The Washington Commanders And The Origin Story Of THAT name : Native American Heritage Month 2023

In the last edition of Native American Heritage Month 2023, we will discuss “that” name and the accompanying symbol associated with the previous name of the Washington Commanders. Make sure you’re all caught up on Native American Heritage Month 2023 articles here.

I don’t feel comfortable writing about some of the racial epithets associated with this topic. That being said, it’s an important topic, so I will censor them, but I will provide sources that have the full terms in an educational matter.

That Washington Commanders “Name”

Before the Washington Commanders came to Washington, D.C., they were located in Boston. In 1933, the team changed locations within Boston, and they felt they needed to change the name Boston Br*ves to something else so they weren’t confused with the baseball team that had the same name. As a result, they chose the name Boston R*dskins.

In 1937, the team moved to the country’s capital. They then became the Washington R*dskins, the name we all know and hate.

There’s no clear explanation as to why George Washington Marshall, the owner of the team, chose the new name.

Some say he chose it to honor the head coach, William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz. That was a more popular native in years past, but now the more likely theory is that he wanted to change the name but not have to change the team’s symbols.

Marshall is cheap and a segregationist white supremacist. He really knows how to pile it on. The man wouldn’t bring African Americans onto his team until nearly a decade after the majority of other teams had until he was literally forced. And he’s still in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’s not the only openly racist guy enshrined in the HOF, either.

The whole being a proud racist thing calls into question any positive goodwill he was extending towards his “Native American” head coach or Native American culture as a whole.

Dan Snyder was spouting this nearly completely disproved theory in 2013. I would tell him to read up on his own team’s history, but they aren’t his anymore. Ha!

Oh, and even though the Washington Commanders of yesteryear suggested that their name wasn’t offensive to Native Americans, You can’t pick a small group to poll, guys. You can’t find three people there and six other people there (some of whom allegedly weren’t actually Native Americans—a consistent theme for this team) and say all is well.

A study in 2021 reflected something other than undying support for the name.

As discussed in prior Native American Heritage Month 2023 articles, we discovered that using Native American mascots in a sports setting damages Native American children’s sense of community and self-worth.

Between the mental health of children and the history of the name being chosen by a proud segregationist, it was about time that name disappeared. It’s actually awful that it took that long.

All The Dietz

Some history is stranger than fiction. William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz is an individual who personifies this.

If you notice, I put quotations around “Native American” when describing Dietz before. This is not something I choose to do lightly. A person’s identity, name, and culture are some of the most important things they have, so I had to dig deep into research before I could disprove Dietz’s claims that he was Native American.

The Origin Story Of The Farse

It’s not totally surprising that William would want to pretend to be Native American. Apparently, pretending that you were from that community afforded you the opportunity to attend some of the schools like Carlisle (mentioned in-depth in last week’s edition, here), a football giant of a school.

This was appealing to people who wished to be athletes. Of course, you got to skip being ripped away from your parents at a young age to be abused mentally, physically, and all the other ways as a child to strip the “Native American” out of you. How convenient.

Anyway, Dietz was one of those guys. As a kid, people told him he looked Native American, so he felt he might have used the bullying he received to benefit him.

The Beginning Of A Lie

It appears the first time he lied about his identity was in 1904 at an exhibit at a world fair where Native American children showed off their cultural artistic skills that were being cultivated.

He mingled with the man who was running a school that worked harder at celebrating and not stripping culture from Native Americans—an educational facility utilized as a substitute for the boarding school system. Dietz convinced his future boss, his future wife, and pretty much everyone else that he was Native American at this fair.

Ultimately, he would go on to work at a Native American school named Chilocco and be recruited to play on the football team. He had to quit the team because he was unable to provide the tribal documentation showing he was Native. However, he did play for another local team that was a Quaker college, wooing the young ladies with “Native American” songs and dances.

Dietz would finagle his way into Carlisle, somehow convincing the head coach and football deity Pop Warner, who apparently could bring people on the team without their tribal documents.

He would also marry his wife, Native American Angel De Cora, who was an art teacher at Carlisle that Dietz worked as an assistant for. The relationship was a clear abuse of power, due to De Cora being 14 years older than William and being his boss.

Dietz’s mother was so furious that he married a Native American woman that she attempted to have the marriage annulled or canceled multiple times.

His white mother, with whom he grew up along with his white father in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, And there’s a birth certificate to prove it. People did eventually call him out, but he went on for a while, creating a name for himself in art and on the gridiron in the 1910s.

