KC Chiefs: Team name is fine, but time to move on from traditions

Team Name

Just about every Chiefs fan knows the story of how the team was to be named the Chiefs in the first place. In short, the team was named after Harold Roe Bartle, who was the mayor of Kansas City at the time the Chiefs were relocating from Dallas to Kansas City.

Bartle was very instrumental in persuading the Hunt family to move the team to Kansas City, and Bartle’s nickname was “Chief”, which he acquired in his professional role as Scout Executive of the St. Joseph and Kansas City Boy Scout Councils and founder of the Scouting Society, the Tribe of Mic-O-Say.

In fact, it has been stated that despite the Native American logo and imagery, the team’s nickname was not a reference to Native Americans at the time, but rather just a reference to Mayor Bartle’s nickname “Chief”

The difference between the name Chiefs compared to the name Redskins is really quite simple. The term “Chief” is a position of honor in a tribe and has even become a position of power in corporate America.

A Chief is just another term for a leader or warrior, and that is what the Hunt family were trying to convey when giving that nickname to their team. The term “redskin” has been and always will be a racial slur no matter how you look at it.

If you were to use the term “redskin” in any conversation unless you were referring to the football team, it would be viewed as racist and that is the biggest difference between Washington’s team nickname and Kansas City’s team nickname, so I do not believe the name needs to be changed.