Playing Indian | Episode 2

Summary

First America – “Playing Indian | Episode 2” (June 29, 2026)

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Rebecca Nagle, dives into the persistent and complex phenomenon of “playing Indian” in American culture—from the Boston Tea Party to modern sports mascots and the January 6th insurrection. The show interrogates how white Americans have long appropriated Native American imagery and identity as a symbol of freedom and rebellion, while simultaneously erasing and marginalizing actual Native people. Through interviews, historical context, and personal anecdotes, Nagle and guests explore the deep roots and enduring impact of this paradox.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Present Mirrors the Past

• Opening Reflection (02:30)
  • Rebecca Nagle recalls her experience on January 6, 2021, watching the attack on the US Capitol, and being struck by the sight of the "QAnon Shaman," a rioter in faux Native garb.
    • “Why would a white guy storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election dress up like a Native American? The answer to that question actually explains how the whole thing happened in the first place.” – Nagle (04:08)
  • Sets up the episode’s guiding question—why do Americans keep "playing Indian"?

2. The Hidden Native History of the Boston Tea Party

• Museum Visit and Historical Reenactment (05:14–11:15)

  • Nagle takes listeners to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, focusing on how the story is typically told with little reference to the Native component.
  • Tour guide "Archibald McNeil" (played by Jeff) recounts the Tea Party as standard protest, omitting that rioters dressed as Native Americans.
    • “We cover ourselves in cloaks, coats, blankets, anything to disguise our figures. Some folks might smear some lamp black soot on their faces...” – Jeff (09:24)
  • Nagle notes this "important detail" is present but easy to miss in the museum’s narrative.
    • “Unless you were really looking, the native part was easy to miss.” – Nagle (11:33)

• Museum Visitor Interviews (11:40–12:25)

  • Most visitors had no idea the Tea Party involved colonists dressing as Native people.

3. Origins & Meaning of “Playing Indian”

• Interview with Historian Phil Deloria (15:19–24:52)
  • Deloria (Standing Rock/Yankton Sioux descendant, author of Playing Indian) explains the deep roots of this American tradition.
  • Colonists chose Indian costumes not merely for disguise but as a symbol of freedom and rebellion, appropriating Native identity to distinguish themselves from the British.
    • “They were wearing something they thought of as Indian costume... They actually attach a tribal name to this. They call themselves Mohawks.” – Deloria (17:06)
    • “Phil says the rioters weren't wearing a disguise. They were wearing a costume.” – Nagle (17:50)
  • The practice traces back to medieval European traditions of "misrule"—using costume and symbolic inversion in acts of protest.
    • “Misrule is about inverting the social order…” – Deloria (18:27)
  • The symbolic selection of “Indianness” reflected colonists’ yearning to identify with the perceived freedom and connection to land embodied by Native people—while also despising and seeking to vanquish actual Native communities.
    • “They do, but they can't fully take it on. Because they also are repulsed by it.” – Deloria (23:49)
  • A 1776 political cartoon exemplifies the pattern: Native imagery as a stand-in for colonists, rather than a reference to real Indigenous people.
    • “She is absolutely representing American colonists who are rebellious.” – Deloria (22:23)

4. Erasure and Appropriation in Historic Memory and Museums

• Discussion with Evan O'Brien, Museum Creative Manager (25:05–27:15)
  • O'Brien describes the struggle to balance historical accuracy—acknowledging the Mohawk costumes—without perpetuating harm or offense.
    • “We want to be as authentic as possible...in order to be fully authentic, you cannot ignore the indigenous disguises that were involved…But we also want to be sensitive.” – O'Brien (25:14)
  • The costumes are now avoided in reenactments out of respect, but this often means the Native part of the story is missed by visitors.

5. Modern Manifestations: Summer Camps, Mascots, and Cultural Fantasy

• Roots of the “Playing Indian” Phenomenon in Youth Camps (30:20–31:46)

  • In the early 20th century, white Americans created summer camps for boys to “play Indian” to reclaim masculinity and authenticity in an industrialized world.
    • “Get all of these kids out of the city, get them into the woods, teach them how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to paddle a canoe...” – Deloria (30:58)
    • Indian costume continues as a badge of American authenticity.

• Sports Mascots and Cultural Tradition (32:50–37:16)

  • The story of the Kansas City Chiefs is traced directly to a white mayor with a penchant for dressing as an “Indian chief.”
  • Nagle attends a Chiefs game and records fans’ attachment to the “tradition.”
    • “Everything’s so tradition-based.” – Chiefs Fan (35:33)
    • Most fans are unaware or dismissive of evidence that mascots lower Native children’s self-esteem.
      • “So I’m not discounting the research, but we need to, like, help them and educate them. So let’s not try to, like, make your childhood bad...” – Chiefs Fan (36:32)

• Expert Insight on the Harm of Mascots (37:35–38:43)

  • Phil Deloria explains the real psychological harm to Native children and the boost in self-esteem for white children when exposed to these caricatures.
    • “When Native kids see the powerlessness of their parents...to stop this thing, they feel an incredible lack of efficacy for being Native that seeps into the blood and the bones of Native kids that does this kind of damage. This isn’t just a trivial thing.” – Deloria (37:35)

6. The Paradox: Natives Everywhere—Except as People

• Personal Reflection and the Settler Colonial Dynamic (38:43–44:01)

  • Nagle shares her own experiences of feeling invisible and questioned as a Native person, while Native imagery is omnipresent.
    • “At the same time that, like, we’re everywhere…we’re also nowhere. And just like how often I feel really invisible in the United States.” – Nagle (38:43)
  • Deloria discusses the ongoing American tendency to venerate a fantasy of “the Indian” while rejecting real Indigenous people—an expression of “settler colonialism.”
    • “Every time that there’s a real, actual red-blooded Native person standing there in front of them, it is a reminder, right, that all of this land was once native land.” – Deloria (39:06)
    • “The Indian of white people’s imaginations, that Indian only lives in the past.” – Nagle (39:06)

• Clarifying Colonialism vs. Settler Colonialism (40:59–41:54)

  • Deloria differentiates extractive colonialism (where colonizers intend to return home) from settler colonialism (where colonizers stay, seek to claim the land, and appropriate Indigenous identity).

