The New Washington Football Team Name: Strike up The Band(Wagon)
Working through my own intransigence over changing the Washington Football Team’s name.
1: Tohoga
Imagine that you’re driving in Washington, D.C. Heading southeast on Massachusetts Avenue from American University, turn right at Wisconsin Ave., and head south into Georgetown. You’ll pass right over the site of what was once a thriving Nacotchtank* trading village called Tohoga. Fertile and forested at the confluence of two rivers, Tohoga was part of the local Nacotchtank community that spanned the breadth of modern-day southern Maryland.
Hang a left at K Street, follow the on ramp to Rock Creek Parkway, and make your way south to Virginia Ave. You’ll see the Watergate Hotel. You might also catch a glimpse of Theodore Roosevelt Island on the Potomac. That’s where the Nacotchtank took refuge in the late 1600s, after they were driven from their land by smallpox and tobacco barons.
Maybe you travel these streets every day, or zip under them on the D.C. Metro. Maybe you’ve heard about the Nacotchtank, or the Anacostans; maybe you haven’t.
Or maybe you take a different route altogether. Like the one I used to travel as a suburban Maryland kid in the 80s when we were lucky enough to score tickets to watch the team then known as the Washington Redskins** at RFK Stadium.
This essay is about the roads we travel between childhood and adulthood, past and present, self and other, but that’s not how it started. It started as a pitch for the Washington Football Team’s next name. And although too late to affect the outcome, I’m still going to pitch the name to you, because in the midst of my journey to prove myself right, I stumbled on something profound: that what I think is less important than how I think.
* According to writer Dana Hedgpeth in “A Native American tribe once called D.C. home. It’s had no living members for centuries” (Washington Post, November 22, 2018), the name Anacostans is more frequently used in reference to this group, but Anacostans “…is a Latin version of their original name, the Nacotchtanks. The name came from the Indian word ‘anaquashatanik,’ which means ‘a town of traders.’”
** Except when it’s necessary for clarity or present in a direct quote, my essay will avoid using this term.
2: Camp Androscoggin
It’s a Tuesday morning in July and my Canadian friend and I are chatting over Zoom, discussing American history — and football. At one point, she refers to the American experience as ‘colonialism.’ I stop her right there. “Colonialism is a British Empire thing,” I explain. “Manifest Destiny was a religious conviction that we were entitled to settle the open land, not lord over existing nation-states.” I’m really stepping in it, but I enjoy a good debate.
“What’s the difference if you’re Indigenous?” she asks.
I want to explain how, compared to colonialism, Manifest Destiny was … what? Well-intentioned? Aspirational? American? My emotional identity as an American is rooted in Manifest Destiny, not colonialism.
“Isn’t Manifest Destiny just colonialism without the Crown?” she continues.
I resist this. Manifest Destiny is shorthand for our stories: exploration, the Wild West, Lewis & Clark. Westerns and adventure and covered wagons and cattle and the Gold Rush. Wind-blown dresses on clothes lines, and saloon doors banging open; dusty miscreants tossed to the dirt. Sheriffs, deputies and outlaws. Town squares and railroads and lots of mud. Cowboys and Indians. Canyons. The American Dream.
Colonialism is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Elitism. Tea and safari hats and tattered orphans forced into hard labor. Eyeball soup.
My heart says there’s no comparison. But my left brain reminds me that this feeling is not fact; it’s mythology. Whether we’re talking about Manifest Destiny or a football team mascot, I’m weighing my nostalgia against someone else’s pain. And to balance the equation I have to assign that pain a value.
For the first year of its history, the Washington Football Team was called the Braves, followed by 87 years of the name I grew up with. Most recently, it has been in a holding pattern while the owners respond to an evolving social landscape.
My Canadian friend and I talk about the ways in which our countries have appropriated Native American culture. She mentions Philip J. Deloria’s 1998 book, Playing Indian, which traces white America’s tradition of “playing Indian,” from the Boston Tea Party to a Grateful Dead concert, systematically manufacturing American aboriginality to make ourselves citizens “not of an impermanent government, but of the land itself.”[1]
The book starts with an interesting description of Benjamin Franklin by D.H. Lawrence:
Benjamin [Franklin] knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own under-consciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American.[2]
He wanted to be American.
Native to this place. As American as Native Americans, apple pie, and…football.
