On Monday, Washington's NFL team announced that it would change its nickname and logo, which has been long been decried as racist and dehumanizing by Native American advocates.

In short, 2020 is shaping up to be a chapter unlike most others in American history books for Native Americans.

“I see this moment in history as a day of reckoning that Native Americans have known is ahead of us because of what we’ve endured for 20 generations of intergenerational trauma as a result of genocide," said Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, the largest and oldest Native American advocacy organization in the country.

There is some debate over the origin of the word, which may have been used by Native Americans to describe their own people to French traders, but newspapers showed a more sinister use by the 1860s, when the word was used in bounties offered for scalps and skins of slain Indians.

Unaware or unmoved by that history, supporters of the nickname have cited a 2016 Washington Post poll that found 9 out of 10 Native American respondents were "not bothered" by the term.

"This is a wrong that is (being fixed) as a part of the reconciling of America, and I'm glad to be alive to see it," said Green, who played for the team from 1983 to 2002?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a historian and the author of "An Indigenous People's History of the United States," credits Black Lives Matter protesters with including Native American causes.

"Gratitude goes from Native people right now to Black Lives Matter because they have, from the beginning of their founding, had it baked in to their whole process to defend other minorities as well," said Dunbar-Ortiz, herself a veteran activist in the American Indian Movement of the 1970s.

"To us the Washington name change signals the beginning, the first domino to fall that will lead to many more dominos falling," said Sharp, "until we do come to terms as a country with the meaning and the hurt that this activity has inflicted on our communities for generations."