When I was a kid, I didn't pay too much attention to Chief Wahoo.
I was a Detroit Tiger fan. I grew up in a town that was almost exactly halfway between Detroit and Cleveland, and since we got Tiger games on television I began following the Tigers. But my cousins, who lived closer to Cleveland than to Detroit, always followed the Indians and sometimes even went to their games.
I never thought a whole lot about the whole issue of whether the name "Indians" or the Chief Wahoo logo insulted or demeaned the Native Americans or anything like that. Not even after I found out that I was part Native American myself. (My Indian ancestry is only about one sixty-fourth of my family tree, as it turned out. I weigh 190 pounds, so about three pounds of my weight is Native American.)
I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and as much as I hate all this political correctness garbage, I've got to say:
Chief Wahoo has got to go.
Mind you, I've got no problem with calling the team the "Indians". The Cleveland team was called the Blues when they joined the American League in 1901. They were called the Bronchos in 1902 and the Naps (after star player Napoleon Lajoie) from 1903 to 1914, when Lajoie left the team. In January 1915 the team held a contest to select a new name; the winner was "Indians" in honor of Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot from Maine who played for the Cleveland Spiders in the National League in the 1890s.
It wasn't till the 1940s that the team used a cartoonish Indian character on their uniforms. The first one was really offensive; he looked like one of those dimwitted boobs chasing Bugs Bunny around in the early Warner Brothers cartoons. As far as I can tell, the present Chief Wahoo showed up in about 1950 or so. He wasn't much of an improvement. This grinning, big-toothed, Day-Glo red character "looks like he's drinking Ripple out of a bag," says Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto.
Let me give you an example. Suppose that we were the minority, and the local sports team decided to call their club the Whiteguys. They want to call the team the Whiteguys to honor the courage and bravery of white people. That's OK; that doesn't sound insulting or anything. We're guys, and we're white. No problem so far.
Then, suppose that they decided to make a "character" to represent the team. Whom do they choose? Do they make the character resemble Thomas Edison, or George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln? Or Chuck Yeager or Neil Armstrong or Charles Lindbergh?
No. They choose Curly from the Three Stooges.
Then, everybody at the games goes "whoop, whoop, whoop" all the time and runs around poking each other in the eyes with their fingers because "that's what those people do, isn't it?"
Here's what I think. A few people think that the name "Indians" itself is derogatory, but the team says that they chose the name to honor the Native Americans for their bravery and courage in battle. I'd balk at "Redskins", but "Indians" is OK by me. My suggestion is to keep the name and change the character.
The University of Illinois took the name "Fighting Illini" in the 1920s. They have a Native American symbol that looks like this:
Why can't the Cleveland team use something that looks more like this?
I've got another suggestion, since I'm just full of them today. Why not put the script "I" from the front of the uniforms on their caps instead of that grinning, stereotypical idiot?