Continued from above:
Blackfeet chief John Two Guns White Calf.
The Boston Football Braves found a new hometown field at Fenway Park, home of the
Boston Red Sox, in 1933. The franchise changed its name to the Boston Redskins as a tribute to their hosts and to maintain their Tammany identity and uniforms.
The franchise then
moved to Washington, D.C., in 1937 and for decades maintained its original indigenous identity.
In the 1970s, the Washington Redskins looked for a new Native American icon to represent the team. The image of White Calf was championed by Blackfeet tribal leader Walter "Blackie" Wetzel.
The Redskins stepped onto the field with a portrait of Chief White Calf on team helmets for the first time in 1972.
The similarities between White Calf and the face on the logo are unmistakable. The black-tipped white feathers and braided hair hanging down over the ear are also similar to those found in pictures of White Calf and other Blackfeet.
The proud, prominent face of White Calf enjoyed widespread support and input from Native communities across the country. Even the NCAI, for a time, appeared to be among those who favored the indigenous icon.
Babe Ruth is shown signing autographs for fans while playing his last season for the Boston Braves.
The National League Braves were founded by James Gaffney, a member of Tammany Hall, who adopted the image of Lenni Lenape chief King Tammany as the team logo, seen on Ruth's left sleeve. The Washington Redskins were founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves and adopted the same Tammany imagery.More
Wetzel, after all, was president of the NCAI from 1961 to 1964, before the organization changed its priorities.
But times have changed, noted Billeaudeaux.
While White Calf once fought against Washington, D.C., to preserve the heritage of American Indians, said Billeaudeaux — the NCAI now fights in Washington, D.C., to erase the heritage of American Indians.
The newer woke NCAI elevated its assault on Native American images in 2013, when it published a report dramatically called "Ending the Legacy of Racism in Sports & The Era of Harmful ‘Indian’ Sports Mascots."
The 29-page dissertation included a caustic 3,560-word history of the Redskins and its "legacy of racism."
Yet the NCAI Redskins' narrative is missing one notable name. It fails to mention Chief Two Guns White Calf — the face of the Redskins franchise for 48 years.
Lenni Lenape chief Tammaned, also known as Tammany, was dubbed the "Patron Saint of America" by the generation that fought for American independence.
This is an idealized portrait by Fritz Bade from descriptions of the man, as it appeared in the 1938 book, "The Tammany Legend" by Joseph White Norwood.
Fox News Digital made several attempts to ask the NCAI to explain the oversight and to share its viewpoints — most recently on Monday, Feb. 5 — but did not receive a response.
The failure to mention the once-revered face of the Redskins franchise, in a history of the Redskins franchise, betrays the group's mission to promote a woke agenda over Native American heritage, Billeaudeaux charged.
The report even cites historical events of 1932, including a Tom & Jerry radio cartoon, to offer conflated support of its claims that the Redskins name was racist. Yet the NCAI failed to note that the team changed its name to the Redskins only after moving to Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox.
Donald Wetzel holds an autographed Washington Redskins football on June 27, 2014, in Great Falls, Montana.
Wetzel, a member of the Blackfeet nation, was proud of the Washington Redskins logo that his father Walter designed in the 1960s and the team adopted in 1972.
The study also did not mention Tammany, the original inspiration for the Braves/Redskins Native American imagery when the franchise was founded in 1932.
The NCAI report also argued, in a widely repeated claim, that indigenous mascots on sports teams have led to low self-esteem among Native Americans.
A source document cited in the claim was a brief study of 71 Native American children in Arizona in 2004.
But the claim that Native imagery creates low self-esteem is "a bald-faced lie," Walter "Red Hawk" Brown, chief of the Cheroenhaka Nottoway
tribe of Virginia, told Fox News Digital.
The U.S. Army veteran said he was a fan of the Redskins until its history was erased. He added, "You take away self-esteem when you take away someone’s history."
He also said, "If things keep going the way they're going now, in 100 years there will be nothing left of our history."
Walter "Red Hawk" Brown, chief of the Cheroenhaka Nottoway tribe of Virginia, refuted claims by the National Congress of American Indians that Native American logos in sports harm the self-esteem of those in Native American communities. Brown spent 28 years as a U.S. Army officer.
Redskins historian Billeaudeaux called the NCAI's version of events a "misinformation campaign" and "information laundering."
The NCAI tacitly admitted in its own report that White Calf's omission was not a mistake.
"Mr. Wetzel was not president of NCAI at the time he took these reported actions and these actions were not taken on behalf of NCAI’s members," the organization claimed, connecting Wetzel with the Redskins portrait but failing to name the man it portrayed.
The NCAI's incomplete history had the intended effect. The accusations of racism against the Redskins organization caught the attention of congressional leaders and President Obama — and stoked public outrage.
The 42nd New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment was commonly known as The Tammany Regiment, in honor of the Lenni Lenape native who helped inspire the birth of the new nation.
Tammany's image adorns a battlefield monument dedicated to the 42nd New York Volunteers at Gettysburg.
The Redskins erased the image of White Calf from the NFL seven years after the NCAI erased him from Native American history.
White Calf was not only scrubbed from the NCAI's 2013 history of the Redskins, but multiple searches on the organization's website also produced no mention of him.
"The whole thing has been a sham since the beginning," said NAGA president Davidson, expressing her viewpoint. "They don’t put out accurate information because they don’t want people to know the real story."
As recently as 2016, a poll by The Washington Post revealed that 90% of Native Americans supported the Redskins name and logo.
Over the past few years, communities across the nation have been stepping up to save their Chief White Calf Redskins heritage and other Native American images targeted by cancel culture and its woke proponents.
"They're trying to erase or eradicate Native American history," said Rick Spiegel, an activist in Sandusky, Michigan, who is leading a grassroots effort to reclaim the Redskins nickname and its White Calf portrait logo at the local high school.