Editor’s Note: Have you been following the TwitterStorm for #NotYourMascot during the Super Bowl? We heard from Jacqueline Keeler today about the origins of the campaign, and are grateful for her insight into the history and future of the campaign to remove racist mascots and Native names and iconography from the NFL.
–
EONM (Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry) started with a group of us who found each other on Twitter where we were arguing the issue of Native Mascots with Redsk*n fans. These included: Jonathan Miller of Change the Name Now based out of Washington, DC and Ethan Keller with No Native Mascots a group working on the mascot issue in Wisconsin. I contacted everyone over email in order to begin filing FCC Obscenity Complaints online during Redsk*ns games. I wrote about it here: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/12/10/tweet-about-indian-mascots-went-viral-you-can-do-it-too.
During the game the racist Sonic sign appeared and I sent out a tweet about that went viral (mentioned in the article). My tweet said, “Why Indian Mascots need to end in a picture.” We demanded Sonic apologize and they did. NCAI joined us in our demands and supported our press releases.
We knew we wanted to continue this through the Superbowl and so came up with the hashtag #NotYourMascot after the other hashtag we were using #Changethename (originated by Jonathan Miller’s group) got spammed and Twitter marked it as spam. Dani Miller (a member of our group) wrote about this here: http://lastrealindians.com/natives-censored-on-twitter-by-danielle-miller/.
We have also been working with Suey Park, an Asian American social media activist and graduate student who has had success in the past getting #NotYourAsianSidekick trending to number one. She’s been a great resource and advised us to begin tweeting the night before the Superbowl. She also got a lot of the activist students involved and the Asian American community.
We did keep #NotYourMascot under wraps until Saturday night because we wanted to avoid it being spammed again. Yet, we still got a lot of support and we trended! See below.