Campaign Action
It’s that time of year again: The World Series of baseball. For some fans, it’s the most exciting event in all of sports. And this year it will be the Chicago Cubs, who have only seen the series from the stadium bleachers since 1945 and haven’t won since 1908, and the Cleveland Indians, who won the series in 1948, losing in 1954, 1995, and 1997.
It’s a dream contest for sports writers and fans alike, two long-standing underdogs pitted against each other for the title of champion of The Big Show.
For some Americans, however, the fun is going to be at least partly spoiled by the Cleveland team’s stubborn defiance in continuing to display their vile racist logo, a caricature of an American Indian, Little Red Sambo Chief Wahoo. Although Cleveland adopted the name of the team 101 years ago, a cartoonish depiction of an “Indian” mascot with yellow skin emerged more than 80 years ago. This was reengineered in the late ‘40s and soon everybody was calling him Chief Wahoo. In 1951, the caricature was tweaked again, this time with red skin. Since then, it’s been rejiggered only slightly.
As usual, those who say there’s nothing wrong with the caricature, from the owner to the fans who show up at the games painted in garish red face and woo-woo-whooping, it’s supposedly all about respect and honor of America’s Native peoples. This would be laughable if it weren’t so moronic. Chief Wahoo epitomizes the disrespect engendered by Indian mascots and logos. If the series goes the full seven games, it will overlap with November’s Native American Heritage Month. What a fabulous way to kick that off.
As usual, there will be those who say American Indians and others who think the Chief Wahoo logo and the Washington R*dsk*ns nickname ought to be dumped in a landfill should focus on Indian-related issues that “really matter.” Uh huh. As if we don’t already multitask. Where are those critics when it comes to actually raising such issues—like the horrendous rate of cops killing Indians, or the continuing violation of treaties that are supposed to have been the law of the land for at least the past 135 years? They’re AWOL.
And, as usual, enterprising PR operators will trot out some Indian or pretendian to claim that the name and logo don’t bother him and that all the protesters are just looking for attention. Throughout American history, the protesters have been called “renegades” and the go-alongs have been called “the good Indians.”
Three years ago, it appeared Cleveland was wising up and going to phase out Chief Wahoo. No such luck. The team has options, but the players have worn caps with the logo during all of the post-season games this year, including the playoffs against Toronto. In fact, there was an attempt to get the Canadian courts to block the use of the team’s nickname and logo, but a judge said he couldn’t do that. The Lakota writer Sheena Louise Roetman wrote at Indian Country Today:
On Friday, the Toronto Star reported that at least two prominent First Nations chiefs had publicly spoken out against the use of the nickname and logo, including Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Patrick Madahbee and Stacey Laforme, chief of Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.
Earlier this year, owner Paul Dolan made it clear to the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "[We have] no plans to get rid of Chief Wahoo. It is part of our history and legacy.”
Most of the Indians who used to live in Ohio—the Erie, the Shawnee, and the Kickapoo who were there before Europeans arrived, and the Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, Seneca and Miami, who were pushed there following the European "Discovery”—were obliterated, with the survivors forcibly removed in the 1830s to what later became Oklahoma. Their descendants still live there, together with a dozen other tribes similarly displaced at gunpoint.
The claim that Indians were being honored by having Chief Wahoo representing us clashes with how Louis Sockalexis—the first actual Indian (Penobscot) on the Cleveland team when the name was chosen in 1915—was treated: Fans threw garbage at him when he stepped up to bat. They war-whooped. That's the real legacy.
And today, we have similar behavior. Fans war-whooping, red-facing, and sometimes doing the full stereotyped bit, showing up in faux buckskins and faux headdresses, the likes of which no real Indian who lived in or near Cleveland ever wore.
Those people in 1915 had an excuse. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which used real Indians to depict fake Indians, had only ended a couple of years before. Geronimo and Red Cloud, once fierce leaders of the indigenous resistance, had died in 1909 but many lesser known war chiefs were still alive. And 1915 was the year the deeply racist Birth of a Nation, shown in the White House to the reported delight of Woodrow Wilson, helped resurrect the Ku Klux Klan.
But what’s the excuse for this offensive behavior a century later?
A year ago, when more than 50 Native Americans began showing up at the gates to the Cleveland team’s home games, Philip Yenyo (Aztec/Mexica), executive director of the American Indian Movement of Ohio, had an answer for the claims of legacy:
“All we hear is that this is the team’s tradition, and it is that way because it has always been that way,” he said. “Their reason we have it is because we always have. That’s not good enough.”
“But I think our people and others have come to realize that this caricature of our people as a red-face, smiling savage does great harm to us and our culture and has done so for many years,” Yenyo said. “Think of it this way: if this team was called the Cleveland African-Americans, would the country permit them to have as their logo, Little Black Sambo? How many people do you think would be out here protesting that?”
In a clip below from the April 7, 2013, Moyers & Company show, Bill Moyers interviewed writer Sherman Alexie, who was born on the Spokane Reservation in Washington. His Native heritage includes the Coeur d’Alene Indians on his father’s side, and Colville, Choctaw, Spokane, and European on his mother’s side. A transcript follows the video:
BILL MOYERS: What is it like to be an alien in the land of your birth?
SHERMAN ALEXIE: I mean, it’s a destructive feeling. because you know a lot of Native culture has been destroyed, so you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared.
And to never be recognized, to never have any power … you know, other minority communities actually have an awful lot of economic, cultural power. But we don’t, you know, not at all. You can still have the Washington Redskins, you know, you can still have the Atlanta Braves and, and the Cleveland Indians, which is by far the worst. And if you look at Chief Wahoo on their hats and put Sambo next to him, it’s the same thing.
And you could never have Sambo anymore. Most of, you know, at least half the country thinks the mascot issue is insignificant but I think it's indicative of the ways in which Indians have no cultural power. We're still placed in the past. So we're either in the past or we're only viewed through casinos.
MOYERS: Do you feel shoved back into that tight space, that closet, even by the questions I ask about Indians, Natives, and reservations and all of that?
ALEXIE: Uh, sometimes, but I'm, you know, it's who I am, so I have no issue about talking about it. You know, I know a lot more about being white that you know about being Indian.
Obviously, there’s no easy solution to everything Alexie talks about in the short clip or the rest of that 40-minute interview.
But there is an easy answer to the Cleveland situation. For the World Series, the team could just not wear the Chief Wahoo caps. They have other choices. The fans could choose not to show up in red face or feathers like a bunch of Little Red Sambos. They could cheer, but, not with wah-wah-wahs.
In the long run, Cleveland should stick with Slider, the fantastical fuchsia creature that is the team mascot and return to the name of the city’s major league team from the 1880s and ‘90s: the Cleveland Spiders. Maybe that name would finally bring them the kind of year they had in 1948.