

The Haudenosaunee (hoe-dee-no-SHOW-nee) Confederacy is made up of six Native nations. McCarthy is a member of the Onondaga Nation, a Beaver clan citizen of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, in Ontario.

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The chop is a rhythmic forearm motion performed to the beat of what its perpetrators seem to think mimics a Native war chant. (It is actually a stereotypical Hollywood version.) Kansas City fans perform it gleefully at Chiefs games — and network TV cameras show it with nary a word from commentators, who should know better. (The NFL did not return emails requesting comment on its position on the chop and the chant.)

“It’s incredibly racist and dehumanizing for people to behave like that, and how that behavior is condoned,” McCarthy says. “It is unconscionable that this level of racism can prevail when we have had these global racial-justice movements underway and accelerating. I am trying to find the words. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable that this still persists.”

Next month the Washington Football Team will reveal its new team name. The former Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians. But the Atlanta Braves retain their team name — and their version of the tomahawk chop. They won the World Series in November under intense media criticism for encouraging their fans to perform it.

Sports fans have seen the chop on a national stage a lot recently, from the World Series to the Super Bowl. The Chiefs won the Super Bowl two years ago and lost it last year — and each time their fans belted out their sing-song chant. It will be the same on Sunday in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs when the Bills play the Chiefs at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium.

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As it happens, that’s where Amanda Blackhorse, who is Navajo, joined her first protest against Native team names in sports, in 2005. She was a student at the University of Kansas when she joined a group called Not in Our Honor. They carried protest signs outside the stadium while Chiefs fans — some dressed as faux Indians — pelted them with calls of “Get over it!” and “Go back to your reservation!” and “Why don’t you get drunk?”

The Chiefs announced in 2020 that they would no longer allow fans to wear costume headdresses and war paint. This was only weeks after Washington jettisoned its team name, which in turn came only weeks after the murder of George Floyd, which briefly caused the nation to look anew at the issue of systemic racism.

Blackhorse says banning pretend-ian outfits was a start, but she can’t understand why the Chiefs still hang tight to their tomahawk chop. The team did little more than require its cheerleaders to use a closed fist rather than an open palm in the chop. (Most of the fans, of course, still use an open palm.)

The fist motion supposedly symbolizes beating a drum. Blackhorse doesn’t see that as much of an improvement. “Banging drums in this way is a mockery of our Native communities and Native religions,” she says. “I cannot believe that they still get away with all this.”

She turned from protester to activist on that day at Arrowhead in 2005. She was later the lead petitioner in a trademark-registration case that placed pressure on the Washington team to change its name. (When team owner Daniel Snyder famously said in 2013 that he would NEVER change the name, it was in response to a question about her case.)

On her Facebook page, the icon representing Blackhorse is a version of the Chiefs logo with the word "NOPE" in the middle of the arrowhead. And one of her recent posts is a video of a Native fan in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey among a sea of chopping Chiefs fans at last Sunday’s game in Kansas City.

“People don’t think about what it’s like to be a Native person in the middle of all of that.” McCarthy says. “They think Indigenous people are gone. But we’re still here. … There are so many Haudenosaunee fans of the Bills here in Seneca territory, and so many Indigenous fans of the NFL everywhere. And they don’t deserve this.”

Last year mass graves with the remains of Indigenous children were uncovered in Canada at former residential schools. That’s where, decades ago, First Nations children who had been taken from their families were forced to live in boarding schools.

“We think of that kind of atrocity as a thing of the past, but it is still reflected in this kind of condoned behavior” at ballgames, McCarthy says. “The mockery and the violence are not disconnected. To see how grown adults act in front of children, and the way it is allowed to be seen as normal behavior, is terrible — this level of dehumanization of living people.”

Such residential schools also existed in the U.S. In fact, so-called “civilization regulations” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries forbade Native Americans to speak their own languages or practice their religions. Not incidentally, it was during this era of forced assimilation that Native team mascots came to be. The National League baseball team in Boston — which had been previously known by a number of names, including Red Caps and Beaneaters — became the Braves in 1912. The franchise would later move to Milwaukee, and then, of course, to Atlanta.

The National Congress of American Indians, the nation’s largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization, has long opposed sports mascots that implicate Native Americans. The organization renewed its objections when the Braves reached the World Series: “In our discussions with the Atlanta Braves, we have repeatedly and unequivocally made our position clear — Native people are not mascots, and degrading rituals like the ‘tomahawk chop’ that dehumanize and harm us have no place in American society.”

The NFL tweeted a photo just before the start of the 2020 season. It showed the end zone at Arrowhead with the word “Chiefs” in large letters, and “End Racism” in smaller ones.

Irony rarely comes so neatly packaged.