From this core desire to be American, riding the chaotic divisions and inversions that leave Americans divided to this day, sprang a centuries-long tradition of ‘playing Indian.’ This is where the Skins’ name sprang from in the first place.
As my friend and I talk about ‘playing Indian,’ my mind drifts to Camp Androscoggin. Beautiful, wonderful Camp Androscoggin in Wayne, Maine, on Lake Androscoggin; my beloved childhood summer camp. Where we fought Color War as members of the Black team or the Orange team, or sometimes played against other camps called Kennebec, Winnebago, Samoset and Powhattan. We kayaked the Saco, Kennebec and Allagash rivers. Our counselors carved beautiful totem poles.
So much joy. No idea of the full significance of these names and practices.
[1] Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p.183.
[2] Ibid., 1.
3: RFK via Wagshal’s
Growing up, I obsessed about football every day, hoping against hope that on Wednesday my team would grace the cover of that week’s Sports Illustrated (as Gary Clark did during our illustrious ’91-’92 season). Hoping that by Friday my dad would somehow get tickets to Sunday’s game. And when he did, I got to raise my hand in Sunday School and excuse myself early — oh what a glorious feeling that was.
The journey to RFK was a ritual. First we left behind our suburban streets: Madawaska (Maliseet for “land of porcupines”) and Sangamore (from Sagamore, Algonquin for “tribal chief”), which parallels the Potomac River (the Patawomeck tribe’s namesake).
A quick stop at Wagshal’s Deli to pick up those huge beef hotdogs for tailgating, then we took Massachusetts Avenue across Northwest Washington and into Northeast. As we travelled from Maryland to D.C., the cityscape changed. I was transported through the symbolic heart of America, along the veins and arteries of the capital.
We always parked in the Moriah Baptist Church lot where we’d be greeted by the familiar faces of the clergy-cum-parking lot attendants, then take the short hike to the stadium; a pilgrimage with familiar strangers who made up the eclectic mix of our city and its surrounding towns. I loved this togetherness; the common cause towards which we were marching.
At the time, there wasn’t another powerhouse team in the D.C. area.* But the Skins were all we seemed to need, having gone to four Super Bowls and winning three between 1982 and 1992. Our fans hailed from D.C. to Delaware and into Pennsylvania going north and east, and as far as Georgia to the south, through Virginia and the Carolinas (North Carolina didn’t field a team until 1995). Our fan base, like Manifest Destiny itself, followed a westward path: West Virginia, parts of Kentucky and Tennessee (which didn’t get its football team until 1997). This expansive fandom guaranteed a sold-out stadium with a generational wait list, and often the most expensive franchise tag in the world.
RFK Stadium was an extraordinary place. Small for football standards — only 56,000 seats. And loud. From the moment the starters were announced, you couldn’t hear anything except the roar of the crowd, unless it was the PA guy announcing a name like “Kurt Gouuuveia.” You couldn’t see anything from the lower levels unless you stood the whole time, and the stands shook like an earthquake. That’s where Jeb’s tickets were.
The 400 sections were so close and so high it was like watching from the face of El Cap. That’s where Bobby’s tickets were. The mezzanine was holy ground and that’s where Herb’s tickets were. From all these vantage points I got to experience euphoria and, on rare occasions, heartbreak. I got to feel the contact high of camaraderie and togetherness. The exaltation of utopic oneness. Shared reverence. This was our team, our coach, our stadium, our fight song, our marching band, our mascot.
It was, to me, the most special place on Earth. And it felt like it had always been here and always would be, an intrinsic part of my American life.
* All honor to the ‘83/’84 Georgetown Hoyas men’s basketball team.
4: The Marshland
Contrary to popular belief, D.C. is not built on a swamp, or even a marsh. It’s built on well-drained, fertile land that was used for millennia by Native Americans for maize farming, hunting, and fishing before it was taken over by Europeans for tobacco farming. Across all those centuries, one thing that has never changed is the region’s presence within two major watersheds: the Potomac River watershed and the larger Chesapeake (nee Chesepiooc, Algonquian for a “village at a river”) watershed. And this broader region has always been home to a variety of wetland habitats.
I’m a birder, so I think a lot about bird habitats. Habitat decline for the species that occupy these Maryland watersheds has been happening for hundreds of years, thanks to monoculture and pesticides and the razing and re-engineering of its surface area.
It’s an issue that’s hardly limited to D.C., and one we’ve been trying to address for the last century. The Roosevelt presidencies introduced some prescient policy around conserving natural resources. More importantly, they ushered in a new mindset, teaching a generation of Americans to think about the land as an important resource. Progress can’t happen without preservation.
Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorite presidents, is a highly romanticized figure in American history. A man’s man. Leader of the Rough Riders and a hero of the Spanish-American War. A boxer, a would-be cowboy, a frequent skinny-dipper in the Potomac. His domestic policies often focused on fairness (for men, mainly), with his “Square Deal” and his conservationist work programs.
He was also a big football fan. In the early years of the twentieth century, football was not the same sport it is today. The rules were different, the players were unprotected. But the sport was still exciting. And very, very violent.
Lore has it that football would have been banned altogether were it not for Roosevelt’s intervention. After years of disproportionately high death tolls among players on the college circuit (head injuries, broken spines, the occasional rib-pierced heart), Harvard and Yale called on President Roosevelt to intervene. He appealed to players to be civil, and insisted that coaches help them use their brutality more strategically.
The result was the introduction of elements that have become central to the game, like the forward pass and the 10-yard first-down.
Of course, we could also lay some blame for the violence at the feet of Roosevelt himself. Though he demanded a lower death and injury toll, the President also encouraged coaches to keep the sport sufficiently violent to remain “manly” and avoid playing “on too ladylike a basis.”
As much as I love this figure, I recognize that he embodies our self-contradictory “American cultural logic.”[3] A conservationist and naturalist who took part in a culture that enthusiastically hunted species for sport without considering the long-term consequences. An arbiter of fairness with blind spots for certain tracts of society. He represents an important point of progress in our national story, but also highlights some of its deepest shortcomings.
The Rooseveltian worldview is fundamentally transactional. The Panamanian Mestizo want independence? We’ll help you get it — but we want a 99-year canal lease for our efforts.[4] Let’s preserve nature — so we can use it as a resource. Not necessarily bad on its face, but undeniably transactional.
[3] Deloria, p.8.
[4] McCullough, David. The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978)
5: Moral Authority
Progressive twenty-first century viewpoints are evolving away from this transactional mindset, especially when it comes to the environment. We increasingly accept that nature has value beyond what we can take out of it. That it’s not just the people who possess the land; we share it with other creatures. It’s part of a complex system. And there’s a certain balance we’ve messed up. Naturalism and conservation have laid the foundations for restoration and re-habitation.
Other viewpoints are evolving as well.
Movements to change the Washington team’s name go back to the early 1970s, but didn’t really gain momentum until 1993 when Cheyenne-American Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell launched his effort to have the Washington team’s name changed. He wrote a well-argued piece in the Washington Post explaining the effect the name had on him and many other Native Americans. To him it didn’t represent celebration or respect; it was a racial slur.
After Senator Nighthorse Campbell published his Op Ed on changing the team name, letters to the editor started rolling in. One of those letters, written by a Kenneth Liles of Bethesda, really caught my attention. So much so that I clipped it out and saved it. This letter from Kenneth Liles gave me the key argument I needed to defend the name. It balanced the nostalgia/pain equation in a way that let me have my name and rationalize it too. Here it is:
Whether the letter-writer’s facts were right or not, whether homa referred to skin color or some other meaning the Choctaw intended when invoking the color red, the bigger elephant in this room — if one assumes that Mr. Liles was not, himself, Native American — is the implicit social permission that allowed him to publicly lecture the senator — a Cheyenne man — about Native American history, cultural experience, and the right way to feel about a word the senator regarded as a slur. But as an emotionally charged teen, it gave me just the arrow I needed for my quiver, helping me justify the name to myself.
The strange thing is that I really didn’t grow up dismissing people’s feelings or ignoring social justice issues. I’m Jewish, and social justice is a core tenet within American Jewry.
My dad moved to Washington to work as a lawyer in the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. My mom brought me up on Gershwin bringing jazz to the mainstream and Ginsberg’s poetic activism; and on American Jews’ contribution to Tin Pan Alley, Harlem, Vaudeville, and rock ‘n roll. I learned about Rabbi Heschel linking arms with Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma and Rabbi Prinz speaking just before MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, where Prinz famously said:
“…the most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
Between my family and my K-12 education at Georgetown Day School, a progressive school that was the first to be integrated in the District of Columbia — I was steeped in civil rights, social justice, and personal empathy.
Nevertheless, when it came to changing my team’s name, my mindset was, “No way: the name stays.” From there it was a simple task to find support for my opinion — like the aforementioned letter to the editor.