    • “In the settler colonial kind of structure...you want to build a new country on a piece of land...People already live there. So you come up with all these ways to get rid of the people living on the land you want. And as you’re pushing people out, you need to claim that you belong. How do you do that? You take on the identity of the people you pushed out.” – Nagle (41:54–42:27)

7. The Unfinished Project of American Identity

• American Identity is “Unfinished” (43:12–44:01)
  • Deloria argues that Americans’ uncertainty about their identity leads to excessive and overwrought expressions of nationalism.
    • “Americans are always uncertain about their identity, which means they over and excessively over perform, right. Their claims to identity...A confident country doesn’t do that...We can see this in this moment right now, around certain forms of white nationalism...” – Deloria (43:12)

8. Parallels with January 6 and Reflections on National Identity

• Closing Reflections (44:01–46:22)
  • Nagle draws a direct line from the Boston Tea Party to January 6:
    • “For me, what I didn’t understand about January 6th was how the rioters could claim they were defending American democracy while also tearing it down. They denied the results of a democratic election…after I learned all this history, I realized our founding fathers did the same thing. Our founders built a national identity on plain Indian. At the same time, our government was rounding up and killing actual Native Indian people. We built our national identity on the thing we were trying to destroy.” – Nagle (44:01)
  • The episode ends with an open question: what happens when Native people are put back into America’s founding story?

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Erasure and Exhaustion:
  • “Whether it’s sports mascots or Coachella or Halloween, I see white people dress up like natives all the time. It’s exhausting...” – Nagle (05:14)
• On the Contradiction of “Playing Indian”:
  • “They despised actual Native people. We were the merciless Indian savages of the Declaration of Independence. But the Indians of their imagination, they loved those Indians.” – Nagle (24:08)
• On Appropriation in National Identity:
  • “Looking at England, you are rebelling literally against the monarch. And what do you say? I’m not that. I’m aboriginal. I’m of this land, this land of freedom and liberty and abundance. I’ve been made a new person.” – Deloria (23:03)
• On the Lasting Effects of Mascots:
  • “Look, this whole mascot practice is super bad for Native kids…When Native kids see the powerlessness of their parents and their elders and their leaders to stop this thing, they feel an incredible lack of efficacy for being Native.” – Deloria (37:35)
• On Settler Colonialism:
  • “Settlers come to stay, that means they care more about land than about labor, and they find ways to take and appropriate the identities of the indigenous people who are there.” – Deloria (41:54)
• On the “Unfinished” American Identity:
  • “American identity is unfixed, unfinished.” – Deloria (44:01)
• On the Parallels to January 6:
  • “Our founders built a national identity on plain Indian. At the same time, our government was rounding up and killing actual Native Indian people. We built our national identity on the thing we were trying to destroy. It’s the type of thing a serial killer would do in a horror movie. Kill someone, move into their house, and then pretend to be them.” – Nagle (44:01)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• 02:30 – Nagle’s personal account of January 6; connecting QAnon Shaman to “playing Indian”
• 05:14 – Discussion of white Americans dressing as Natives: “It’s exhausting…”
• 06:43–11:33 – Museum reenactment and visitor interviews reveal erasure of Native element in Tea Party narrative
• 15:19–24:52 – Deep dive with historian Phil Deloria on Boston Tea Party, costumes, and the symbolism of “Indian”
• 24:44–27:15 – Behind-the-scenes discussion of museum’s challenge representing Native aspects without offense
• 30:20–31:46 – Roots of “Indian” summer camps and fixation on Native authenticity
• 32:50–37:16 – Kansas City Chiefs, fan interviews, and discussion of mascots as “tradition”
• 37:35–38:43 – Phil Deloria on psychological effects of Native mascots
• 38:43–44:01 – Personal reflections and the paradox of Native erasure and omnipresence; settler colonialism explained
• 44:01–46:22 – Closing: synthesizing history and the January 6th insurrection, questioning American identity

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Final Thoughts

“Playing Indian” explores how the American fascination with Native identity—manifesting as everything from faux headdresses to sports mascots—has always been about more than costumes: it’s a foundational part of American national identity, forged by both appropriation and erasure. The episode powerfully connects the origins of this tendency to today’s political and cultural crises, illuminating how much of American self-understanding is built on imagining, and replacing, Native people.

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For listeners who haven’t heard the episode, this summary provides the full sweep of history, analysis, personal testimony, and memorable moments that define this essential chapter of First America.

Transcript

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[Rebecca Nagle]

Visit your nearby Lowe's.

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[Rebecca Nagle]

Do you remember where you were on the afternoon of January 6, 2021? I remember where I was climbing through the window of my then boyfriend's house. It was pouring down rain, he was at work and I had two things that really sucked to have at the same time Covid and bed bugs. I needed to isolate somewhere while my house was treated, but my boyfriend forgot to leave out a key so in I went through the window. I remember sitting down on his couch, exhausted and wet and pulling up Twitter and there I saw a stream of images of an angry mob storming the US Capitol. Lawmakers were barricading themselves into their offices. It wasn't clear if all of them were safe.

[Kim (Producer)]

It was scary.

