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As the NFL team found its continued use of the name under attack in 2013, it ignited a public relations effort in which it promoted high schools that also used the name. In 2014, team owner Dan Snyder launched the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, a private charity that supports Native American groups. One of the beneficiaries is Red Mesa High School, a school on an Arizona Navajo reservation that uses the name and has been featured on the foundation’s website.

The franchise has spent at least half a million dollars on a lobbying firm promoting the foundation’s work to Congress since 2014, Capital News Service found. The lobbying effort began around the same time that 50 Democratic U.S. senators signed a letter urging the National Football League to encourage Snyder to change the team’s name.

The NFL team also posted press releases on its website promoting high schools that continued to use the name. One article in February 2013, focusing on Lamar High School in Houston, was titled “Lamar: ‘Once A Redskin, Always A Redskin’” and quoted the school’s football coach as saying, “For this school to be called anything else would seem extremely strange.”

Ironically, at the end of that year, the Houston Independent School District voted to ban schools from using Native American nicknames and mascots. In 2014, Lamar became the Texans.

Tony Wyllie, a senior vice president and the chief spokesman for the NFL team, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the trend of schools dropping the name, the team’s lobbying activities or the work of the Original Americans foundation.

The franchise’s efforts seem to have worked. Since 2013, calls for the NFL team to change its name and national media coverage of the debate have subsided — even as other racially charged issues have moved to the front of national consciousness.

The removal of the nickname at the high school level is just as important to Native American activists as the NFL team’s name, said Suzan Shown Harjo, president of The Morning Star Institute, a native rights advocacy organization.

“With the dreadful name of the Washington NFL franchise that has been shared by many, many schools too, what they’re doing is picking up the very worst thing we can be called in the English language,” Harjo said.

One school that hasn’t changed is Red Mesa, an Arizona school with an overwhelmingly Native American student body and a beneficiary of more than $200,000 in donations from the Original Americans Foundation.

Red Mesa is one of three U.S. schools with majority-Native American student bodies that use the name, Capital News Service found.

The foundation set up a recurring summer football camp for the school beginning in 2015. Retired Washington Redskin players, including kicker Mark Moseley and linebacker Ravin Caldwell, were among “legend” players to serve as instructors at the camps, according to a press release. The foundation held 10 youth football camps across “Indian country” in the summer of 2017, according to its website.

In October 2014, the Washington NFL team played an away game against the Arizona Cardinals. Washington invited local Native Americans to the game as their guests, including students and faculty from Red Mesa High School.

In 2013, Red Mesa’s then-superintendent Tommie Yazzie told Capital News Service that he believed Native American schools like Red Mesa could use the name, but it would be “inappropriate” in an area “where the population is basically white, unless there is a cultural connection.”

But Yazzie, a Navajo, made clear that people on his reservation had greater concerns than white-majority schools using the name.

Yazzie left the job a year and a half ago and Kim Pearce succeeded him as superintendent.

In an interview with Capital News Service last month, Pearce described the relationship between the NFL team and Red Mesa as “friendly,” adding that he didn’t know the full extent of the team’s support for the school.

To his knowledge, the team did not require Red Mesa to keep the name as a condition of support, he said.

The donations Red Mesa received were part of the foundation’s multi-million dollar effort to support Native American groups. The Original Americans Foundation spent $3.7 million in fiscal year 2014, but contributions declined to $1.6 million in 2015, according to IRS records. (Records for fiscal year 2016 were not available at time of publication.)

Though total donations declined, Red Mesa High School’s share of the pie grew between 2014 and 2015. The school accepted more than $215,000 from the foundation in 2015 after receiving just $10,000 the year before.

Foundation representatives did not return several phone calls and emails requesting comment on the decline in contributions between 2014 and 2015, nor did they respond to a request for information about 2016 donations.

“The foundation gave $1.6 million in products and services to Indian lands where the most people can be accommodated,” a foundation spokesman told the Washington Post in April. “As we hone the mission of the foundation, we will continue to try to find areas that have the highest impacts. . . . Sometimes it’s how you give and not how much.”