Looking back, maybe my inclusive values made it easier for me to land in this problematic place. Because when you grow up with just enough insight into social justice and just enough experience of diversity, it’s easy to think you can’t be blinded by privilege. It’s easy to consider your view the common-sense view.
My own search for my ancestors has factored into my position on the Washington team name. They were Russian Jews whose life stories were erased during the 19th-century pogroms of the Russian Empire. I’ve spent two decades looking for any clues I can find about the generations before my great-grandparents who immigrated to America. That journey has led only to dead ends. I would be quite moved by a marker, a street name, a mascot — anything to connect to my history.
What this issue really struggles with is the relative weight of feelings vs. reason. Ideally, in personal relationships and in child-rearing we can have all of our feelings. In broader society, not so much. Public discourse generally takes the form of debate — although passions often still get the best of us. But debating isn’t actually the best way to build understanding, especially not on topics that weigh one side’s feelings about their lived experiences against another side’s refuge in the cool, detached corridors of reason. In these instances moral authority matters more than objective reasoning. Moral authority is what determines who has the more profoundly rooted right to make the call when deciding whether something is appropriate or not.
And on the subject of whether or not the professional football team from Washington’s former name should have stayed or should have gone, that was clearly not mine to suggest. However, the new team name? Well, I’ve got as much standing as anyone. So, even though a day late and a dollar short, here goes…
6: The Washington Rails
Time for the big reveal.
The Rails are a family of ground-living birds, such as my favorite, the Virginia Rail. It has occupied the D.C. region since well before America existed. It’s endemic to our freshwater marshes and rare to see, though not endangered.
This bird shares a few important qualities with great football players. It’s stealthy and fast on its feet. It’s highly adapted to its habitat, able to slice through vegetative barriers that seem impenetrable. It has a helmet of extra-tough forehead feathers to push through dense marsh vegetation, and unusually strong legs. It dekes out enemies with fake nests to throw them off the trail of its eggs.
From its golden-rust coloring and its burgundy bill to its cunning ability to escape seemingly hopeless entanglements, the Rail is very D.C.
The Washington Rails. That’s the name I’m pitching.* With this name, the team would preserve its colors, its ‘WR’ initials, and even its feathers. This is an endemic species that truly reflects our region and reminds us of the inarguable fact that what has always been here, besides the people, besides the history, is the land itself. That thing we’re so keen on driving our roots into.
Whether the team goes off the rails, or stays on the rails — the double-entendre with the rail system is purposeful. The rail system built America, while locally the Metro is the pride of D.C. And it’s how lots of fans get to Raljon — I mean Landover, MD — where the “new” stadium is.
The Rails name opens the world of ecology to the team. It offers the opportunity not just to stop wronging Native Americans, but to move in a new direction that recognizes the past without repeating its worst parts.
* The Washington Red Tails works, too. The Red-tailed Hawk is a bird of prey with a ubiquitous range, just like our fan base. That name offers many of the same advantages as the Washington Rails…but, it’s awfully similar to one of our NFC East Rivals (cover your eyes).
7: Digging Deeper
Maybe the deeper truth of America is this: that truth is never really self-evident. It’s always filtered. And history is just a selection of facts by the person telling it.
As Americans, we value our freedom to question received truths. To take positions, and to challenge the positions of others. But we can sometimes struggle to turn the questioning back on ourselves and our ‘positions.’
The most powerful journey for me has been the one out of my ‘positions’ and back to my deeper self. To recognize that I am not at all comfortable with some things I’ve supported and even loved in my life.
I also realize that what I was really doing when I defended the old team name was trying to protect something precious. All those childhood associations: Wagshal’s, the church parking lot people, the motion of the stadium section, the sense memory. Not the team — they don’t need my protection — but everything those experiences meant to me.
And maybe I just can’t protect that. Maybe I don’t have to. Maybe it’s better to lose some of myself, if the alternative is to ignore the harm.
Our old team name is a thing of the past. I don’t miss it nearly as much as I miss Joe Gibbs, Art Monk, John Riggins, Charlie Casserly, Bobby Beatheard, Darrel Green, or RFK Stadium itself. Our new team name should reflect what we can protect and hold on to. Georgetown will never revert to Tohoga, but we can design the symbols we have to honor the land we occupy and a fuller truth of who we are, where we are, and what we aspire to become. Maybe that can be the new American Dream.