[Rebecca Nagle]

It felt like maybe there wouldn't be a peaceful transition of power, like our democracy was going off the rails. And then I saw this image that made me stop and go, wait, what the. It was this one rioter. He was bare chested, his face was covered in paint, he carried a spear, and on his head sat a fur and feather headdress with horns.

[Narrator/Storyteller]

He was among the first to break into the building and headed for the US Senate chamber where he sat in the presiding officer's chair that was vacated by Vice President Mike Pence and scribbled this note. It's only a matter of time. Justice is coming.

[Rebecca Nagle]

It was the QAnon Shaman. I remember how much people talked about him the days after January 6th. People found him funny and strange, but also confusing. Why would a white guy storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election dress up like a Native American? The answer to that question actually explains how the whole thing happened in the first place. You're listening to First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how our current political moment is 250 years in the making. From Pushkin Industries and Critical Frequency, I'm your host, Rebecca Nagal Gohin Dawadin Jeleca Yedli Gan la citizen of Cherokee Nation. A lot of people felt confused by the QAnon Shaman's outfit. You know how I felt?

[Kim (Producer)]

Tired.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Whether it's sports mascots or Coachella or Halloween, I see white people dress up like natives all the time. It's exhausting to see this racist character of your culture constantly reflected back to you. But it's also defeating that despite all the advocacy Native people have done, it keeps happening. And I wanted to know why? Why do Americans keep doing this? And so I went back in history to try and find where it all started. And the beginning was a lot earlier than I would have guessed. Last episode we talked about how the American Revolution started in Pennsylvania over Native land, not in Boston, over Texas. Well, episode we are going to Boston and we are covering the most famous event leading up to the revolution, the Boston Tea Party. You've probably heard of the Boston Tea Party, but there's a part of the story I bet you haven't heard, and that's the native part. Earlier this year, I visited the Boston Tea Party ships and museum with my producer Kim, who through the magic of historical tourism and reenactments, I was able to travel back to the year of the Boston Tea Party, 1773. And I met someone who's going to help us tell this story. Well, someone pretending to be someone.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

So my name is Archibald McNeil. I'm a rope maker here in Boston.

[Rebecca Nagle]

His real name is Jeff. He works at the museum as a tour guide.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

I've been living in Boston my whole life.

[Kim (Producer)]

Well, you did tell us what you're wearing.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

I love getting to talk about my outfit. So I'm wearing my striped green and white trousers, my trusty boots, and then I'm wearing my linen shirt. And then I have my short jacket here, which is made of wool. It is quite cold. And then I have right now on a linen cap.

[Rebecca Nagle]

In his little outfit, he kind of reminded me of a newsboy, but I know the time period is off. As a tour guide, Jeff seemed really earnest.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

I might not look like I have much money, but my family does own land here in Boston.

[Rebecca Nagle]

At the museum, he tells the story of the Boston Tea Party. See if you can catch the native part. It starts in 1773, when Boston is boiling with anger.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

Bostonians have been at the forefront of fighting back against tyrannical taxes and oppression.

[Rebecca Nagle]

They were mad at George iii, King of England. George had started imposing taxes on the colonies to pay for that huge world war we talked about last episode. And when the colonists protested in Boston, Georgson and troops.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

I've witnessed the protests and some of us even considered an invasion by British forces in our own town.

[Rebecca Nagle]

When a crowd of colonists threw snowballs and ice at British soldiers. The soldiers fired into the crowd.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

Five men were gunned down outside the State House. I was there and watched some of my dear friends get killed.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This was the Boston Massacre, March 5th of 1770. Three years later, the British Parliament passes a law called the Tea Act. It gives this one British company a monopoly over all tea shipped to the Americas. To add insult to injury, the tea it wants to send is bad. It's old, it's moldy. And then there's the tax. For every pound of moldy tea, the colonists have to pay a 3 pence import tax. Three ships of moldy monopoly tea are docked in the Boston harbor.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

We cannot send the tea back. The moment that tea is offloaded. The taxes have to be paid, and we know what has to be done.

[Rebecca Nagle]

They decide to throw the tea into the harbor.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

And so December 16, in the middle of a snowstorm. It's quite cold. About 150 of U.S. storm down to Griffin's Wharf. We board the ships. There are thousands on the shoreline watching us. Now some more.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And here's where I want you to pay attention to what Archibald and his fellow colonists were wearing.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

We cover ourselves in cloaks, coats, blankets, anything to disguise our figures. Some folks might smear some lamplight soot on their faces. This is going to be treason after all. When we throw this tea into the harbor, we want to make sure that none of us are recognizable.

[Rebecca Nagle]

There's an important detail missing, but we'll come back to that.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

The only thing you can really hear is the breaking of the chests and the splashing on the water. The heaviest of these chests weigh about 400 pounds. That's a lot of tea to get all the way up above board. It's packed in so tightly, and so we're having to hit it and scrape it with our axes, boots, anything that we can to get it loose. And it takes us about three and a half hours to destroy £92,616 of tea. It's about £10,000 of British sterling worth of tea, which I believe in your day is approximately $1.5 million worth of property damage.

[Rebecca Nagle]

We had to cut our interview with Jeff the actor short because it was time for him to start another tour.

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

Fortunately, I do have to give my office back here.

[Kim (Producer)]

I should get a photo of you, too.

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

He's actually about to ring the bell.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

Of course.

[Kim (Producer)]

I appreciate it.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

Of course.

[Rebecca Nagle]

As a tour guide, Archibald takes visitors through the museum, and it is an experience. I went on a replica ship, drank actual tea, paintings came to life and yelled at me. Parliament is the supreme constitutional authority of the empire. That part was a little Harry Potter esque. On the tour, I was watching out for how the museum tells the native part of the Boston Tea Party. And it was there.

