Native American Groups Decry Woke Effort by Chiefs, Taylor Swift to Erase Heritage

Native Americans say they fear efforts being made to elicit the support of pop megastar Taylor Swift to use her influence to erase the Native heritage of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Many are speaking out against woke leftists who are working to eliminate Native American heritage all across the country as liberals force cities to take Native names off geographical locations, street signs, schools, and sports teams and as the Boy Scouts of America have begun to eliminate its longstanding connections with Native culture in its organization, Fox News reported.

Some Native Americans are warning that Taylor Swift could become a major threat as the cancel culture seeks to enlist her aid to help them attack the Kansas City Chiefs over its Indian logos and the much-maligned “tomahawk chop chant.”

“It’s a woke firing squad looking to tear everything down by telling us that Native Americans and Americans need to be divided,” Maurice the Native Patriot (@lanativepatriot), a Swinomish Indian from Washington state, told Fox News.

“It’s become popular to think that even seeing a Native American image is racist,” he added.

In another post, Maurice slammed the left, saying, “You’re actively attempting to destroy American history and using Natives as your pawns of sacrifice to gain notoriety.” And added, “All I see is you attempting to destroy, delete, and forget about Native Americans and their role in American History.”

Indeed, erasing the history and legacy of the Kansas City Chiefs would be erasing the legacy of one of the city’s past mayors, who was a major promoter of Native American culture.

Harold Roe “Chief” Bartle, who was mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, from 1955 to 1963, was also inducted as a member of the Arapaho tribe when he was a young man.
“Bartle was inducted into the Northern Arapaho Tribe as a blood brother and was sponsored into it by a Chief named Lone Bear,” Scouting historians David L. Eby and Paul Myers Jr. wrote in a biography of the mayor.
Bartle became a main organizer for the Boy Scouts in the 1920s in St. Joseph, Missouri, and incorporated much Native American culture into his work with children. He earned the nickname “Chief” during his work with the Scouts and carried it and his love and fascination with Native culture throughout his life and into his days as mayor of KC.

It was Bartle who helped rechristen the NFL team as the Chiefs when the AFL’s Dallas Texans moved to KC from Dallas. The team’s then-owner, Lamar Hunt, wanted to name the team the “Kansas City Texans.” But Bartle convinced him to go with the Chiefs instead. Bartle was a huge influence on the city, bringing much focus on Native history.

Hunt even said that he came to like the Chiefs’ name because there were so many active Native American communities in and around Kansas City, something he had not seen before in other big cities, Forbes wrote.

But now, liberals and wokesters want to erase this proud history.

“Native American history is American history,” Tony Henson, the executive director of the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA), headquartered in North Dakota, told Fox News. “This effort to divide us comes from the ‘hate-America’ Marxist crowd that wants to tear down tradition and rebuild the United States in their own image.”

The Chiefs have already bowed to the cancel culture left by telling fans not to do the “Chop” chant and banning Native headdresses and paraphernalia.

Worse, the team now officially claims that its name has “no affiliation with American Indian culture,” which is patently untrue when reviewing the history of the team’s move to Kansas City.

The whole effort is shameful, as far as Hensen is concerned. “This effort to erase history and divide us is not where 90% of Americans are. This is not where 90% of Native Americans are,” he told Fox News.

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