09/22/2025
Two Guns White Calf: Red Paint, Resistance, and the Survival of the Sacred Dances
As D.C. leaders prepare to vote on the future of the RFK Stadium site on Wednesday - which is Constitution Day - they should dedicate funding for a permanent tribute to Blackfeet leader John Two Guns White Calf at the new stadium complex.
His likeness once represented Washington’s NFL team, yet few know that his father died in the capital fighting for Native rights—or that his son, John Two Guns, later carried on this mission in Washington as well, pressing for treaty rights and religious freedom. Honoring them at the very place where the franchise hopes to build its future would mark a long-overdue act of historical justice—and here’s why.
It Takes All of Us
Only a handful of North American tribes rooted their creation in a Sun God and survived during this time, with just 8–12% of U.S. tribes practicing such rituals. The Blackfeet were among them, their ceremonial life centered on Natosi, the Sun God, with both warriors and worshipers painting their faces and bodies in red vermilion as acts of devotion. This color, later misread as a slur, once signified sacred obligation and spiritual power.
Consider the Beothuk and the Natchez, long-eradicated tribes who both painted their bodies in sacred red as they honored their Sun Gods. They were ultimately erased as distinct nations—the Beothuk through targeted colonial persecution, and the Natchez through forced dispersal and absorption into other tribes. The Blackfeet narrowly escaped the same fate: painting one’s body in red vermilion as an offering to Natosi became a crime on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border.
In 1856, the Blackfeet signed the Lame Bull Treaty with the U.S., ceding millions of acres in exchange for “perpetual peace” and rations—including 500 pounds of vermilion paint annually. Yet by 1888, the very paint that symbolized both warriorhood and Sun worship was suddenly outlawed under the Code of Indian Offenses: “The sun-dance, the scalp-dance, the war-dance … shall be considered Indian offenses … punished by withholding rations or imprisonment.” For over 40 years this decree severed spiritual life. Dancers and leaders were fined, cut off from food, or jailed.
For a time, however, the Blackfeet and their northern relatives had freely practiced what could be called “red-skinism.” The Blood band of the Blackfoot Confederacy, named for their heavy use of vermilion paint in Sun ceremonies, were actually supplied by the appropriately named Fort Vermilion in Canada. To them, the red skin was a sacred and proud identity where 90% of modern Natives - as surveyed by the Washington Post in 2016 - agreed. The paint on their faces and bodies marked warriors as consecrated to Natosi, radiant in both war and worship - HTTR!
End Racism
By the 1890s, as these bans deepened, several Plains nations began petitioning for the restoration of their spiritual ceremonies. The Lakota appealed, the Cheyenne sought recognition of their rites as religious, the Kiowa filed petitions, and the Blackfeet and Crow pressed for their own ceremonies.
It was into this climate that Chief Two Guns White Calf the elder, last war chief of the Blackfeet, journeyed from the Montana plains to D.C. to defend his people’s treaty rights and sacred spiritual ceremonies. He appeared in traditional garb despite pre-visit pressure to wear “modern” clothing—and died there, only five miles from the future RFK Stadium site. He passed just as penalties for paint and ceremonies would soon increase—likely in rebuke of those tribes continuing to resist the bans.
By 1907—confident in their total victory—the U.S. Army was issuing “Indian Wars” medals, the only U.S. campaign medal depicting a specific enemy: a war-bonneted, spear-carrying, horse-riding Native warrior. With its blood-red ribbon, the medal cast the destruction of Redskin resistance as a fait accompli—the final act of a completed conquest. It commemorated decades of wars fought to break Sun-worshiping tribes’ resistance and erase ceremonial life.
Yet leaders resisted. Wades In The Water, among the last Blackfeet to take a scalp, for instance, continued to share warrior traditions despite the bans. Historian John C. Ewers noted the “rough-and-ready redskins” as among the fiercest elite and spiritually connected warriors, unwilling to surrender culture.
Inspire Change
John Two Guns White Calf embodied that same defiance. In 1913, his likeness was immortalized on the Buffalo Nickel—the first Native leader, and arguably the first marginalized figure in America, to appear on U.S. coinage. He made repeated journeys to D.C. in the 1920s and ’30s, pressing for treaty rights and religious freedom at immense personal and communal cost.
Dressed in traditional garb and often painted, he led one of the nation’s most heroic counter-assimilation campaigns. The NFL Commanders’ own 2005 Media Guide acknowledged that the term “Redskin” originated from the use of sacred vermilion paint by spiritually connected warriors—an identity Two Guns White Calf and his Blackfeet ancestors embodied.
He died in 1934. At his funeral, worshipers openly prayed to Natosi, defying federal bans still on the books. The Brooklyn Times Union reported: “The wails of squaws and the plaintive intonation of prayers to Natos, the Sun God, were heard among the Blackfeet …”
Only weeks later, perhaps in response to the national news, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier issued Circular 2970: “The cultural liberty of Indians is to be encouraged. No interference with Indian religious life or ceremonial expression will hereafter be tolerated.” The bans collapsed, and ceremonies once again spread across the Plains—just three years before the NFL’s Redskins made their home in D.C.
Choose Love
As D.C. leaders decide the fate of the RFK Stadium site, they should fund a permanent tribute to Chief Two Guns White Calf and his son at the new complex—a place where their story can be told in full. Their defiance preserved one of North America’s rarest spiritual traditions and helped end decades of federal bans. Honoring them now would not only correct the record, but ensure that the legacy of the Blackfeet “Redskins” endures where they once stood and fought for their people’s survival.
Stop Hate
For Sun-worshipping tribes, elevating Blackfeet “Redskin” history (“braves on the warpath”) into NFL representation was not stereotyping but survival—broadcasting warrior traditions to millions of fans each week. Today, due in part to the White Calf family, spiritual ceremonies thrive. In 2025 alone, they were held from the Shoshone-Bannock at Fort Hall to the Oglala in the Black Hills. Each engagement affirms a legacy of sacrifice, spiritual continuity not to mention an exercise of the Constitution’s 1st and 14th Amendments.
As Ewers wrote: “By the middle of the nineteenth century the sun dance was the great tribal religious festival of the Blackfeet. … It was modified and adjusted to their own ceremonial pattern.” That distinction still holds. The ceremonies once driven underground now rise each year under Montana’s skies—proof that the spirit of Two Guns White Calf remains alive.
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