The paper draws upon the controversy over the use of indigenous-related
sports emblems that has recently sparked a series of protests across the United States
against the Washington Redsk*ns name and imagery. It focuses on the visual aspect
of the debate, tracing the white-supremacist foundations of the Washington team’s
insignia to the institutional construction of Native identity through popular Indian
head pennies, gold coins, and buffalo nickels in the period between 1859 and 1938.
Pointing at the seemingly paradoxical discrepancy between the minted messages
and the systematic political, legal, and military invasion on American Indian
sovereignty in that period, it proceeds to deconstruct the paradox by exposing the
numismatic pictorial language as a manifestation of the same ideological project
and the configurations of power that have remained unchanged to this day. The
continued circulation of indigenous-based iconography in the contemporary
American context shows that the same cultural imagination continues to serve not
only as a powerful rationale for European America’s historical, national, and
political narrative but also as a form of ‘‘anti-conquest’’ that both obscures and
enacts the established formulas of colonial domination and control. Observing the
alterations of the Washington Redsk*ns logo design across some of the key sociohistorical
moments of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the analysis explores how various forms of national anxiety
transcend into identity through the politics of representation. In that light, it regards
recent activism against mass-mediated symbolization of indigenous identity as an
important arena in which centuries-old hegemonic discourses are contested against
new venues of self-determination and internal decolonization.

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• NO LOGO! Visual sovereignty and the Washington Redsk*ns debate