[Kim (Producer)]

Sure.

[Rebecca Nagle]

In the museum. There's a cartoon on the wall and a book and a glass case near the entrance. There's actually a big sign about it. Museum staff pointed it out to us.

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

We wanted to make sure that this message was communicated to all of our guests.

[Kim (Producer)]

I could also imagine, though, kind of walking past, past it.

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

You can? Yep, yep. People aren't oblivious sometimes.

[Rebecca Nagle]

You know, my sense was that unless you were really looking, the native part was easy to miss.

[Kim (Producer)]

Would you mind saying your name and where you're from?

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

Sure. My name is Jenny. I'm from Dublin and Ireland.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I wanted to test my hypothesis. And so as people left the museum, I stopped them outside.

[Kim (Producer)]

This is going to sound like the weirdest question you've ever been asked, but from going through the museum, did you pick up on, like, what the rioters were wearing when they stormed the ships?

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

I think I have a picture in my head.

[Kim (Producer)]

What's the picture in your head?

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

I don't know, like, leather boots and sort of like loose pants, like britches and maybe loose shirts. Maybe I'm confusing it with Shakespeare, but, you know, like waistcoats and hats. Mel Gibson and the Patriot is kind of my reference here.

[Kim (Producer)]

So at the actual Boston Tea Party, they dressed up like native people.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Oh.

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

Oh, I didn't know that at all.

[Rebecca Nagle]

It's really interesting. I talked to about a dozen people as they left the museum. Homeschooled kids, tourists from Germany and Florida. And none of them picked up on the fact that the rioters were wearing Indian costumes. No, but I find it fascinating. Why in the world would 18th century colonial rioters dress up like Indians?

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[Ashley Akineti]

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[Rebecca Nagle]

why the heck colonists dressed up like native people to throw tea in the Boston harbor, I met up with a historian from Harvard.

[Kim (Producer)]

Hey, Phil.

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

Hey.

[Phil Deloria]

Welcome to Cherry Boston.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is Phil Deloria. He is a descendant of the Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux tribes.

[Kim (Producer)]

Where are we standing, philosopher?

[Phil Deloria]

We're in front of the Boston Tea Party ships and museum. The fifes and the drum music is playing.

[Kim (Producer)]

What's a fife?

[Phil Deloria]

Oh, it's a little flute.

[Kim (Producer)]

What's that building called?

[Phil Deloria]

That's called Ye Olde atm. Classic American tourist infrastructure.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Phil wanted in on the fun and so we boarded a ship. It's part of the museum and docked in the real Boston Harbor.

[Phil Deloria]

I love this stuff. It's super cool, right? It's full of ropes and riggings, and it's surprisingly small for a ship that's going to be sailing a on the open ocean. I mean, to me, I would be scared to be on this ship, frankly. Can I throw a box of tea over? Fantastic. I'm standing here holding this crate of tea or a replica of a crate of tea. Here we go. Listen for the splash.

[Narrator/Storyteller]

All right.

[Phil Deloria]

I feel very American right now.

[Kim (Producer)]

If you can put yourself in the shoes of, of, you know, a young lad who's throwing the tea overboard, what do you think is going through his mind?

[Phil Deloria]

Oh, I think he's having so much fun. It's dark, you're in disguise. You're with your friends. The ways that, like when we jump outside of civil order, you know, it can be incredibly liberating.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Phil wrote about all this for a book called Plain Indian. In it, he says that the American tradition of white people dressing up like Indians, it starts with the Boston Tea Party.

[Phil Deloria]

They were Wearing something that they thought of as Indian costume, more or less. Right. And. But what does that mean? You know, some lamp, black on their

[Rebecca Nagle]

faces, which is basically soot to darken

[Phil Deloria]

their skin, maybe a feather or two, some blankets. Blankets are even at this moment, associated with native people. They actually attach a tribal name to this. They call themselves Mohawks.

[Rebecca Nagle]

The way this story gets told a lot is that the rioters dressed up like Mohawks for disguise the way a burglar would wear a mask. After all, they were committing a crime. Phil and other historians think that's wrong.

[Phil Deloria]

It's pretty clear that if you knew Boston street politics, the identities of most of these people are not really secret.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Phil says the rioters weren't wearing a disguise. They were wearing a costume.

[Phil Deloria]

You know, Boston is Boston. The tea is the tea. And to sort of call it a party, the costumes make that possible.

[Rebecca Nagle]

That's what's strange about the Boston Tea Party. I mean, it's part protest, part riot, but large part party. To understand why 18th century rioters would want to wear a costume, Phil says we have to go back to medieval Europe and. And to this thing called misrule.

[Phil Deloria]

Misrule itself is about inverting the social order. So you can go to old church festivals and find the bishop suddenly becomes mounted backwards on a donkey and dragged through the church. Horrendous, right? You know, sacrilege.

[Rebecca Nagle]

At this time for peasants, laws are really harsh. For poaching a deer from the king's forest, the punishment was death. So they'd find ways to. To push back, like ganging up on a sheriff.

[Phil Deloria]

Sometimes you can think of these as little baby riots, right? Little baby riots that have a kind of a traditional folk character to them.

[Rebecca Nagle]

To add fun to their civil disobedience, they'd wear a costume while they did it.

[Phil Deloria]

You know, when they were exercising these rituals of misrule, men would put on

[Rebecca Nagle]

women's dresses, banging pots and pans in the street, riding someone out on a rail, even tarring and feathering. All these things go back to medieval

[Phil Deloria]

Europe, and they make their way to the new world.

