Yesterday’s Super Bowl was all about belonging. 

Offering something for everyone, the National Football League orchestrated dozens of activities for the host community: laptop giveaways, tree plantings, a veterans night. The game itself was an all-time classic, though with a controversial ending.

In the days before the game, the league suffused metro Phoenix with the colorful designs and music of Indigenous artists. Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribal nations. But the high profile of Native Americans at the Super Bowl contrasted with another, more uncomfortable relationship: Native Americans and the Kansas City Chiefs.  

Decades of Native American advocacy have significantly curtailed sports words and imagery that reduce Native Americans to caricatures. In 2020, Washington’s football team dropped its old name, and the Chiefs soon after banned fans from wearing “headdresses and face paint styled in a way that references or appropriates American Indian cultures and traditions.”

But every Chiefs game is still filled with the “tomahawk chop” – a chant fans perform in unison. Such portrayals of Native culture “are harmful not only because they are often negative, but because they remind American Indians of the limited ways in which others see them,” according to Dr. Stephanie Fryberg, who was quoted in a 2005 American Psychological Association statement about retiring Native mascots. There’s also the principle of emotional invalidation – telling others how to feel. When those fighting against caricatures of Native culture are told to just get over it, it diminishes them.

The Chiefs have two players who are tribal members. And one of Congress’ five Indigenous Americans, Sharice Davids, represents hundreds of thousands of Chiefs fans in Kansas. 

Native Americans have impact in Kansas City.

“I am glad for the artists, but what happens after this game?” says Rhonda LeValdo, a founding member of Not in Our Honor, a Native American coalition, in an email. “We all have to make choices, and my choice is to make the future better for the next generation so they don’t have to deal with this. They need to know that their identity matters.”

Sunday’s Super Bowl showed how football can create a powerful sense of belonging. But it also showed the work ahead to extend that belonging to all.