NFL

Tribe leads charge to scrap Redskins name

VERONA, N.Y. — Last winter, a group of student leaders approached the school board in upstate Cooperstown about changing their team’s mascot — the Redskins.

The movement caught on quickly and by May, Cooperstown Central School was known as the Hawkeyes.

No one was more impressed than members of the local Oneida Indian Nation.

The Washington Redskins have faced increased pressure to change the team’s name.AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Ray Halbritter, Oneida Nation’s longtime official representative, even donated $10,000 to the school district to pay for the cost of converting the uniforms.

Then he started to think. If a high school could do this, why not the NFL? The Oneidas started pouring money into an ad campaign and have convinced the NFL to send a delegation — which could include commissioner Roger Goodell — to meet with the tribe next month.

“We were so inspired by these kids in Cooperstown,” Halbritter said. “To see kids do something that these billionaire team owners and the NFL were unable to do, or unwilling to do, was very inspirational to us.”

Joining the Fight

The Oneida Nation tribe pegs its membership at just 1,000, but its push into the Redskins debate has caused a noticeable surge in momentum — which includes President Obama saying last month he would think about changing the name if he owned the Redskins.

“It’s not about a politically correct question anymore,” Halbritter, Oneida Nation’s longtime official representative, told The Post last week. “It’s just about doing the right thing. When people do understand the issue that way, I think everybody wants to do the right thing.”

Energized by the small victory in Cooperstown, Halbritter quickly pivoted to the much larger battle over the Washington Redskins’ name by creating a Web site (changethemascot.org), paying for national radio ads and coordinating protests in every city the team visits this season.

It is a battle against giants. The NFL is a multibillion-dollar behemoth, and Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who has staunchly defended the nickname, is among its most powerful owners.

It was a fraught decision in some ways for Oneida Nation because of the opposition. The powerful — and, in Snyder’s case, obstinate — voices in favor of the Redskins name would mean the sudden shine of an intense spotlight on his small tribe.

Getting Defensive

One of six tribes in the New York-based Confederacy of the Iroquois, Oneida Nation until now was known mostly for building the state’s first Indian casino in 1993 and for selling cheap, tax-free cigarettes at 12 convenience stores it owns not far from the campus of Syracuse University.

Halbritter, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has been the Oneidas’ leader since 1987, was respected for using the profits from the cigarette sales and the flourishing Turning Stone casino and resort to bring his tribe out of grinding poverty and get the scourges of every reservation — alcoholism, suicide and high infant mortality — under control.

Becoming the public face of the Redskins fight has made Halbritter, 64, the subject of critical stories by the conservative Web site Daily Caller and others alleging he isn’t even an Oneida Indian and has been shortchanging the tribe’s members from their true share of the casino’s profits.

Halbritter denied both charges, but it’s clear the scrutiny has put the Oneidas on the defensive and made them guarded.

Kandace Watson, director of education and cultural outreach for the Oneida Nation.Shannon DeCelle

Tribe officials refused to let a Post reporter speak with members other than Kandice Watson, Oneida Nation’s director of education and cultural outreach, or even get out of the car during a closely monitored driving tour of the reservation last week. And Halbritter would make himself available only by phone for 10 minutes, as a Manhattan-based “crisis communications expert” listened in and tried to control the conversation.

Halbritter said he considers the personal attacks a weak attempt by “Redskins” defenders to obscure the real subject at hand — a mascot he and many other Native Americans consider a highly offensive anachronism.

“It’s not surprising,” Halbritter said of the Daily Caller article and other stories critical of him and the tribe. “It’s a page out of the bigotry playbook, and it’s unfortunate. They can try to distract everyone, but [the Redskins’ name] is the issue. And you don’t have to be Indian to know the name is offensive.”

Dissension

While the tribe’s newfound prominent role in a controversy has brought scrutiny and criticism from the outside, it also has been a surprising source of friction within.

Why the internal discord?

“Because the tribe has a lot of members who’ve been Redskins fans forever and don’t want the name to change,” Watson said. “Even my own cousin and her daughter feel that way, and we discuss it all the time.

“I don’t see how they’re not offended, but they’re not.”

The fact even a significant number of his own people — Watson estimates that 100 or more of Oneida Nation’s members actually consider the Redskins name an honor — tells Halbritter that all the recent progress doesn’t mean the fight is over and that ultimate victory is far from assured. But even with the blowback and the absence of total support from fellow Oneidans, it’s a fight Halbritter says his tribe won’t give up.

“Throughout history, people have vowed to preserve everything from slavery to segregation to preventing women the right to vote,” he said. “But that’s the thing that’s great about America. When a lot of people speak out, change can happen.”

Halbritter is more sensitive to the internal debate, which Watson, who is his cousin and a lifelong resident of the reservation, says stems from the Indian-pride movement of the early 1970s.

“Because we were so under-represented, anything that had an Indian on it, we liked,” Watson said. “So we do have some [Oneida] members who have been Redskins fans since the ’70s, because they were into the Indian ‘warrior’ movement at the time. But times have changed. Just because it has an Indian on it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.”

Watson, 47, said several members of Oneida Nation also have expressed to Halbritter and on Facebook that they think the tribe has more important things to worry about.

Halbritter turned defensive when asked about the criticism from within.

“If you want to go looking in the bushes, I’m sure you’ll find somebody that doesn’t [want to change the name],” he said. “This name is offensive, and that’s the important issue. How many people do you have to offend or hurt before it’s time to do something?

“Look, you can’t poll morality. This is for the common good of our communities in this country.”

End Game

That decision to join the fight already appears to be paying off, even if the ultimate goal of a new name for Snyder’s team isn’t certain.

Though protests at the team’s road games have been small and polls on the issue remain all over the place, the name-change movement led by the Oneidas has prompted the NFL’s Goodell — at least in public — to all but abandon what had been his strong defense of the mascot in a letter to Congress just a few months ago.

“If we’re offending one person, we need to be listening and making sure that we’re doing the right things to try to address that,” Goodell said this month at the league’s fall meetings in DC.

Observers have long predicted the only thing that could force Snyder to abandon the Redskins moniker is the federal government removing the team’s copyright on it.

The trademark strategy could succeed because racially offensive terms technically aren’t eligible to be copyrighted, but it’s now clear the protest movement is moving the needle, too.

“I believe the NFL and the owners will eventually do the right thing and get rid of this offensive name,” Halbritter said. “Indian people suffer from the lowest life expectancy, lowest standard of living and highest infant mortality of all ethnicities in the country. We’ve fought in this country’s wars in a greater ratio than any other ethnic group. We deserve to be treated like everyone else.

“We are Americans.”