[Rebecca Nagle]

So by the time we get to the Boston Tea Party, having a little baby riot to protest the king's unjust tax is not new. Even putting on a costume for your baby riot is not new. What changes is the costume. Phil says, colonists aside, we don't want

[Phil Deloria]

to dress up like women, you know, in the way that they used to do it back in the old country. But we need to dress up. We want to do something. And here's this Indian costume and it does all the right stuff.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And that costume of the Indian, it starts to mean something to the colonists. And that meaning is connected to the land. You have to remember in England, it's illegal to hunt in the king's forest, it's illegal to collect wood.

[Phil Deloria]

To suddenly landing in New England finding that, yes, I can go out and hunt deer. If I want to have a big fire and stay warm, I can do that.

[Rebecca Nagle]

So North America, in this very practical material way, becomes a land of freedom and opportunity.

[Phil Deloria]

And Indian people, Native people, end up, I think, being kind of exemplars of that. It's like, well, what's the symbol of this freedom, Right. That we're claiming for ourselves? It's those Native people.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Were Native people seen as more free than Europeans at the time?

[Narrator/Storyteller]

Yeah.

[Phil Deloria]

Yes. If we're in Puritan New England, this is not a particularly free kind of society. So there's lots condemnation. You have to wear a scarlet A if you're an adult. I mean, so if you're looking out at Native people, you might actually be envious, you might actually be desirous of that kind of status.

[Rebecca Nagle]

So freedom, this thing that is the cornerstone of American identity. When early Americans were trying to figure that freedom out, Indians represented it. And it wasn't just in costumes. The founding generation put the figure of a Native person in paintings on political pamphlets, the figureheads of ships on guns. 18th century white dudes had weird societies where they gave themselves Indian names and performed made up rituals. They were obsessed. And one of the places this Indian symbol shows up is political cartoons. Phil brought one to show me.

[Phil Deloria]

It's called the Female combatants.

[Rebecca Nagle]

In the cartoon, England is represented by the figure of a white woman. She's wearing this long flowing robe with

[Phil Deloria]

a very ornate sort of hairstyle. And she's like literally holding out her fists as if she's boxing.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Who is she boxing? Of course. But the colonies in North America and in the cartoon, the colonies are represented by a native woman.

[Phil Deloria]

There are feathers coming out of her hair. There's a kind of breechcloth thing, no top, so her breasts are exposed and she's reaching out to punch Britannia in the face, right? And Britannia is saying, I'll force you to obedience, you rebellious slut.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Does the native woman in the picture, does she represent native people or does she represent white people?

[Phil Deloria]

She absolutely is not representing Native people. She is absolutely representing American colonists who are rebellious.

[Kim (Producer)]

Okay, so in this cartoon, they're not

[Rebecca Nagle]

indigenous people, have nothing to do with the political struggle. It's just a stand in for the white colonists.

[Phil Deloria]

Exactly. It's a symbol.

[Rebecca Nagle]

It's kind of weird.

[Phil Deloria]

It's very weird. It's very weird.

[Rebecca Nagle]

At the time of the Revolution, colonists needed a national identity and they were in an awkward place. They were not English anymore, but they're not American yet. Phil says plain Indian is the bridge that gets them to American.

[Phil Deloria]

Looking at England, you are rebelling literally against the monarch. And what do you say? I'm not that. I'm not that dominating kind of thing. No, no, no. I'm back over here. I'm aboriginal. I'm of this land, this land of freedom and liberty and abundance. I've been made a new person.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Those lofty Enlightenment ideals we all know from the Declaration of Independence, they're great and all, but revolutions and regular people need symbols. They need something tangible that represents those big ideas. And for the founding generation, that symbol was Indians. Do the colonists need to take on Native identity to become American?

[Phil Deloria]

They do, but they can't fully take it on.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Right.

[Phil Deloria]

Because they also are repulsed by it. Right. And I think it's this sort of dynamic of sort of desire for something about being native or aboriginal to this place and repulsion. Right. Of thinking, these are savages, we want to have nothing to do with them.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And so the way early Americans played Indian had this big contradiction baked into it. They despised actual Native people. We were the merciless Indian savages of the Declaration of Independence. But the Indians of their imagination, they loved those Indians. Those Indians had all this freedom and all this land the colonists wanted for themselves. After Phil and I both took the tour of the Boston Tea Party ships and museum, I told him what I thought.

[Kim (Producer)]

To me, the museum feels like this metaphor of how Native history is talked about, where it's kind of hiding in plain sight.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Like you know what to look for, you can find it.

[Kim (Producer)]

But also if you're not looking for it, it's really easy to miss.

[Phil Deloria]

Yeah, I think hiding in plain sight is a good way to think about it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I asked the museum's creative manager, Evan o', Brien, what he thinks about all this. Why don't they emphasize the Mohawk costume part more?

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

Yeah, sure. So in all regards, we want to balance. Well, actually, we want to strive for balance in both areas. We want to be as authentic as possible. And the complexity with the Tea Party is in order to be fully authentic, you cannot ignore the indigenous disguises that were involved. You simply can't. However, we also want to be sensitive and not make any offense. History is complex. We can learn from it, but. But we also don't want to repeat the same mistakes.

[Kim (Producer)]

And so do you guys think it would be racist, basically, to have white folks today dress up like natives in your programming?

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

Yeah. I mean, we don't allow that. Yeah, we don't do that in any capacity.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Evan has seen volunteers show up to their reenactments dressed in Native costume.

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

When we first did it in 2012, there were a few gentlemen that showed up with fringe and all kinds of stuff. And we had to say, gentlemen, we'd love to have you involved, but you can't wear that.

[Kim (Producer)]

I understand why you don't want to just be like, all right, everybody dress up, you know?

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

Right, right.

