Rhonda LeValdo is exhausted, but she's refusing to slow down. For the fourth time in five years, her hometown team and the focus of her decadeslong activism against the use of Native American imagery and references in sports is in the Super Bowl.

As the Kansas City Chiefs prepare for Sunday's big game, so does LeValdo. She and dozens of other Indigenous activists are in Las Vegas to protest and demand the team change its name and ditch its logo and rituals they say are offensive.

"I've spent so much of my personal time and money on this issue. I really hoped that our kids wouldn't have to deal with this," said LeValdo, who founded and leads a group called Not In Our Honor. "But here we go again."

Her concern for children is founded. Research has shown the use of Native American imagery and stereotypes in sports have negative psychological effects on Native youth and encourage non-Native children to discriminate against them.

"There's no other group in this country subjected to this kind of cultural degradation," said Phil Gover, who founded a school dedicated to Native youth in Oklahoma City.

"It's demeaning. It tells Native kids that the rest of society, the only thing they ever care to know about you and your culture are these mocking minstrel shows," he said, adding that what non-Native children learn are stereotypes.

LeValdo, an Acoma Pueblo journalist and faculty member at Haskell Indian Nations University, has been in the Kansas City area for more than two decades.

She arrived from Nevada as a college student. In 2005, when Kansas City was playing Washington's football team, she and other Indigenous students organized around their anger at the offensive names and iconography used by both teams.

Some sports franchises made changes in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Washington team dropped its name, which is considered a racial slur, after calls dating back to the 1960s by Native advocates such as Suzan Harjo. In 2021, the Cleveland baseball team changed its name from the Indians to the Guardians.

Ahead of the 2020 season, the Chiefs barred fans from wearing headdresses or face paint referencing or appropriating Native American culture in Arrowhead Stadium, although some still have.

"End Racism" was written in the end zone. Players put decals on their helmets with similar slogans or names of Black people killed by police.

"We were like, 'Wow, you guys put this on the helmets and on the field, but look at your name and what you guys are doing,'" LeValdo said.

The next year, the Chiefs retired their mascot, a horse named Warpaint that a cheerleader would ride onto the field every time the team scored a touchdown. In the 1960s, a man wearing a headdress rode the horse.

The team's name and arrowhead logo remain, as does the "tomahawk chop," in which fans chant and swing a forearm up and down in a ritual that is not unique to the Chiefs.

The added attention on the team this season thanks to singer Taylor Swift's relationship with tight end Travis Kelce isn't lost on Indigenous activists. LeValdo said her fellow activists made a sign for this weekend reading, "Taylor Swift doesn't do the chop. Be like Taylor."

"We were watching. We were looking to see if she was going to do it. But she never did," LeValdo said.

The Chiefs say the team was named after Kansas City Mayor H. Roe Bartle, who was nicknamed "The Chief" and helped lure the franchise from Dallas in 1963.

They also say they have worked in recent years to eliminate offensive imagery.

"We've done more over the last seven years, I think, than any other team to raise awareness and educate ourselves," Chiefs President Mark Donovan said ahead of last year's Super Bowl.

The team has made a point to highlight two Indigenous players: long snapper James Winchester, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and center Creed Humphrey, who is from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma.

In 2014, the Chiefs launched the American Indian Community Working Group, which has Native Americans serving as advisers, to educate the team on issues facing the Indigenous population. As a result, Native American representatives have been featured at games, sometimes offering ceremonial blessings.

"The members of that working group weren't people that were involved in any of the organizations that actually serve Natives in Kansas City," said Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center, which provides health, welfare and cultural services to the Indigenous community. Crouser is among those who plan to protest in Las Vegas this weekend.

U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, sees the label "Chief" as a term of endearment. He has been a Chiefs fan since he moved to Kansas City more than half a century ago, although he said it "wouldn't bother me that much" if the name were changed.

"A chief was somebody with enormous influence," said Cleaver, who is Black, making a reference to tribal chiefs in Africa. "As long as the name is not an insult or an invective, then I'm OK with it."

The story presented by the Chiefs features the message that the team is honoring Native culture. But Crouser calls that a "PR stunt."

