Rob Roche protesting the Cleveland Indians Chief Wahoo
Major
League baseball is a game of hallowed traditions. For the
Cleveland Indians, the traditional throwing out of the first
pitch every season is accompanied by a few other time-honored
rituals, which include throwing out insults to Native Americans,
some of whom come to the team’s stadium each spring to protest
the team’s name and its cartoonish logo and mascot, Chief Wahoo.
“We’re going to hold up signs, get ridiculed for about two hours
and then we’re going to go home,” Sundance, the director of
Cleveland AIM, told Akron News Now before this year’s
demonstration.
Those Native American protestors who gather at the ironically
named Progressive Field—some of them members of the Cleveland
American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Committee of 500
Years of Dignity and Resistance—have not been met with open arms
or friendly words. Cleveland’s
baseball fans have hurled beer cans and spat on them. The
protesters have been called stupid and “Custer-killers”—although
it’s not absolutely clear whether that last description is an
insult or a compliment. Cleveland AIM calls the use of the Chief
Wahoo mascot “bigoted, racist and shameful,” and the Committee
of 500 complains that the logo is a negative stereotype against
indigenous people.
Supporters of the Cleveland Indians insist that the team’s
name and the logo bring honor to American Indians, and heighten
awareness to the plight of Native people across the nation. The
Cleveland Indians organization did not return calls from ICTMN
seeking comment on this issue, but in an April 4 story about the
controversy, team spokesman Bob DiBiasio told the Cleveland
Plain Dealer that he respects the opinions of the
protesters, but as to whether the team symbols are racist or
not, he said “it is an individual perception issue… When people
look at our logo, we believe they think baseball.”
Sundance reports that things can get pretty tense outside the
gates of the Cleveland stadium on Opening Day. “We have been
actively protesting at the stadium since 1973,” he says, adding
that the Cleveland AIM was, “formed in 1972 and in that same
year we filed a lawsuit against Cleveland baseball for slander
and libel… Obviously it was unsuccessful, because we are still
standing out there today.”
He says the anti-Wahoo protestors are often joined by members
of the Native organization known as The Peacekeepers, who stand
as a human barrier to protect them from an often unruly and
inebriated crowd. “There were a couple of years in the recent
past when The Peacekeepers were not there. In one of those years
there was an assault,” he says. “The young gentleman who was
assaulted came as a bystander… He had a video camera and was
doing a project for a class.”
Robert Roche, Chiricahua Apache, the Executive Director of
the
Cleveland American Indian Education Center, and a former
director of Cleveland AIM, also witnessed this ugly incident.
“He was a white student from Cleveland State, and an Iraq War
vet. He was filming the demonstration and we noticed one guy
standing behind us. When you are at these demonstrations, you
try to remain alert because you never know what might happen.
The student was just standing there, asking questions… This guy
assumed the student was with us and punched him in the mouth.”
“It was shocking that the police arrested the guy—We have had
altercations throughout the years, and the police have never
done anything. But it was a white guy hitting a white guy [this
time].”
Roche has been coming to the Opening Day protests at the
Cleveland ballpark since 1973. (He also claims to be the first
person to publicly burn in effigy an image of the Chief Wahoo
logo.) “When we had demonstrations at the old Cleveland Indians
Stadium there were always chances for physical altercations,” he
says. “People used to throw beer cans at us; they would spit on
the women and spit on the kids. They always seemed to pick on
the little kids and the women. I used to get in the middle of it
to try and defuse the situation but [the police] barricaded us
so it would be harder for the fans to get to us.”
Roche says he has been taken to police headquarters many
times after a demonstration, but never arrested. “I told them to
arrest me, they wouldn’t do it,” he says. “If they arrested me
it would bring unnecessary publicity to them. They’ve always
reprimanded me and let me go.”
Ferne Clements is the Secretary and Interim Chair of the
Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance, a
Native-friendly multi-cultural organization dedicated to
enhancing and protecting the cultural human rights and heritage
rights of indigenous people living in Northeast Ohio. Though
Clements is not of Native descent, she is a strong advocate
against the use of the Cleveland Indians name and logo. “The
logo is a negative stereotype against indigenous people,” she
says. “What is sacred to the indigenous people is made a mockery
of. If there was an African-American logo similar to a black
Sambo, or if it was a Jewish character, it would not have lasted
this long.”
Clements has been coming out for Opening Day for 20 years.
