Cleveland may turn tide
Team’s decision to change nickname may spark more
Colorful names for teams are nearly as old as team sports themselves.
But as a growing movement aims to right the wrongs of the past, including notable successes with pro sports franchises in Cleveland and Washington recently, it reminds us history hasn’t always been kind — let alone fair — to marginalized groups.
“I don’t know where the momentum is going to go,” said Joshua Hunt, vice chair of The Committee of 500 Years of Dignity & Resistance, whose Cleveland-based organization joined a coalition of Native American activists who convinced the city ’s baseball team to drop “Indians” — first adopted in 1915 — from its name.
“But we’re hoping,” Hunt added, “this will be a blueprint for professional teams like the (Atlanta) Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, (Chicago) Blackhawks and all the thousands of public schools that this is what happens when you take the time to actually listen to indigenous people.”
By now, because of pressure from activists, the public or their corporate sponsors, most sports teams have shed overtly racist names of the past. More than a dozen major college or pro sports teams made the move over the past 50 years.
But a few have clung to Native American names
and imagery, arguing they reflect honor and respect. History says otherwise.
Chariot-racing teams in ancient Rome first adopted colors and symbols — and later names — largely as a practical matter, to distinguish themselves from rivals during the actual events. Over time, though, those identifiers took on added significance. Like nations and religions, they became a marker to strengthen the bonds among followers and separate friends from foes.
But as sports became increasingly popular and profitable at the turn of 20th Century, owners sought to fire up the imaginations of their fans. It hardly helped marginalized groups like Blacks and Native Americans that those owners tended to be rich white men, who found their beliefs in cultural superiority reflected in the accomplishments being notched around the world by America’s growing might.
Many of those owners named their teams Indians, Braves and Redskins at the very moment the United States government was in the final throes of
a largely one-sided battle to take lands from various Indian and First Nations tribes and isolate its people on reservations — attempting to effectively destroy their language and culture.
“It was a learning process for me,” Cleveland team owner Charles Dolan said in an interview with The Associated Press, “and I think when fair-minded, open-minded people really look at it, think about it and maybe even spend some time studying it, I like to think they would come to the same conclusion: It’s a name that had its time, but this is not the time now, and certainly going forward, the name is no longer acceptable in our world.”
But activists argue that there was never an appropriate time, and certainly not when they began to show up.
“Shortly after the socalled ‘Indian Wars’ of the 1880s, that’s when we see sports teams start to use the names on a wide basis,” said Hunt. “It’s almost as if they did it to say, ‘After we defeated them, now we’re going to parade them around.’ ”