Articles
“Major League Baseball’s Cleveland franchise boasted this week that the team has decided to retire it’s eighty-plus-year old American Indian mascot, Chief Wahoo at the start of the 2019 season. It’s a decision the public and even some Indians are applauding. But it’s nothing more than a corporate sports team’s attempt to appease what the league considers a growing backlash.
In reality, the move allows the team to retain the racist spirit of Chief Wahoo, and to continue to avoid truly reckoning with the damage the mascot has and continues to inflict.
For decades the buck-toothed cartoon mocking this country’s First Peoples has served as the prideful cheerleader for one of baseball’s storied teams. Chief Wahoo goes hand-in-hand with hot dogs and homeruns in Cleveland. No hardcore fans (apparently) imagine their beloved mascot to be a demeaning and dehumanizing image that exploits American Indians.
In 1968, the National Congress of American Indians, an advocacy organization representing 250 tribes, called upon corporations and public institutions to stop using stereotypical names and images deemed offensive to Indian people. Unlike with other racist images such as Little Black Sambo and Frito the Bandito, it has been nearly impossible for Americans to see the harm in such a lovable character as Chief Wahoo, especially since legend has it the Chief was named after Major League Baseball’s first American Indian player, Cleveland Spider’s outfielder, Louis Sockalexis.”
– The Progressive, Going Native: Chief Wahoo and the Lie of Gradualism.
“Chief Wahoo, the grinning, red-faced caricature of a Native American that has served as the Cleveland Indians’ logo for more than 70 years, will be phased out at the end of the 2018 baseball season, a long-expected but politically fraught move that places pressure on the handful of remaining sports franchises that still use Native American imagery and nicknames, most notably the NFL’s Washington Redskins.
The Indians’ change, announced Monday in a statement from Major League Baseball, came at the urging of Commissioner Rob Manfred, who began pressing Indians chief executive and part-owner Paul Dolan nearly a year ago to eliminate Chief Wahoo, the presence of which had become a flashpoint between many fans of the team and advocacy groups that considered it to be racist.
“Major League Baseball is committed to building a culture of diversity and inclusion throughout the game,” Manfred said in his statement. Dolan, he said, “made clear there are fans who have a longstanding attachment to the logo and its place in the history of the team. Nonetheless, the club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use.””
– The Washington Post, Cleveland Indians’ removal of Chief Wahoo reignites debate over controversial nicknames.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #5 – Progress? (Chief Wahoo is Alive.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