The Narrative

His story about his birth was that his German engineering dad got attacked by Native Americans when he was traveling the plains, surveying for the railroad. He surrendered to the local tribe, and the chief thought he was a nice guy.

The German engineer lived with the tribe for a while and took a Native American wife. When the government rescued the other stranded engineers, the man wouldn’t leave his wife and two kids. One of those kids was named James “Lone Star.”

The German got rich from trade and all that, so he left his wife and kids and married another woman, an old flame from back in the day. When Lone Star was five, his dad came back and took him away from his mother. At eight, he went off to boarding school. The language barrier that he didn’t overcome in the three years with his stepmother and father was finally rooted out in school.

Dietz clearly didn’t take a class on lying in school because that’s not even the childhood story of the man he was stealing the identity of. For this to be true, his sister, who would have been 20 years older than him and would have been born to the German man when he was just 10 years old. Also, James Lone Star’s dad wasn’t an engineer, and his parents weren’t named W.W. and Julia.

Dodging The Draft And The Tuth

Where was the real James Lone Star? No one is quite sure. It appears he died at war, although there are incomplete records supporting that fact.

Even though James Lone Star was assumed to be dead, Dietz exploited the fact that no one was sure of that fact. He even reached out to James Lone Star’s sister, Sallie.

With no clear evidence that Dietz was Lone Star, he reached out to a reservation anyway and got official documentation that he was a member of the tribe. The fingerprints were a new requirement to verify identity, but of course James Lone Star had never provided any.

It was eventually the WWI draft dodging that got William in trouble.

The FBI was involved in the Dietz case. They went back to his real hometown in Wisconsin, where they spoke with his very white parents and the community that allegedly mocked the parents for their “Native American” son.

In interviews, William denied that his own mother had not given birth to him in front of her face, which didn’t go well.

He also proceeded to badger Sallie for a signed affidavit that he was her brother. Thank goodness she didn’t provide him one, because as soon as she saw him in person in court, she knew it wasn’t her brother. He was 14 years too young, for example.

The 1919 Trial Begins

Sallie refused to vouch for her “brother,” but William was able to convince his mother to. She testified in the trial that she had a stillbirth, and her husband brought another baby that was also a newborn baby that he had with a Native American woman that he had impregnated while they were reconciling their tumultuous relationship. There’s nothing like raising another woman’s baby with your husband to cultivate a positive relationship.

Community members vouching for being witnesses at the birth and directly after the birth make Dietz’s mother’s claims look even less credible. It was a terrible position that William put his mother in just because she didn’t want to see her son go to jail.

The judge posed to the jury that they needed to focus not on whether William was any one specific Native American individual, but whether he believed he was Native American or not. It was a hung jury. A second trial later resulted in 30 days of jail time for William.

An identity crisis is a… unique situation. But identity theft is another. He took money from his “sister,” Sallie, and he took government money from the man who likely died serving in the military.

The emotional pain to Sallie, his wife, that he wanted to replace with someone “young” and “white” who thought he was Native American, the pain to his family, is hard to fathom. The seeming lack of shame and remorse, particularly while testifying in court, paints Dietz in a very negative light.

Post Court Life

Despite going to court in 1919, this didn’t seem to affect William’s career too much. He did appear to have financial problems, but it’s not clear why since it appeared that he was consistently employed. Dietz had consistent coaching gigs until 1942, mostly in college, with an exception to his two seasons coaching for the NFL’s now-Washington Commanders. He also continued to create and sell art.

William Dietz would die a poor man, unable to afford his own tombstone. Former football teammates would buy his second wife, Doris Pottlitzer, the stone. Dietz would go in the ground living a lie, with his fake name and place of birth written out on it.

To paint this story in a light that supposedly “honors” Native American culture or “explains” the usage of the name and symbol associated with the Washington Commanders’ prior name is a shame.

The total disregard for the maternal bond between Native American mother and son is also an alarming, recurring theme throughout this story.

That Washington Commanders “Symbol”

The symbol for the future Washington Commanders was a Native American man’s head from a profile perspective. He had braids and feathers. It was originally developed in 1932 for the Boston Br*ves.

In 1972, William Wetzel of the Blackfoot tribe designed a new symbol. Even his own tribe varied in their opinion of the name and the symbol, but lo, the new symbol was integrated for the future Washington Commanders.

Wetzel took inspiration from the Buffalo nickel when creating the new logo. Even the Buffalo nickel has been controversial pretty much since day one, so it was an interesting place to derive inspiration from.

The symbol was finally retired in 2021 and was replaced with the large W when the name was changed to the Washington Commanders.

Why is the NFL like this?