"There's no honor in you painting your face and putting on a costume and cosplaying our culture," Crouser said. "The sheer entitlement of people outside our community telling us they're honoring us is so incredibly frustrating."

LeValdo is very conscious of who gets to own a narrative. As a University of Kansas journalism student in the early 2000s, she said a professor told her she would be too biased as a Native woman to report on stories about Native people. When she entered the world of video journalism, she was told she "didn't have the look" to be on camera.

During Chiefs home games, she and other Indigenous activists stand outside Arrowhead with signs saying, "Stop the Chop" and "This Does Not Honor Us." The sounds of a large drum and thousands of fans imitating a "war chant" as they swing their arms thunder from the stadium.

For LeValdo, the pain fueling her anger and activism is rooted in the oppression, killing and displacement of her ancestors and the lingering effects those injustices have on her community.

"We weren't even allowed to be Native American. We weren't allowed to practice our culture. We weren't allowed to wear our clothes," she said. "But it's OK for Kansas City fans to bang a drum, to wear a headdress and then to act like they're honoring us? That doesn't make sense."

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Apache. Lakota. Chinook. Iroquois.

These are not only Native American tribes that once fought for their land against the U.S. military. They are also the names of U.S. Army helicopters.

The convention of naming choppers after America’s Indigenous people is believed to date back to 1947. Army General Hamilton Howze reportedly wasn’t thrilled with Hoverfly and Dragonfly — the names of the first two Army helicopters — and ordered some changes.

“He wanted to name them after something that was fast-moving, militarily strong and had some kind of connection to American military history,” says David Silbey, a military historian at Cornell University. “And he thought of the Native American warriors of the 19th century — the Apache, the Lakota and all those folks. And so, he started that tradition of naming Army helicopters after Native American tribes.”

An Army regulation created in 1969 codified this naming protocol. Name suggestions were to be provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Silbey says required naming regulations no longer exist, but certain military naming traditions have continued.

For example, the Lakota helicopter was named as recently as 2012 in honor of the Lakota tribe of the Great Sioux Nation in North and South Dakota. That same year, Lakota elders blessed two Lakota choppers at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota.

“I think the idea of naming weapons and ships and planes is a good one as a way of invoking the history, the tradition, the ethos of the military,” Silbey says. “It's a way of invoking the long history of the United States and the U.S. military. And sometimes even including the folks we were fighting against, who we've now come to peace with, as is the case with Army helicopters.”

Since World War II, Army tanks have been named after generals. There’s the Sherman tank, named after Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, and the Abrams tank, named for Vietnam-era General Creighton W. Abrams.

Two Army missiles named after venomous snakes are the Titan and the Sidewinder.

“The [sidewinder snake] actually has the ability to sense infrared heat. There’s a thing in its snout that senses heat, and that's how it targets its prey,” Silbey says. “And that's how the missile guides itself — it hones in on the infrared heat of a jet engine. So, there's that nice little actual connection to nature in the name.”

But other Army missiles are named the Falcon, Sparrow and Harpoon, which highlights how military naming protocols can sometimes be all over the place.

However inconsistent, some naming traditions continue across the U.S. military, according to Silbey. The secretary for each service, whether it’s the Marines, Air Force, Army or Navy, has the final say on naming equipment and weapons.

A report by the Congressional Research Service outlines how naming Navy vessels has evolved over time.

“Attack submarines, for example, were once named for fish, then later for cities and most recently [in most cases] for states, while cruisers were once named for cities, then later for states, and most recently for battles,” writes report author Ronald O'Rourke, a naval affairs specialist. “State names, to cite another example, were once given to battleships, then later to nuclear-powered cruisers and ballistic missile submarines, and most recently to [in most cases] Virginia-class attack submarines.”

The United States doesn’t build battleships anymore, but when it did, the vessels were named after U.S. states. And for more than 200 years, there’s always been a Navy ship in the fleet called the USS Enterprise.

Of the Navy’s 15 most recently named aircraft carriers, two are named for members of Congress, and 10 have been named for past presidents, O'Rourke writes in the report. But none of those were named for presidents who were Democrats.

