One longstanding effort to raise awareness and press for a name change has been to petition the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to cancel the team’s trademark registrations. The federal trademark statute (called the Lanham Act) provides that the PTO shall not grant any applications for trademark registration if the registration contains matter that “may disparage … persons, living or dead” or “bring them into contempt or disrepute.” The PTO, however, erroneously registered six of the team’s trademarks between 1967 and 1990 even though the marks contained the word “redskin,” which disparages Native Americans or brings them into contempt or disrepute.

The Lanham Act allows people injured by the use of a trademark to petition the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB, a part of the PTO) to cancel improperly granted registrations. In 1992, Suzan Shown Harjo and a group of Native American leaders filed precisely such a petition. The TTAB ruled in their favor and found that the term “redskin” disparages Native Americans and brings them into contempt or disrepute. However, this holding was reversed on appeal due to a technicality. In 2009, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Ms. Harjo and other petitioners had waited too many years after they reached their 18th birthdays and that their petitions were time-barred.

As a result, a group of younger Native Americans filed a subsequent petition to cancel the trademark registrations. Because of their younger age, their petitions should not be time-barred. These younger Native Americans are members of the Navajo Nation, Paiute Tribe, Omaha Tribe, Kiowa Tribe, and the Muscogee Nation of Florida. This case is currently before the TTAB and is captioned Blackhorse v. Pro-Football, Inc. (Filings in the case are publicly available on the TTAB web site). The TTAB held a hearing on the Blackhorse case in March; the case is now awaiting a ruling by the TTAB.