We don’t mean to rub salt in the wound of Cleveland’s loss of the World Series, but it is time for the baseball team there to change its mascot and its name.
When the Chicago Cubs beat Cleveland last week to win its first World Series since 1908, it ended Major League Baseball’s longest championship drought and what was know as the curse of the Billy Goat.
Now it’s the Cleveland Indians team that has gone the longest — 68 years — without a championship. They are under the curse, some say, of Chief Wahoo, the cartoonish and offensive character that first appeared as Cleveland’s mascot in 1948, the last time the team won the World Series.
Curse or not, it is time to consign Chief Wahoo to the trash heap of mascots that represent an era of mockery and prejudice. Like schools across Maine and the country, the team should change its name as well.
The team’s defense of Chief Wahoo is increasingly flimsy. “When people look at Chief Wahoo, they think baseball,” Bob DiBiasio, the team’s spokesman, told Cleveland Scene in 2012.
Increasingly, however, the team is using other logos to get their fans to “think baseball.” When the team moved to a new ballpark in 1994, a large statue of the mascot was left behind. Baseball caps with a large “C” on the front are replacing those featuring Chief Wahoo, and other team merchandise is emblazoned with a scripted “I” rather than Wahoo. Most telling, there are few sightings of Chief Wahoo at the team’s spring training ground in Arizona, home to a much larger Native American population than Ohio.
And while we understand that the team’s management can’t control its fans, seeing Cleveland fans in red face paint and feather headdresses is especially jarring. Such costumes don’t conjure respect; they are just offensive.
“The use of Chief Wahoo — essentially a red-faced Sambo figure, no different than the horrific blackface visages that were commonplace in the 19th century — normalizes racist attitudes toward American Indians,” Jon Tayler wrote in a powerful Sports Illustrated essay last month, calling for the end of Chief Wahoo. “It dehumanizes a group of people who have, since the first days of colonization and Western exploration, been brutalized and marginalized with unimaginable cruelty. It reduces American Indians to the level of a cartoon — an insulting depiction created by a white man in the service of another white man at a time of legalized racial segregation in the United States. It trivializes the history of an entire people.”
This same logic applies to the team’s name.
In the early 1900s, Cleveland’s professional baseball team was called the Napoleons (shortened to Naps) after the team’s star Nap Lajoie. When Lajoie was sold to the Philadelphia Athletics in 1914, the team again needed a new name. Local baseball writers suggested Indians.
From the beginning, the name didn’t conjure respect for Native Americans.
“In place of the Naps, we’ll have the Indians, on the warpath all the time, and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts,” the Cleveland Leader wrote in announcing the name change in 1915.
Decades later, the team defended the name by saying it honored Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot from Indian Island who was the first known Native American to play professional baseball. He played for the Cleveland Spiders.
“Sadly, the Cleveland professional baseball team only uses the story of Sockalexis to attempt to justify its use of the nickname and the racist image, Chief Wahoo,” Ed Rice of Orono, the author of “Baseball’s First Indian, Louis Sockalexis: Penobscot Legend, Cleveland Indian,” wrote in a recent BDN column.
It is time for Cleveland and Major League Baseball to end this shameless charade.
