There have been other dubious defenders of the Washington team name, but Yancy is doing so for profit.
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http://deadspin.com/is-the-redskins-vip-indian-defender-a-fake-indian-1642991295Is The Redskins' "VIP" Indian Defender A Fake Indian?
Mark One Wolf was, for a time, a favored native in Dan Snyder's fight to save the "Redskins" nickname. "Native American backing team name is VIP at practice," read a Richmond Times-Dispatch headline. It was accompanied by an Associated Press photo of One Wolf in profile, as if to echo the team's logo. But that was July. Now folks on both sides of the squabble agree on one thing: One Wolf makes poor Liz Warren look like Pocahontas.
"He is the 21st-century version of William 'Lone Star' Dietz," says Toby Vanlandingham, an anti-name activist from the Yurok Reservation in California. Dietz was the former Redskins coach whose reputed Sioux heritage inspired the team's nickname, according to the save-the-name camp, even though most evidence available today suggests he was neither Indian nor the inspiration.
"Mark One Wolf is a fucking phony," says ReGina Zuni, an ardent pro-namer living on the Isleta Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. Zuni says she's so convinced that One Wolf's not really an Indian that she emailed the team to warn them to stay away from him, lest they get caught using another—yes, another—poseur....
Authentic or not, One Wolf's star shone brightest during Washington's training camp in July in Richmond. He showed up at the team's workouts wearing an urban Indian ensemble and an RGIII jersey, his long black ponytail accessorized by a red bandana, a Western-looking necklace, and a cap with turkey feathers. The name controversy was overshadowing every other story, so media flocked to the Indian-looking dude in team colors.
That's how the Times-Dispatch found him. The story discussed One Wolf's founding of Native American Redskins Fans, a group for name sympathizers, and how he'd been a special guest at RGIII's mom's birthday party because he stood out.
While in Richmond, One Wolf gave his pro-name spiel to anybody with a media credential. "It's never been an issue for me or my family," One Wolf said as a camera rolled. "The Redskins name, it's always been a term that we felt was a unifying term."
That soundbite landed him a featured role in the video titled " Redskins Is a Powerful Name," released by Redskins Facts, a new group that lobbied for support for the name. The team initially attempted to disguise Redskins Facts as a grassroots deal, but the operation was quickly unmasked as the work of PR powerhouse Burson-Marsteller.
He enjoyed that first stint in the spotlight so much he kept going for more. In late August, One Wolf used his position with the native fans group to call for all Indians to boycott the Washington Post because of the paper's coverage of the name debate....
The Snyder-owned fan board Extremeskins.com trumpeted One Wolf's pitch for a Post boycott.
One Wolf quite literally became the face of the save-the-name movement: One supporter was so happy to have a real live Indian on her side that she made a poster in burgundy and gold with his profile replacing the helmet logo.
"I never asked for that," the guy known as One Wolf now says when asked about the notoriety he's gained from taking the team's side in the name brouhaha. "I just showed up to camp. But it was a privilege and an honor to be in that position."
Even before he was fêted by Snyder, lots of Native Americans also involved in the name squabble were on One Wolf's trail. And this bunch has no problem believing what he said in Snyder's propaganda film, the part about how the team's name was never a big deal for him or his family.
"We can't find anything about him that's native, and we've had a lot of people look into this," says Jacqueline Keeler, an Oregon writer and anti-native mascot activist. (Keeler helped assemble the native panel that appeared in the recent name-tackling episode of The Daily Show.)
It didn't take long for those looking at One Wolf, who has been dubbed "One Puppy" by the anti-name faction, to find he has serious name issues of his own. For all his talk about not wanting the team to change its name, it turns out the guy going by One Wolf sure likes changing his.