The foundation promotes its relationship with Red Mesa on its website. The school is the only beneficiary that appears to use the word “Redskins” in an official capacity.

The other Navajo-majority high school the foundation supported, Monument Valley in Utah, goes by the Cougars. The school upgraded its football equipment with the foundation’s grant. A number of tribes and nations, as well as the Utah Division of Indian Affairs and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also accepted donations.

Team owner Dan Snyder created the Original Americans Foundation in March 2014, as the controversy over his team’s use of the name peaked. The foundation works to “provide resources that offer genuine opportunities for Tribal communities,” according to its website.

At its inception, Snyder wrote a letter to the team’s fans saying he had visited 26 Tribal reservations in 20 states and became convinced of the need for the foundation.

“The more I heard, the more I’ve learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community,” Snyder said in his letter. “In speaking face-to-face with Native American leaders and community members, it’s plain to see they need action, not words.”

The creation of the Original Americans Foundation did not quiet detractors of the team’s name. Many Native groups have said they refused to accept money from the foundation, according to the Washington Post. Some groups suggested Snyder’s motives were disingenuous.

“We’re glad that after a decade of owning the Washington team, Mr. Snyder is finally interested in Native American heritage, and we are hopeful that when his team finally stands on the right side of history and changes its name, he will honor the commitments to Native Americans that he is making,” Oneida Indian Nation spokesman Ray Halbritter said in a 2014 statement.

In May 2014, two months after the foundation’s creation, 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to the NFL urging the league to encourage Snyder to change the team’s name.

“The National Football League can no longer ignore this and perpetuate the use of the name as anything but what it is: racial slur,” the letter from the senators said. “It is time for the National Football League to formally support and push for a name change for the Washington football team.”

The team combated that sentiment on Capitol Hill with a lobbying campaign to promote the foundation’s work. Since 2014, the firm McGuireWoods Consulting has lobbied both the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives on the team’s behalf, focusing on “discussions of team origins, history and traditions,” “Washington Redskins Charitable Foundation and youth sports” and “activities of Original Americans Foundation.”

The team spent at least $530,000 on this effort between 2014 and September 2017, according to the congressional lobbying disclosure database.

Wyllie did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the team’s lobbying strategy. McGuireWoods Consulting also could not be reached for comment.

The NFL team also defended the name by dedicating part of the team website — not the foundation’s site — to promoting positive coverage about the use of the name by both the Washington team and by high schools. The section is called “Redskins Pride.”

The home page links to favorable public opinion polls on the topic as well as news articles and op-eds with headlines like “Government Decided that ‘Redskins’ Bothers You” and “Why ‘Redskins’ Is Not a Bad Word.”

The web page’s content does not appear to have been updated since 2014. But when a 2016 Washington Post poll found that nine in 10 Native Americans weren’t offended by the word, Snyder said in a statement that the team was “gratified by this overwhelming support from the Native American community.”

Some Native Americans, like Harjo, question the validity of the Post poll, though. Either way, its results have played a role in quieting down the national discussion, Harjo said.

Snyder also defended the name in court. In response to a complaint lodged by Amanda Blackhorse and four other Native Americans, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceled the NFL team’s trademark of “Redskins” in 2014 under the Lanham Act, which prohibited trademarks that could be viewed as disparaging to any “persons, living or dead.” The team appealed the decision in federal court.

Last June, the Slants, an Asian-American rock band, won a Supreme Court case that overturned the Lanham Act as an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech. The five Native Americans challenging Snyder dropped its case later that month.

The public debate over the NFL team’s name has diminished since 2013, just as discussion of other racial issues have become more prominent in national cultural conversations, from debates over removing statues of Confederate generals to African-American athletes kneeling in protest of police violence to the reenergized white supremacist movement.

This new focus may have taken some of the spotlight away from Native topics like the Washington NFL team’s name, said Joe Watkins, a tribal liaison and anthropologist for the National Park Service, who said he was speaking on his own behalf, not his employer.

“I think American Indian issues have, in many ways, again fallen to the background because of it,” said Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation who previously directed the University of Oklahoma’s Native American Studies program.