As Native Americans protest the NFL, Taylor Swifts voice could help -

Jane Fonda, that silver spoon-born legend of Hollywood, doesn’t talk about one moment of hers off the big screen that is as difficult to forget as any of her most notable moments on it. I know. A collaborator of mine asked her.

But she certainly hasn’t forgotten it, though it was over 30 years ago.

I’m not referencing her 1972 trip to North Vietnam to denounce this country’s deadly and disastrous incursion there. I’m recalling what she did in the theater of the most legendary sporting event on our calendar — what celebrated Texas sportswriter Blackie Sherrod called the World Serious.

In 1991, Atlanta was headed to the first of four World Series in a span of six seasons. Fonda, 53 then, had fallen so hard for the bon vivant billionaire owner of Atlanta’s baseball team, Ted Turner, that she retired from acting.

So, there she was, captured on camera with Turner at one playoff game in Atlanta’s stadium as the team advanced to the World Series, seated next to Georgia’s political power couple, former president Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter. And she pretended along with the other fans of the hometown team — a team drenched in what the club imagined to be Native imagery — to act like she and they thought Indigenous people behave: moving one outstretched arm, bent at the elbow, up and down to the beat of piped-in faux American Indian music.

The act is called the tomahawk chop. Fans of Kansas City’s football team, swaddled as well in Native American imagery and moniker, also started doing the same the same year. Rumor is they both got it from Florida State’s football team, whose fans started the nauseating tradition.

But when Indigenous survivors in heavily Native populated Minnesota, where Atlanta eventually met the Twins in that year’s World Series, caught wind of the mockery, they greeted Fonda et al. with a protest.

“We want Ted Turner to come out with some kind of statement to put this ignorant, stupid, racist behavior to a stop,” Clyde Bellecourt, the founder of the American Indian Movement, said at the time.

“I don’t believe I’ve betrayed their cause,” Fonda responded. “I support them very much. But I’m sorry it offends them, and I’m not going to do it anymore.”

Since megawatt entertainer Taylor Swift started dating Kansas City star tight end Travis Kelce this season and showing up at his games, she hasn’t had to apologize for mocking Native people with the insidious chop. She hasn’t been seen doing it.

But she has wrapped herself in the name and colors of the team in gear emblazoned with an arrowhead. All of which is protested home game after home game and will be this weekend at our most grandiose sporting event, the Super Bowl, by Native groups who point out it is cultural appropriation at best and racism at worst.

They’re right — and have been ever since they began waging their fight early in the 20th century when what is a malicious practice of mascoting Native people began, in sports and beyond. As Native historian Phil Deloria at Harvard pointed out in a just-released-to-streaming documentary I co-produced and wrote, “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” it all began in a period of virulent racism in this country. Around the time the white supremacist film “The Birth of a Nation” first screened and the Ku Klux Klan was emboldened enough to march in Washington. Or, as comedian Bill Burr piercingly figured, “You know White people came up with that in, like, the 1920s when they … first got sound in movies,” he said once on Conan O’Brien’s TV talk show. “ ‘What do [Native people] sound like?’ They got some moron on the set, and he just goes [screaming]. … ‘Put some rouge on his face and have him do it with an ax.’ ”

Making fun of people of color who suffered a genocide on this land, which is still theirs, and who are marginalized still today.

I’m not familiar with Swift’s discography. I’m too old and too Black to be a Swiftie. My music is America’s classical, jazz. Such as “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Or Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”

But I am familiar with Swift’s social media, which has echoed the defiance against racism of those works.

In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement — which helped erase the racist name of Washington’s NFL team — she tweeted: “Racial injustice has been ingrained deeply into local and state governments, and changes MUST be made there. In order for policies to change, we need to elect people who will fight against police brutality and racism of any kind. #BlackLivesMatter.”

Kansas City’s team name and imagery are racist. And Swift’s declaration to fight “racism of any kind” was liked by close to a quarter of a million people.

I don’t doubt Swift’s seriousness about wanting to stamp out racism. But I’d suggest her pointing out the perniciousness of her boyfriend’s team’s name, cultural appropriation and encouragement of opprobrious behavior by its fans while more than 100 million tune in to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday. I would wager this weekend’s game sets a viewership record simply because of infatuation with the pop star-football star romance.

Native Americans in the Kansas City area fighting against the team’s obstinance on this issue called for Swift’s support early this season as her romance with Kelce blossomed. “We remain hopeful that an outside influence like Ms. Swift could be an ally for us in moving the conversation forward on why the chop is a racist act,” the coalition Not In Our Honor said in a statement in September. “We ask for people to learn about our shared history, the real history of this country, not the sanitized version many learned in school. Our culture was stripped from us … yet our culture continues to be mocked for sport and profit despite decades of protest by Natives and Native organizations and recommendations by national psychological, educational and sociological associations.”

Swift should heed their plea, for herself and her devotees, if we’re to believe their influence can make a difference. And then, unlike Fonda, she’ll have nothing to regret.

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