“The last Democratic president to have a carrier named after him is the John F. Kennedy. There’s no Barack Obama. There's no Bill Clinton. There's no Jimmy Carter. There's no Lyndon Johnson,” Silbey says. “There's a Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush. … It's getting a little obvious that they're not naming them after Democratic presidents.”

There are some names that can go horribly wrong. Silbey points to the World War II-era ships designed to carry ammunition and explosives. Many of the ships in this class were named after volcanoes, and one of the vessels exploded in 1944, killing about 400 people.

“I think a way that the military has gone wrong with naming conventions has been that tendency to name things after Confederate generals, political figures, Confederate victories,” Silbey says. “The Confederates were traitors to the United States, traitors to the United States military, and naming a military weapon, installation, ship, plane after someone like Robert E. Lee, who betrayed his country, is/was the wrong choice. And I'm glad it's being fixed.”

The Army has renamed several bases that were initially named after Confederates.

The newest branch of the military, the Space Force, which is tasked with conducting military operations in outer space, hasn’t named any equipment yet. However, members of that branch of the nation's armed forces are currently called guardians.

MUSKOGEE, Oklahoma — 

The hallways of Bacone College are cold and dark. In the main hall, there are no lectures to be heard, only the steady hum of the space heater keeping the administrative offices warm.

Students aren't attending classes here this semester but work still needs to be done. In the college’s historic buildings, there are leaks to plug, mold to purge and priceless works of Native American art to save from ruin. Not to mention devising a plan to keep the college from shuttering for good. It’s a daunting task for the nine remaining employees.

But on this rainy December morning, the college's president is running a DoorDash order. “If we have the money, we can pay,” Interim President Nicky Michael said regarding salaries.

Founded in 1880 as a Baptist missionary college focused on assimilation, Bacone College transformed into an Indigenous-led institution that provided an intertribal community, as well as a degree. With the permission of the Muscogee Nation Tribal Council, Bacone's founders used a treaty right to establish the college at the confluence of three rivers, where tribal nations had been meeting for generations.

Throughout the 20th century, the center of this was Bacone’s Native American art program, which produced some of the most important Indigenous artists of their time, including Woody Crumbo, Fred Beaver, Joan Hill and Ruthe Blalock Jones.

They and their contemporaries pushed the boundaries of what was considered “Native American art.” During a period of intense hostility against tribal sovereignty by the U.S., Bacone became defined by the exchange of ideas its Native faculty and students created and represented a new opportunity for Indigenous education and academic thought.

“Bacone was the only place in the world where that could happen for Native people,” said Robin Mayes, a Cherokee and Muscogee man who attended Bacone in the ’70s and taught silversmithing there in the ’90s. “It’s a tragedy to think that it’s going to be discontinued.”

For decades, the college has been plagued by poor financial choices and inconsistent leadership, triggering flashpoints between administration, students and staff over the mission and cultural direction of the college.

Some have accused recent administrations of embezzlement, fraud and intimidation, resulting in multiple lawsuits. Students expressed frustration with a lack of resources and cultural competency among some school leaders. The college also has had trouble maintaining its accreditation.

Last year, a lawsuit crippled Bacone's finances. Ultimately, Michael made the decision to suspend classes for the spring semester. She hopes the deferment is temporary, but if the college can't muster up millions of dollars, Oklahoma’s oldest continually operating college likely will close its doors.

“It has endured for over 140 years through terrible decisions,” said Gerald Cournoyer, an instructor who was hired in 2019 to restart the college’s art program.

“Providing oversight for Bacone has been a struggle because of the leadership or lack thereof,” said Cournoyer, who also is a renowned Lakota artist. Some presidents focused time and money on athletic programs, others on Bacone's Baptist missionary roots. “When you put absolutely no money, nothing, not $20, not $10, into your fundraising efforts, this is what you get.”

During the time Patti Jo King was the director of the Center for American Indians at Bacone from 2012 to 2018, leadership wanted to build a state-of-the-art museum to replace the 80-year-old building housing many priceless pieces of Native art.

“We didn’t even have the money to keep it open seven days a week,” said King, now a retired Cherokee professor, writer and academic.

Even when she first arrived on campus, King said Bacone's financial debts already had caught up to it. The student dorms didn’t have hot water, staff were severely underpaid and graduation rates among the college’s remaining students were low.

