Kevin Gover first objected to the name of Washington’s professional football team in 1973 in a letter to then-owner Edward Bennett Williams.

Williams never acknowledged the letter, Gover recalled recently, admitting that his high-schooler’s passion may have been a bit over the top. “I probably wouldn’t have answered that letter if I’d received it, either,” he said with a rueful smile.

Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation and director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, has since polished his diplomatic skills. But he well remembers the shock he felt moving here from Oklahoma with his family and suddenly encountering the name seemingly everywhere he turned.

“The nastiest thing people ever said to us had become the name of an NFL team? I didn’t comprehend it then, and I don’t now,” Gover said during a visit to The Post last week.

Gover is now in a position to do something about it: not to persuade the imperturbable Dan Snyder, of course, but to help other Americans understand the historical context that makes the name so offensive. And for those of us who think we get that a slur is a slur, who think we know the narrative of white expropriation from Native Americans, Gover wants to show that the history is richer and more complex than we may have been taught.