A push by a group of Native American activists to renew focus on the Washington Redskins’ name led to a bombardment of fake news in the sports world Wednesday.
The Rising Hearts coalition published multiple fake news stories purporting to be from Sports Illustrated, ESPN, the Washington Post, and others announcing the team’s name would become the Washington Redhawks instead of Redskins.
The group also created a Twitter account and a website for the new, made-up team.
“We created this action to show the NFL and the Washington football franchise how easy, popular and powerful changing the name could be,” said Rebecca Nagle, of the Cherokee Nation, who was one of the organizers.
“What we’re asking for changes only four letters. Just four letters! Certainly the harm that the mascot does to Native Americans outweighs the very, very minor changes the franchise would need to make.”
Native American activists have campaigned for years to get the Redskins to change their name, arguing the term is a racist reference to Native Americans that is offensive.
“Since 1970, Native Peoples and our allies have eliminated over two-thirds of these racial identifiers in American sports,” said Suzan Harjo, a renowned Native advocate of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee tribes. “We collectively have eliminated over 2,000 of these so-called Native names, logos, symbols, images, mascots and behaviors from the U.S. sport landscape. We can’t rest until all of them are consigned to museums and history books, where they belong.”
The group said they had “hundreds” of collaborators who pushed out the fake news.
The Rising Hearts coalition will be doing a press conference on Thursday in front of RFK Stadium and will hold a rally outside FedEx Field on Sunday.
