The Chiefs are lauded for their home support, with many crowning Arrowhead as the league's rowdiest stadium. However, it also is the home of one of the league's most controversial traditions.
The tomahawk chop has been a fixture at various sporting events for much of the last 30 years, with a number of fanbases, including the Braves and Florida State Seminoles, employing it as a way to lend support to their home team.
Kansas City is no exception, with scores of onlookers using the gesture to celebrate Chiefs touchdowns. However, that gesture is steeped in racism, a symbol of the ever-present effects of settler colonialism on Native American communities.
MORE: How Joe Burrow vs. Patrick Mahomes compares to Tom Brady vs. Peyton Manning & other rivalries
As the Chiefs ready for yet another appearance in the AFC Championship, it seems as good a time as any to take a look back at the history of the tomahawk chop.
How did the Chiefs' tomahawk chop start?
The origin of Kansas City's use of the tomahawk chop can be traced to Northwest Missouri State's marching band. Seriously.
In 1990, the band played at one of Kansas City's games. Al Sergel, a Florida State graduate, led the musical group as the band performed FSU's war chant during the game.
It got the attention of players and then-Chiefs head coach Marty Schottenheimer. Soon, it became a fixture at Chiefs games, too. The chop developed around the same time — it was already making the rounds at Braves games. And it was an activity linked with KC's resurgence in the decade. The Chiefs had just one double-digit win season in the 1980s. They reeled off four more to start the 1990s.
"It's really become a signature item," former Chiefs promotions director Phil Thomas told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1991.
MORE: Bengals players irk Chiefs with 'Burrowhead' nickname for Arrowhead Stadium
Chiefs tomahawk chop controversy and protests
With more clamor surrounding the racist names and iconography associated with professional teams in Washington and Cleveland, the insidious impacts of the tomahawk chop slipped under the surface.
But Native American activists have raised awareness of the racist origin of the gesture in recent years. For some, it's a vestige of past media representations of Native American communities.
“When I see something like a tomahawk chop, which is derived from television and film portrayals, I find it incredibly offensive because it is an absolutely horrible stereotype of what a Native person is,” Vincent Schilling, associate editor of Indian Country Today, told The Associated Press in 2020. “It’s not much more than a cartoon. My people are not a cartoon. My community is not a cartoon. My heritage is not a cartoon.”
It's not just the signal, either. Chiefs fans routinely don war paint and feathered headdresses, a nod to racist caricatures of Native Americans. The chop is accompanied by the playing of a faux "Indian" drum, another nod to offensive stereotypes of Native Americans.
MORE: Patrick Mahomes got advice from Tom Brady ahead of AFC championship
Or, as Kaysa Williams, a Native American from Oklahoma, wrote on Facebook according to a 2020 AP story:
What good comes from a bunch of Non-Natives pretending to be Native?
In an op-ed for NBC News, activist Simon Moya-Smith argued that the chop and the behaviors that often accompany it during games work to reduce the experiences felt in Native American communities, places that have been ravaged by genocide and dehumanization.
“How can you see me, or any other Native for that matter, as a human being,” Moya-Smith said, “if sports and Hollywood continue to perpetuate the half-naked, Tonto-talking angry Indian stereotype?”
Or as Alicia Norris, co-founder of the Florida Indigenous Rights and Environmental Equality, told CBS News in 2021:
The Indigenous people of this land have already had a mass genocide approach with regard to their culture and way of living. And when you further dehumanize them and objectify them, it just kind of falls in line with that extinction of who they are.