[Kim (Producer)]

But do you think there's any risk then, that folks who are coming through the experience sort of miss that fact? For me, learning about this time period, what's so clear is that, like, colonists knew about Native people. They were talking about Native people. We were omnipresent in their lives, but in the way that contemporary Americans tell that story were. And so, for me, it's like there's another layer of the conflict, which is how do we make sure that the Native part of the story isn't missed?

[Evan O'Brien (Museum Creative Manager)]

Yeah, that's absolutely fair. And what's difficult about these sorts of stuff, especially in society today, is we tend to fixate on the stuff that stir up the most emotional reaction. Right. The stuff that's dividing us and making people angry with each other and don't want to water down the content and the history. But what we also don't want to do is make those sorts of things the focal point.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I really sympathize with Evan. I think he's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I don't think the museum is the only one that doesn't know how to talk about this history. But that history that we don't know how to talk about it explains so much of what is happening today. The Qanon shaman and the rest of the mob on January 6th. Their version of America and what it stands for is unrecognizable to many of us. But you know who I think would recognize it? Those early Americans who also dressed up like Indians to riot, who also took matters into their own hands, who also wanted a version of freedom that was rooted in their imaginations, not in reality. What that means for our country today. After the break, In my 20s, I lived in Baltimore, and I was often the only Native person in the room. I felt this responsibility to advocate for Native people But at the same time, I would feel like I wasn't Native enough or not native in the right way. I'm mixed. I look white. That comes with a lot of privilege. And also I'm Native because I'm a citizen of my tribe. But for a lot of non Native people, that wasn't enough. Once there was a group email where colleagues debated whether or not I was Native based on my physical appearance. I wish I hadn't internalized all that, but part of me did. I was young and still figuring out who I was. And then I would see those same people drawn to this cartoon version of being Native, like they would burn sage to kill bad vibes or have a dream catcher hanging from their rearview mirror. Baltimore was close enough to DC That I was surrounded by merchandise for the Washington Arskins. I'm not going to say the slur. I remember one time a colleague gave me a ride home. This was someone who I respected a lot. I got in her car and looked down. The floor mats were. The Rskins logo, where I was supposed to place my dirty shoes was on a cartoon of a native person's face. I didn't say anything. I just felt really alone. But I started to wonder if those two things were related. How people loved the cartoon version of natives, but not me. I asked Phil DeLaure about this back in Boston, and Phil, being a professor, answered me with a story. This story starts in the early 1900s, but it explains this fascination Americans have with Native caricatures today. Back then, the adults were worried about the youth.

[Phil Deloria]

They were so worried that urbanization and modern technology was just taking American youth and making them effeminate and non masculine. There's a crisis around adolescence, which is a term that gets invented around this moment. This guy, G. Stanley hall, says, you know, look, the course of development of the individual human being echoes the course of social development of societies and civilizations. And so the child has to pass through the savage state before they move on to something a little more civilized.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And so people created summer camps where white kids could spend time pretending to be Native.

[Phil Deloria]

The idea is, get all of these kids out of the city, get them into the woods, teach them how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to paddle a canoe.

[Rebecca Nagle]

What kinds of names would the kids go by?

[Phil Deloria]

Flying Cloud, Rolling Hawk and things like that.

[Kim (Producer)]

And at camp, what would the kids be wearing?

[Phil Deloria]

You know, we can just sort of look at this.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Phil pulled out a photo from his book.

[Phil Deloria]

Well, here's one where they're, you know, they're in blankets, they're in headdresses. They're holding arrows. They've got buffalo horn headdresses, a lot of feathers. Here's a kid with a drum, a lot of blankets, a lot of, like, no shirts.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Early Americans played Indian as a way to say, we're not British, we're American. A hundred years later, Americans know they're not British, but they're still. Still plain Indian.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Why?

[Rebecca Nagle]

What is it that they're looking for?

[Phil Deloria]

I think they're looking for a kind of authenticity right in the face of the modern. So it's like we've become a more secular society. But Indians have the spirituality thing going, like they're in touch with the universe, right? We have to live in cities, but they got to live out in the woods in the wild, you know, so at every turn, at every step, Indians represent this new, authentic way of being.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And so Americans are still searching for who they are when they play Indian, but now it fills a different void. It's the void created by an industrialized, modern, alienating world. You can see it in the fringe buckskin and featherhead bands hippies wore in the weird sweat lodge ceremonies New Agers performed even in the back to nature, Make America healthy Again, ramblings of the Qanon shaman. At pretty much the same time summer camps became a thing, there was this other American tradition taking shape. Sports mascots.

[Phil Deloria]

You know, early 20th century is when mascots in general start showing up in sports. And, you know, and so you do get these Indian mascots kind of right from the very beginning.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Phil says mascots and the whole summer camp thing, they're related.

[Phil Deloria]

The mayor of Kansas City at one point was also very big into the

[Rebecca Nagle]

boy Scouts as a Boy Scout leader. This mayor liked to dress up like an Indian, and he kept dressing up even after he became mayor, which earned him the nickname Chief.

[Phil Deloria]

Chief in that sense, might mean, like, the mayor, the boss, whatever, right? But also means like Indian chief. And before you know it, right, all of a sudden, you've got Dutch chiefs.

[Kim (Producer)]

So the mascot is paying homage to

[Rebecca Nagle]

a white man who liked to dress up like an Indian.

[Phil Deloria]

I think you could say it.

[Ashley Akineti]

Yes.

[Rebecca Nagle]

That's wild. And that's how the Kansas City Chiefs got their name. It's been over a hundred years since cartoon natives started showing up in sports. And I wanted to know what the deal is. Why are people still so into them? So after leaving Boston, I got on a plane and I went to a football game. In Kansas City. I found a stadium full of Chiefs fans singing the Tomahawk Chop. I'm gonna warn you, it was a lot.