Public records show he was born Mark E. Yancey in 1973 in Washington D.C. He calls himself Mark Suzuki on online résumés. He's passed himself off as Mark Yan here and there and used that handle in comment sections wherever the name was being debated. He had a MySpace page using Kram Yecnay. The Redskins Facts organization ID'd him as Mark One Wolf, while he often contracts the surname by one character to OneWolf. And he touted the team's name on Facebook pages, including the Redskins Facts site, as "Mark Yazzie." At least two of his Facebook pages— "Mark Yazzie" and "Mark OneWolf"— have been terminated for using pseudonyms. Of late, he has been going by Dalaa Ba'Cho.
His alleged tribal affiliations appear to be extremely malleable, too. Yancey watchers say that
earlier this year One Wolf was calling himself a Cherokee while backing Snyder's naming rights on the message boards at powwows.com, a clearinghouse for Native issues. "He changed that when I called him out on it," says Vanlandingham. On that same site,
Yancey/One Wolf now ID's himself as DaLaa Ba'Cho and lists his affiliation as "Chiricahua Apache/Mexica." North Carolina court records from 2007 (dug up by my colleague Diana Moskovitz) list him as "Native American/Alaskan." His recent use of
"Mark Yazzie" as his internet handle suggested to those familiar with native ways that he was trying to pass as Navajo. Turns out "Yazzie" is the "Smith" or "Jones" of that tribe; 18 of the approximately 300 Navajo Code Talkers recognized by Congress in 2011—including William Yazzie, a member of the original 29 Code Talkers and a Congressional Gold Medal recipient—had that surname. (The Redskins trotted out a quartet of Navajo Code Talkers in team gear during a Monday Night Football broadcast in November 2013 while the name debate was at a slower boil.)
"When he was calling himself 'Mark Yazzie,' and saying he's Apache, that showed he doesn't do his research very well," says Keeler, who adds that she is enrolled in the Navajo tribe. "If you're going to fake it, make it believable."
And "Mexica"?
"'Mexica' is not a tribe," says Ray Ramirez of the Native American Rights Fund, a Colorado group that began fighting against Indian-themed team mascots soon after its 1970 founding. "It's a word that's used to refer to mixed breeds between Spanish and Indian blood. You see that word used when people don't have a tribe." (Ramirez's organization sent Yancey's Native American Redskins Fans a cease-and-desist letter for using the acronym they'd established and thereby causing confusion in the marketplace. Yancey had to watch another Facebook page go away. His clique returned to Facebook as Native American Redskins Nation.)
Is The Redskins' "VIP" Indian Defender A Fake Indian?
Eugene Herrod of the Southern California Indian Center (SCIC), who admits he has been monitoring Yancey's pro-name campaigning since last year, says there are two criteria generally used to identify natives: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe or "some sort of cultural relevance, such as being brought up in a native environment such as a reservation."
So his claim of being Chiricahua Apache wouldn't fly with the SCIC, either. The greatest and most mythologized Indian warrior of them all, Geronimo, also identified himself as a Chiricahua Apache. But the U.S. government, which captured Geronimo in the late 19th century on the way to committing genocide against his people, no longer recognizes such a tribe. There is now only
a website at ChiricahuaApache.org for a 501(c)(3) organization that offers membership to folks who fill out a form and pay $5 membership fee.Herrod says that he's traced the Yancey family back a few generations and finds lots of African-American blood and some Asian, but no native blood and no branch on the family tree that ever got anywhere near any Indian reservation. Yancey's parents are both listed as alumni of Spingarn High School in Washington D.C., located right across Benning Road NE from the local NFL team's former home, RFK Stadium.
"For all that he says he is, there is not one single tribe that claims him," Herrod says. "Nobody knows who he is. Everything we've found about him and his parents indicates that they identify as African American. As far as I can tell, I think he's read a lot about Indians, but that doesn't make him an Indian."
Zuni is among those who find Yancey's sidling up to the Chiricahua Apache very suspect.
"So now he's claiming to belong not to a tribe, but a 503(c) corporation?" Zuni says. "He's claiming a fucking non-profit? He's making a mockery of us all. How dare he? How fucking dare he?"
