I am so in favor of the name change of the Cleveland Indians to The Cleveland Guardians. However, on a personal level, I want to bid them a fond farewell. You were part and parcel of saving my life. I could not have survived my adolescence without you.
I grew up on a farm in Missouri with family, friends and neighbors being diehard St Louis Cardinal baseball fans. Supporting another team was blasphemy. Nobody did it. Nobody, except me. I supported the Cleveland Indians. It gets worse; I worshiped a team that, back in the 1950’s, were almost always in the gutter. I still remember a classmate chiding me for choosing a “losing team named after a loser race.” I told him I wanted to support the underdogs but nothing could be further from the truth. The Cleveland Indians were my heroes, because unbeknownst to them (or anyone else for that matter), I belonged to their tribe. It was the concrete way I manifested my supposed ancestral “Indianness.”
They helped sustain me through an unhappy, troubled childhood. Growing up I grasped at any heroes to hold onto my sanity. In fact, ‘being Indian’ helped me to ignore my ‘town drunk’ alcoholic father and, escape and ultimately survive, an abusive religious-fanatical step-dad. I was convinced, he was trying to kill me (In retrospect, as an adult, probably not kill me, but he did enjoy beating the shit out of me in order to put the fear of God into me). I survived his terrifying assaults, by becoming the Indian that my mama claimed we were. Believe me, trauma-wise, when you are a small, defenseless child, every little bit helps. Had I not adopted “being an Indian” I would not be here to tell this story. And the Cleveland Indians are part of that story.
It mattered not that, many years later with the advent of DNA Ancestry tracers, I had no Indian blood whatsoever.
My Mama, from earliest memory, told us we had Indian blood from her Great, Granny Ida. She had a faded picture of Granny Ida with black braided hair, sitting on a very rustic front porch of a log cabin smoking a long-stemmed, corn-cobb pipe. The family myth had it that a male ancestor went down to Oklahoma and rescued her from the Trail of Tears when the Cherokee Nation was forced from Kentucky in the dead of winter to a new home in Oklahoma. Thousands died on that trek. Had I seen that picture of Granny Ida, free of bias, I would probably have just seen a pioneer woman in a rustic environment, but I saw that picture as confirmation of Indian blood.
Years later, again through DNA Ancestry research, turns out Great Granny Ida was full-blooded German.
I was a frightened little child who just wanted (needed) to be protected and loved and I got thrown under the same roof with a monster. I escaped the brutal civilized world by going to the gentle native habitat. I took to the woods—Indian territory. My life-sustaining refuge. I spent every waking hour—apart from chores—in the woods. I knew, although I don’t know how, my step-dad was afraid of the forest. Snakes, possums, lizards, deer, turtles, catfish, water fowl, and of course ‘fanged’ frogs (frogs spoke to me, sharing their croaky wisdom) were my friends and companions. Wild animals were pagan demons to my step-dad, god-sends to me.
I had two dogs, Tykie and Sam, that were my constant companions. Summers I got to sleep out in the barn on a bed of straw with my pooches. Unbeknownst to Mama half the time we were supposed to be sleeping in the barn we were down in the woods in a lean-to shelter I had built myself. To this day, I have never felt more safe than sleeping under a starry sky in a makeshift lean-to with my mutts by my side. Also, by my side I wielded an Ol’ Granddad pocket knife, a razor sharp hatchet and homemade bow n arrows; the bows made out of hickory wood, the arrows out of dog wood. The fletching, chicken or pigeon feathers. The points; folded, crimped, shaped and sharpened tin can lids. I brought home more rabbits and squirrels for the table with homemade bow n arrows than most of my contemporaries ever did with their tailor-made rifles and shotguns.
When I was twelve, we moved away from the farm and woods and Indianhood, but alas, the dye was cast. Although I began to suspect, even in my teens, that I had no Indian ancestry, and later proved by DNA testing, two things would stick with me; I always gravitated toward the forest and natural world (I became an environmentalist), and I never lost my love of the Cleveland Indians.
Somewhere in my adulthood, I realized the deep forest is where I felt safest. In other words, my home. I have now been living in “my home” permanently for the last fifteen years.
And now, just as the bows n arrows and pigeon fletchings of my youth have passed, so too have the Cleveland Indians. Both cherished, and both to remain on nodding acquaintances with me for the rest of my life. RIP old friends, I couldn’t have done it without you.