[Kim (Producer)]

So the thing that we're asking people today is about the tomahawk chop. How do you guys feel about the chop?

[Jenny (Museum Visitor)]

Love it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Love it, love it. I heard people sing the Chop as they walked up the long stadium ramp to find their seats. People sang it in the parking lot. You know, most of the native songs I've heard, they have words. It's weird to hear this impression of our music that doesn't even have a consonant. I talked to fans who put the chief's logo in places you might not expect.

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

Lest anyone doubt our fandom, that's my actual wedding ring.

[Kim (Producer)]

Can you just describe what it looks like?

[Jeff (Museum Tour Guide)]

It's got a ruby background with the

[Rebecca Nagle]

Chiefs arrowhead logo in the middle of it. I even went to a tailgate party that was also a memorial.

[Unidentified Speaker]

So we are here for our buddy's tailgate to celebrate his dad. We do this every year. This is the third or fourth year we've done this tailgate.

[Rebecca Nagle]

People told me the team name honors Native Americans.

[Chiefs Fan]

I think it's just like the fighting spirit of the Native Americans, you know, that never back down mentality. I mean, like, from the male perspective, that's probably the cooler part.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I got the sense that the game, the stadium, the colors, even the Chop isn't just about football. It's deeper than that. Fans use this one word to describe it. It's tradition.

[Chiefs Fan]

Everything's so tradition based.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Just always thought of it as like a tradition of the game and a tradition of the Chiefs.

[Rebecca Nagle]

What I heard people say is that it's part of who they are.

[Kim (Producer)]

Would you guys be mad if the name changed?

[Unidentified Speaker]

Oh, yeah, I wouldn't want it to change.

[Chiefs Fan]

I wouldn't want it to change.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Why not?

[Kim (Producer)]

I mean, it would still be football. Like if they were, you know, the Kansas City City Wolves or something like that. It would still be the same team.

[Unidentified Speaker]

It's just history. It's its own culture. And there's hundreds of thousands of fans as a part of a nation. Are you upset about the use of the tomahawk chop and arrowhead and Chief? Are you upset about that?

[Kim (Producer)]

You know, there's been some, like, research where they look at. At the effect of native mascots on kids, and they have found that exposure to native mascots actually lowers those kids self esteem and sense of pride in being native.

[Chiefs Fan]

So I'm not disgrace. I'm like, not discounting the research, but we need to, like, help them and educate them. So let's not try to, like, make Your childhood bad because you see this happening in spores. Like, you have to help them through

[Unidentified Speaker]

that and culture, you know, and have your kids engage in what your culture is.

[Kim (Producer)]

It sounds like what you're saying is that it's like kind of on Native kids and native communities and parents to correct whatever negative impact mascots might have on them.

[Chiefs Fan]

I'm an Italian American. There's a lot of, we're all in the mafia. We all love pasta. We have greasy hair. You just gotta expect that.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And I do love pasta.

[Chiefs Fan]

All right, I'm gonna go watch some football.

[Paramount Plus Announcer]

Thank you, guys.

[Rebecca Nagle]

That same researcher who found native mascots hurt Native kids. She and a colleague also looked at white students and it had the opposite effect on them. Seeing a racist mascot gave white people a boost in self esteem. I talked to Phil Deloria about this.

[Phil Deloria]

Look, this whole mascot practice is super bad for Native kids. When Native kids see the powerlessness of their par and their elders and their leaders to stop this thing, they feel an incredible lack of efficacy for being native that seeps into the blood and the bones of Native kids that does this kind of damage. This isn't just a trivial thing.

[Rebecca Nagle]

When I was at the football game, I heard over and over that mascots honor Native Americans. But when I confronted fans with the harm mascots do to living, breathing Native kids, they didn't want to hear. Reminded me of how I felt back in Baltimore. I think what feels really frustrating for me as a Native person is that at the same time that, like, we're everywhere, right? Like, you know, we're mascots, we're, you know, like a wooden figure outside of the gas station. We're also nowhere. And just like how often I feel really invisible in the United States states. Do you think that those things are connected?

[Phil Deloria]

They're just two sides of the same coin, right? I mean, Indians are everywhere because settlers have to imagine Indianness inappropriate for themselves and sort of take it and like, always, always playing with it at the same time. Every time that there's a real, actual red blooded Native person standing there in front of them, it is a reminder, right, that all of this land was once native land.

[Rebecca Nagle]

That dynamic of white people liking the Indian that exists in their imagination, but not actual Native people, it's still around today. And the Indian of white people's imaginations, that Indian only lives in the past.

[Phil Deloria]

That Indian is the pure Indian, the authentic Indian, the Indian of desire. And if you could just get access to that Indian who you've been trying to destroy for the longest time, then you could Learn something.

[Rebecca Nagle]

You know, I get asked pretty offensive question by non Native people a lot.

[Kim (Producer)]

They'll ask me, like, if I grew

[Rebecca Nagle]

up on a reservation, what my blood quantum is. It's this weird thing where people who don't actually know what any of that means are trying to, like, measure if I'm authentically Native enough. And this thing clicked for me while I was reading your book, that what they're testing me against is this sort of imagined Native person that actually doesn't exist.

[Phil Deloria]

Yeah, it's really interesting, right, because at this moment, right, the framing of that Indian that we're going to desire is an archaic, ancient, timeless person who can't exist within history at all, right? Because who are the native people? Who are the most important shakers and shapers of stuff? They're traveling the world. They're global citizens. They're all wearing suits. They're buying cars and refrigerators and sewing machines, Right? They are people living in history.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I'm 40 now. Most of this stuff hurts less than it did when I was younger, but it still felt really good to have an elder validate my experience to say it's them, not you. Phil says that weird dynamic of liking cartoon natives more than real ones goes back to this thing called settler colonialism.