Still, she and other faculty endeavored to make it a place where Native students could find community, but Bacone’s old problems never went away. Like Cournoyer, after years of working toward rebuilding, she left in frustration.

Today, the old museum is empty. Its artifacts were moved to another location so they wouldn’t be exposed to extreme temperatures.

The remaining staff act as caretakers of the historic stone buildings that predate Oklahoma, themselves important pieces of the past. In the museum, Ataloa Lodge, the fireplace is made of stones sent to the college from Indigenous communities across the country: one from the birthplace of Sequoyah, one from the grave of Sitting Bull, another from the field where Custer died. Five hundred in all, each stone a memory.

Michael, the interim president, and others have been cleaning up buildings in hopes they might soon host graduation banquets and student gatherings. Other staff chase off looters. Rare paintings still hang across campus, including pieces by members of the Kiowa Six, who became internationally famous a century ago, and Johnnie Diacon, a Muscogee painter and alumnus whose work can be seen in the background of several episodes of the television show Reservation Dogs.

A few years ago, experts from a museum in Tulsa warned that many of the paintings are contaminated with mold, which will spread to other nearby works of art. Leslie Hannah, a Cherokee educator who sits on the college’s board of trustees, said he’s concerned, but the cost of restoring them falls far down the list, behind broken gas lines, flooded basements and a mountain of debt.

Bacone’s current financial crisis stems partially from a lawsuit brought by Midgley-Huber Energy Concepts, a Utah-based heating and air company that sued the college over more than $1 million in unpaid construction and service fees. Twice last year, the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office put Bacone’s property up for sale to settle the debt. Both times the auction was called off, most recently in December.

MHEC owner Chris Oberle told KOSU last month that he intended to purchase the historic property. Attorneys for MHEC have not returned repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.

Alumni have called the validity of any sale of the property into question, pointing to the

treaty right that established the campus and its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Attorneys for the college declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Michael said she doesn’t know what stalled the auction, but she is grateful for more time to try to save Bacone.

When two Native American boys from Nebraska died after being taken to a notorious boarding school hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania, they were buried there without notice. Nearly 130 years later, the tribe wants the boys' remains back home.

So far, the Army has refused to return to the Winnebago Tribe the remains of Samuel Gilbert and Edward Hensley. A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the tribe accuses the Army of ignoring a law passed more than three decades ago aimed at expediting the return of the deceased to Native American lands.

Samuel had been at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania for just 47 days when he died in 1895. Edward spent four years at the school before dying in 1899. Both died in their teens, but records do not disclose their exact ages. Tribal leaders weren't informed when the boys died, and relatives never learned what killed them.

The tribe made a formal request to the Office of Army Cemeteries for the remains in October but learned in December that the request was denied, according to the lawsuit filed January 17.

"The Army always sought to maintain a position of control, dominance over native peoples while they were alive — and while they were dead," said Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the lawyers for the tribe.

The bodies remain in a graveyard along with those of about 180 other children not far from where the school once stood in Carlisle, 1,850 kilometers from the tribe's eastern Nebraska home. The graveyard serves as a "tourist attraction," the lawsuit states.

A spokesperson for the Office of Army Cemeteries said she can't comment on pending litigation. But the spokesperson said in an email that Samuel and Edward, along with other children who died at the boarding school, are buried in individual graves with named headstones.

"The cemetery is a dignified resting place demonstrating respect and care of all the deceased buried there and is absolutely not treated as a tourist attraction," the spokesperson said.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in south-central Pennsylvania, the first government-operated school for Native Americans, was founded by a former military officer, Richard Henry Pratt. He believed that Native Americans could be a productive part of society, but only through assimilation.

After it opened in 1879 in an old Army barracks, thousands of Native American children were sent by train and stagecoach to Carlisle. Drastic steps were taken to separate them from their culture, including cutting their braids, dressing them in military-style uniforms and punishing them for speaking their native languages. They were forced to adopt European names.

More than 10,000 children from more than 140 tribes passed through the school by the time it closed in 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. The children — often taken against the will of their parents — endured harsh conditions that sometimes led to death from tuberculosis and other diseases. The remains of some of those who died were returned to their tribes. The rest are buried in Carlisle.