“There are a lot of verbal incidents. The older generation
will sit there, glare at us and tell us to get a life. The
younger, they will make the wahoo sound, and will yell and
holler at us.”There are some baseball fans that defend the team,
and denounce racism. One gentleman recently wrote a letter to
the Plain Dealer arguing that the Cleveland Indians name and
Chief Wahoo logo were meant to honor American Indians. In his
letter, he wrote, “The name and mascot of the Cleveland Indians
inspire positive recognition of this country’s priceless Native
Americans. The names and symbols being protested conjure
appreciation of such qualities as strength, endurance, prowess,
fairness and cohesion in competition. Any team that embodies
these is certainly formidable in the ballpark, just as tribes
and nations of Native Americans are.
“As an Indians fan, I find Chief Wahoo and the nickname Tribe
a homage to heroics as well. Although baseball is not war, I
cannot help but be reminded of the
Pima Indian who raised the flag on Iwo Jima or, more
recently, a member of the Hopi tribe, Spc. Lori Ann Piestewa,
who was the first woman killed in the Iraq War and the first
Native American woman to die in combat while serving with the
U.S. military.
Native Americans are uniquely American. So is baseball. There
is no slur here. There is full recognition that such Americans
are an indelible part of America’s persona and heritage,” he
wrote.
Clements has a short and pungent rebuttal: “That is crap,”
she says. “They were trying to say the team honors Louis
Sockalexis [one of, if not the first indigenous players in the
major leagues] yet Sockalexis was never mentioned when the team
name was changed to the Indians. We looked into the archives of
the newspapers during that time and there was no mention of
honoring Louis Sockalexis.”
Sockalexis was one of a handful of Native Americans to play
professional baseball in its early days. He signed with a
precursor of the current team, the Cleveland Spiders, in 1897,
but only lasted two years. The team’s name was changed to
“Indians” in 1915, the year after the Boston Braves won the
World Series.
Ellen Staurowsky, a Drexel University professor who has
researched the role of race in sports, wrote about the Cleveland
team chose the name “Indians” in a 1998 journal article for The
Sociology of Sport. She also wrote about Sockalexis, citing an
1897 newspaper that said he was sometimes taunted by fans
because of his heritage.
Staurowsky, who says she has observed some of the protests
outside the Cleveland ballpark, notes that the racist behavior
of fans from over 100 years ago lives on. “I’ve always found it
compelling that the club has claimed that the whole purpose of
the naming is to honor an American Indian, and the behavior of
the fans when they’re confronted with actual American Indians
protesting is quite contrary to honor,” she told CNN’s Stephanie
Siek. “The fact that this has been going on for years and the
behavior essentially hasn’t changed speaks to a level of racism
that is so very difficult to eradicate.”
“You cannot honor people you do not respect,” Sundance
argues. “As a people, we demand dignity. We are not asking for
honor. When a native person stands up and says, ‘Hey this is not
right; no one gave you the right to use our pseudo-name,
category or images,’ people say, ‘Shut up and listen. We are
honoring you. You are too stupid to understand this.’
“We are not too stupid to understand what is going on. We
have seen Indian heads used to dehumanize us and to put out a
call for mass-murder against us for the past 500 years. To see a
bunch of drunken people with Indian heads shouting slurs and
chanting ‘Go Indians!’ is not an honorable environment and it is
not an honorable experience.”
Roche makes another point about this so-called honorific:
“When you honor somebody, you really might want to get their
approval. That is not happening. The problem is that people have
been brought up generation after generation, being told that
Native Americans are being honored. But they have never heard
our side of it.”
There has been some talk of “retiring” Chief Wahoo, but that
will not silence the protests. Clements, Sundance and Roche
agree that the only right thing for the Cleveland Indians to do
is to change their name and their logo. “The Cleveland baseball
team needs to change the team name and logo to something that
does not reference native people,” says Sundance.
“If they change the logo and not the name, it would not
change anything whatsoever,” says Clements, who points out that
the tide is clearly turning, albeit slowly, on this issue—many
schools and universities are changing logos that are
disrespectful to Native Americans.
Roche has an intriguing incentive for the team to make the
switch, one that might win over even the most racist Cleveland
fan. If they change their name and logo, he says, they might
make history by doing something no Cleveland baseball team has
ever done: win a World Series. “Russell Means himself put a
curse on the team [in ‘96],” explains Roche. “[We believe] the
new stadium was built on Indian burial grounds, [so] they are
never going to win the World Series. Never.”
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