Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Who gets to define Native identity?
Clip from Behind the Shield: The Power & Politics of the NFL, featuring Dave Zirin. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing.
WHO GETS TO DEFINE INDIGENOUS IDENTITY?
Two films examine the long history and real-world impact of dehumanizing Native American stereotypes, with a special focus on the massively popular and influential NFL. Use these films to spark classroom discussion on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day, coming up on Oct. 12, gives educators an opportunity to celebrate Native histories, cultures, and resistance. It’s also a chance to help students think critically about dehumanizing media narratives and stereotypes that have reduced Native people to mascots, caricatures, costumes, and cultural symbols for generations.
John and Kenn Little’s groundbreaking documentary More Than a Word offers a powerful way into this history.
Moving from the settler-colonial foundations of the U.S. to the present, More Than a Word examines the real-world consequences of racist cultural stereotypes and chronicles the Native American-led movement to eliminate Indigenous team names and mascots from U.S. sports culture, including the decades-long campaign that ultimately helped force Washington’s NFL franchise to abandon its former name.
The same issues surface in our bestselling documentary Behind the Shield: The Power & Politics of the NFL, featuring acclaimed Nation magazine writer Dave Zirin.
In this short clip from the film on YouTube, Zirin connects the NFL’s decades-long appropriation of Native American culture to the league’s early history of racial segregation and its historically white ownership structure. We encourage you to show the clip in your classes or share it directly with your students.
These issues are part of a much larger story Behind the Shield tells about the NFL and American culture. Using the league as a window into American life, the film examines broader patterns of racism, militarism, corporate power, rigid ideas about gender, and the vilification of political dissent.
Together, More Than a Word and Behind the Shield give students the historical context and critical tools to look beyond familiar stereotypes and dominant media narratives and think more deeply about representation, cultural power, and the long struggle by Indigenous peoples to define themselves on their own terms. Now through the end of October, we’re offering 15% off both films with code INDIGENOUS26.