After the school closed, the property was transferred from the Department of Interior to the War Department. It was used by the Army for a rehabilitation hospital and the Medical Field Service School.

The OAC spokesperson said the original cemetery was "in an inappropriate location adjacent to the pre-existing refuse dump, and blacksmith shop," so the remains were moved in 1927 to another location on Carlisle Barracks. Servicemembers, veterans and their families also are buried there.

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. It allowed for remains to be returned to tribes at their request. But the lawsuit said the Army refused to follow that law and is instead requiring the tribe to adhere to an Army policy.

The difference: While NAGPRA requires the remains to be returned, Army policy gives the agency discretion to decide if, and when, to do so. It also requires a request from the boys' "closest living relative" — which the lawsuit called "nearly impossible to apply in these circumstances."

"Defendants' conduct perpetuates an evil that the United States Congress sought to correct when it enacted NAGPRA in 1990," the lawsuit states.

The Army has disinterred 32 remains of Native American children at the Army's expense since 2017, the OAC spokesperson said.

But Werkheiser said those remains weren't technically returned to the tribes, but rather to the children's relatives, and often after arduous waits. He said that using the Army process rather than NAGPRA "strips the tribes of all of their political rights."

Tribes whose members had remains returned include the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Spirit Lake, Washoe, Umpqua, Ute, Rosebud Sioux, Northern Arapaho, Blackfeet, Oglala Sioux, Oneida, Omaha, Modoc, Iowa and Alaskan native.

"The Winnebago, after listening to what all those other tribes went through, said, 'We're not going to play this game. We're not going to be bullied.'"

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, has pushed the government to reckon with its role in Native American boarding schools. In 2022, her agency released a report naming the 408 schools the federal government supported to strip Native Americans of their cultures and identities. At least 500 children died at some of the schools, including Carlisle.

The lawsuit states that the Winnebago Tribe "continues to experience the pain of knowing that Samuel's and Edward's spirits remain lost."

"The way Winnebago views it is that the boys have been waiting to come home for nearly 125 years," said another attorney involved in the lawsuit, Beth Wright of the Native American Rights Fund. "Their spirits can't rest, and they can't go on unless they are returned to the place that they were taken from."

A South Dakota tribe has banned Republican Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also said cartels are infiltrating the state's reservations.

"Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!" Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. "Oyate" is a word for people or nation.

Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get former U.S. President Donald Trump re-elected and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.

Many of those arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are Indigenous people from places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico who come "in search of jobs and a better life," the tribal leader added.

"They don't need to be put in cages, separated from their children like during the Trump Administration, or be cut up by razor wire furnished by, of all places, South Dakota," he said.

Star Comes Out also addressed Noem's remarks in the speech to lawmakers Wednesday in which she said a gang calling itself the Ghost Dancers is murdering people on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is affiliated with border-crossing cartels that use South Dakota reservations to spread drugs throughout the Midwest.

Star Comes Out said he took deep offense at her reference, saying the Ghost Dance is one of the Oglala Sioux's "most sacred ceremonies," "was used with blatant disrespect and is insulting to our Oyate."

He added that the tribe is a sovereign nation and does not belong to the state of South Dakota.

Noem responded Saturday in a statement, saying, "It is unfortunate that President (Star) Comes Out chose to bring politics into a discussion regarding the effects of our federal government's failure to enforce federal laws at the southern border and on tribal lands. My focus continues to be on working together to solve those problems."

"As I told bipartisan Native American legislators earlier this week, 'I am not the one with a stiff arm, here. You can't build relationships if you don't spend time together,'" she added. "I stand ready to work with any of our state's Native American tribes to build such a relationship."

In November, Star Comes Out declared a state of emergency on the Pine Ridge Reservation due to increasing crime. A judge ruled last year that the federal government has a treaty duty to support law enforcement on the reservation, but he declined to rule on the funding level the tribe sought.

Noem has deployed National Guard troops to the Mexican border three times, as have some other Republican governors.

In 2021 she drew criticism for accepting a $1 million donation from a Republican donor to help cover the cost of a two-month deployment of 48 troops there.