[Phil Deloria]

This is the difference between sort of regular colonialism and that thing we call settler colonialism. You know, regular colonialism is kind of a binary thing, right? You're going to send me to India. Oh, I'm going to stay British. There's no way that I'm going to become India Indian.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Right?

[Phil Deloria]

I'm going to stay British. What do I want to do? I'm going to send my kids home to Eton and to Cambridge and Oxford. What do I want to do? I'm going to get the hell out of here and go home and retire to Northumbria, you know, and have a little estate. Am I going to stay here? No. Am I going to embrace these people? Absolutely not. I just want to extract their labor, all right? And their resources. That's like classic colonialism. But the settler colonial kind of structure is a different position. They're not going to go back home to the mother country. Right. Because settlers come to stay, that means they care more about land than about labor, and they find ways to take and appropriate the identities of the indigenous people who are there.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Settler colonialism is complicated, of course. It spans continents and centuries. But Phil says the easiest way to understand it is you want to build a new country on a piece of land. But you have a problem. People already live there. So you come up with all these ways to get rid of the people living on the land you want. And as you're pushing people out, you need to claim that you belong. How do you do that? You take on the identity of the people you pushed out.

[Phil Deloria]

The dilemma of the settler right is always to be on the edge of feeling bad about yourself.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Right.

[Phil Deloria]

The United States is founded on a certain premise that we can hear in the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So if you take that as the vision document, as the foundational document, document, right. You have embedded within yourself, right. Something that must necessarily speak to other people who you have not treated in those particular kinds of ways. Right. And that is an inescapable kind of conundrum.

[Rebecca Nagle]

And that inescapable conundrum, it left us in an awkward place. We're not unlike early Americans. Americans today are struggling with who we are.

[Phil Deloria]

Americans are always uncertain about their identity, which means they over and excessively over perform, right. Their claims to identity, I think the sort of inclination to do performative American ness, which always feels overwrought and overstrained. You know, the renaming of French fries, freedom fries. I mean, that kind of thing that we do all the time. You know, a confident country doesn't do that. France doesn't do that because the French know who they are. We can see this in this moment right now, around certain forms of white nationalism, right, which are claiming a certain set of things, but which have an air of desperation about them because of the uncertainty of what it actually means. What is American identity? I think part of my sense of it is American identity is unfixed, unfinished.

[Rebecca Nagle]

When I learned how early Americans built a national identity, it kind of reminded me of January 6th. And actually it helped me understand it in a new way. I mean, some of the parallels are obvious. Dressing up like Indians to riot. But I found something deeper than that. Something so deep in the character of America, it's below the surface, almost subconscious at first. For me, what I didn't understand about January 6th was how the rioters could claim they were defending American democracy while also tearing it down. They denied the results of a democratic election. They stormed the Capitol building. Once inside, they broke stuff. I mean, they basically went to the seat of our government and trashed it. But after I learned all this history, I realized our founding fathers did the same thing. Our founders built a national identity on plain Indian. At the same time, our government was rounding up and killing actual Native Indian people. We built our national identity on the thing we were trying to destroy. It's the type of thing a serial killer would do in a horror movie. Kill someone, move into their house, and then pretend to be them. Today it feels like we're experiencing these big ruptures in our national identity and what it means to to be American. Like it's falling apart or breaking in two. And I think there's this natural impulse to try and find where things got off track. But it's always been this way. Just imagine someone did kill a family, move into their house, pretend to be them. Wouldn't you expect that person to lose their mind to one day snap? Of course American identity is broken. We all live in that house. What happens when you put Native people back into the founding story of America? In terms of the fight in the US over are we a democracy? It's even a harder question, I think.

[Kim (Producer)]

Do you?

[Rebecca Nagle]

Yeah, Do I have a position on it? Next time on First America. If you like what you're hearing, please leave a review. It's one of the best ways to help listeners find this show. You can also support First America by subscribing or sharing episodes with your friends. First America was made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce foundation and the NYU Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project. Additional support came from Indian Collective, First Nations Development Institute, Yahavia Thom of San Manuel Nation Borealis Philanthropy and Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty Collective. Our fiscal sponsor is Red Media. I dreamed this project into the world in collaboration with an amazing group of Indigenous scholars, including Maggie Blackhawk, Fond du Lac Ojibwe Ned Blackhawk, citizen of the Timok tribe of Western Shoshone Phil Deloria, descendant of the Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux tribes and Nick Estes, citizen of the Lower Burl Sioux Tribe. I, Rebecca Nagle, citizen of Cherokee Nation, also reported, wrote, hosted and executive produced the show. First America is produced by Critical Frequency and distributed by Pushkin Industries. Our managing producer is Amy Westervelt. Senior producer and sound designer is Brendan Baker. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn. Jules Bradley, Kim Netter, V. Petersa and Jordan Gas Pore are our producers. Our editorial consultant is Connie Walker, citizen of the Okanese First Nation. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our partnership's director is Lindsey Crowder. Our development consultant is Jenny Lawton. Our theme song is by Raven Chukan, who is Danae. Scoring by Laura Ortman, citizen of the White Mountain Apache tribe and Raven Chacon. Artwork by Kelly Gonzalez, citizen of Cherokee Nation. The team at Pushkin is Greta Cohn CEO Eric Sandler, Chief Strategy Officer Grace Ross, VP of Business Development Morgan Ratner, Director of Marketing Owen Miller, Content Delivery Associate Kyra Posey, Creative partnerships manager Jordan McMillan, social media manager Brian Strabinik, Senior Analytics Manager and Jake Flanagan, Production Counsel.

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[Kim (Producer)]

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