The names we won’t use

Having dispensed with the Baltimore Orioles and the Texas Rangers — no problem — the Toronto Blue Jays will face a new foe on Friday in the first game of the American League Championship Series. But as we curse the formidable, speedy baseball club from Cleveland, what should we call them?

Surely not by the team’s name, “the Indians.” As former premier Bob Rae tweeted this week, “Cleveland’s name and logo for their baseball team is so bad we need to beat them for that reason alone. Offensive stereotype.” He and Ontario’s human rights commissioner, Renu Mandhane, are rightly calling on journalists to join them in refusing to utter the name. If such efforts have usually failed to shame teams into changing their ways, they at least avoid amplifying the insult.

Already, several prominent Toronto sportscasters have endorsed the idea. Jerry Howarth, the “voice of the Jays,” says he won’t say the team’s name on air and hasn’t done so in 25 years. After the Blue Jays defeated Atlanta’s baseball team, the Braves, in the1992 World Series, an indigenous fan wrote him a letter explaining how hurtful the team’s name and traditions were. “I haven’t from that point on,” Howarth said. Jamie Campbell, host of Sportsnet’s Blue Jays Central, says he too will refrain.

We on the editorial board are also on board. It has been our newspaper’s long-standing position that the word ought to be avoided. Outside of the sports pages, where clarity sometimes demands it, the Star stopped using the term long ago to refer to anyone other than the citizens of India. We did this not out of blind adherence to linguistic trends or so-called “political correctness,” but out of respect for the many who see it as demeaning, an original symbol of colonial folly. After all, Columbus is said to have coined the term upon reaching North America, believing wrongly he had found the Indian Ocean.

Yet even as we and most others in the media have updated our idea of respectful discourse, the Cleveland baseball team has refused to change its name. Even in the face of annual opening-day protests and an endless stream of far-flung criticism, the organization has insisted that the name represents a proud sports tradition, as if that somehow justifies the hurt caused. Worse still, while the team did retire its crude “Chief Wahoo” mascot in 2013, the gross indigenous caricature can still be seen on its uniforms.

Monikers like Braves, Chiefs or Eskimos are often defended on the grounds that they honour indigenous cultures. “It is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride and respect,” says Dan Snyder, the recalcitrant owner of the Washington football team appallingly known as the Redskins.

But as the Star has written before on this issue, an honour should inspire pride in the honoured, not pain or anger. Nor should it reduce nearly 600 distinct nations to one crude stereotype. These names and symbols are relics of a time when indigenous people were widely held up as either noble savages or subjects of ridicule. First Nations sports fans should be allowed to enjoy the game without being confronted by symbols of historical oppression and persistent racism.

To print these names without acknowledging their offence is to be complicit in the disrespect they show. They have no place on the Star’s editorial page, unless used to illustrate their ugliness and urge their extinction.

Even as we and most others in the media have updated our idea of respectful discourse, the Cleveland baseball team has refused to change its name