....Mark Yancey says he can explain everything.
Mark Yan? "That's just half my last name," he says.
Mark Suzuki? That's just a name he's used professionally for the last few years, starting when he got out of the military and opened his own photography business. "My grandmother's maiden name was Suzuki," he says. "She died before I was born, and I wanted to pay tribute to her." (Yancey's paternal grandfather was named James E. Yancey. The lineage website Ancestry.com does have a 1947 wedding certificate from Yokohama, Japan, for a James E. Yancey and a Yoshimi Suzuki.)
Kram Yecnay? That's Mark Yancey backward.
Mark Yazzie? "Facebook shut down my page as 'Mark OneWolf'.' So I borrowed that from a friend with that name who had a [Facebook] page," he says.
Mark One Wolf? "My mother used to call me 'One Wolf' and 'Lone Wolf,'" he says. "The Apache are a matriarchal society, and she gave that name to me."
Dalaa Ba'Cho? "That's Apache for 'One Wolf' or 'Lone Wolf,'" he says.
He denies trading tribes. "I've always said Chiricahua Apache," he says. "That's what I always heard in my family."
His parents taught him to appreciate native culture by taking him to powwows in the D.C. area as he grew up.
Even if nobody outside of Ashburn is buying his act, Yancey feels secure in the knowledge that "the team is satisfied with my credentials." He knows that Native American groups have looked into his past, and he says it's the "changers," as he calls those wanting to do away with the football team's name, who are behind all the cancellations of his Facebook pages.
...Yancey says, he is not concerned with anybody's failure to verify his tribal affiliation. While a DNA or blood test could quickly determine his lineage, Yancey says he has not taken one nor will he ever take one....
The harshest critic of Yancey's role in the save-the-name fight is somebody on the same side. ReGina Zuni, who is currently running for the tribal council on her Isleta Pueblo reservation, says she became internet friendly with Yancey last year over a shared love of the squad and a desire to keep the name.
Zuni says her grandfather, a former tribal official, got her to love the NFL team with the Indian mascot as a kid, and that love deepened during some years she spent living in the D.C. area. She grew suspicious of One Wolf as she watched him take on new names and tribes as if he were trying on shoes—on top of all the aforementioned affiliations,
Yancey also claimed in a Facebook message to Zuni that his "father has some Shinnecock" in him. Plus, he looked like a totally different guy from one online photo posting to the next. They had a falling out when she confronted him.
"All the names and places he was from and the different stories, and his appearance, I swear it was like the guy was Taliban," Zuni says. "So during one long conversation on the phone, I told him he was going to hurt our credibility if he was lying about his identity. I said, 'Mark, you're a helluva Redskins advocate, but just come clean!' And
he confessed to me he had no native blood."When Yancey wouldn't drop the One Wolf character, she says, she alerted the Redskins that they were using a faux Indian as a spokesmodel in the name battle. "But they wouldn't listen to me," she says. "I can understand cultural appreciation, but I'm going to call out cultural misappropriation! I take what goes on in Indian Country very seriously. He's just a guy who grew his hair long and pressed it like Al Sharpton and threw on some beads and, voila!, a new identity. Who's going to challenge him? He's got dark skin, long hair, and he's wearing turquoise. And fucking Dan Snyder is like: 'Oh, look, we have an Indian!'"
Yancey says he never confessed to being a non-Indian to Zuni.
"Never," he says. "I categorically deny that. I have never admitted to anyone directly or indirectly."
....Yancey admits that he's gotten a few perks via One Wolf's very public defense of the team's name. He says he got an invite to Ashburn to meet with the team president's, Bruce Allen. Yancey posted a selfie he took inside Redskins Park online.
While at headquarters, he says, he talked with Allen about
a children's book Yancey is now hawking. It's called How the Redskins Got Their Name. The 38-page book is available on Blurb, an online clearinghouse for self-published works, for $39.49 plus postage.
