By Matt Sepic

MPR (90.1) News

When football fans arrive Sunday at University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium for the Minnesota Vikings game against the franchise from Washington, D.C., they’ll likely see just as much passion outside its gates.

Anyone going to the stadium will pass Tribal Nations Plaza, where 18-foot high monuments honor each of Minnesota’s 11 Indian tribes. Before the game, Native Americans and others hope to use the monuments as a backdrop to their protest against the Washington team’s nickname.

With a $1 billion stadium still under construction across the river in downtown Minneapolis, the Vikings are playing all their home games this season and next at TCF Bank Stadium. That set up the inevitable friction over the visiting team’s name.

In Minnesota, a state with more than 100,000 people of Native American ancestry, many say the term “Redskins” is a racial slur that insults and trivializes their culture. Outraged that the D.C. team has refused to drop the name, Indian protest leaders plan the largest demonstration ever against it.

“To come here, they’re seeing the power of our voices here in this place,” said Vanessa Goodthunder, a member of the university’s American Indian Student Cultural Center.

Goodthunder, 20, opposes Native American team names and mascots in general, but she said the Washington team’s moniker, which dictionaries define as a slur, is particularly nasty.

For Goodthunder, a member of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwest Minnesota – one of four Dakota tribes in the state – the name is a painful reminder. A century and a half ago, she said, the federal government used the word “Redskin” in advertisements offering bounties for killing her ancestors.

“As a Dakota person, that’s definitely not what I’d like to be called, because we have never called ourselves that,” she said.