Opponents of the name of the Washington Redskins will air their message before a large audience of sports fans tonight.
The Washington Post reports that the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a tribe based in California, has paid for a 60-second anti-Redskins commercial to run during halftime of tonight’s NBA Finals game. The ad will run in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Sacramento, San Francisco and Washington, and the tribe said it made a “significant investment” to purchase the air time.
The commercial begins with a long montage of names and labels that Native Americans call themselves, like “proud” and “forgotten,” “Navajo” and “Blackfoot,” “patriot” and “soldier,” “Jim Thorpe” and “Billy Mills.” It ends with the narrator saying, “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one thing they don’t” and then an image of a Redskins helmet.
A longer version of the ad was posted on YouTube just before the Super Bowl and has been viewed nearly 2 million times.