Holding a picket sign with mascots of "the big five" illustrated, with the words 'Native Americans are People and Not Your Mascots', Washburn said, "The name and the imagery is an unintentional celebration of manifest destiny. Logos are trophies. There may not be intent on the fans to be racist - I don't think any of us are real racists - but giving to what we know about history and how many people are unhappy, well, what we're doing as sports fans - I think it's time to change. In the 1920 and 30s, when all this name and imagery came to be, the American public was not widely aware of the genocide of the Native peoples that had been going on for three centuries."
Washburn, along with some American Indian protesters, also confront an angry fan in the video who chants "Keep the logo! Keep the logo!" And another fan, wearing a chicken-feathered headdress and who claims to be one-quarter Apache, said he's at the game to celebrate Indians. He claims he bought the headdress at a Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico.
"You don't believe me, do you?" the elderly, bearded man says to the interviewer.
I was also at this game. Although I had a hard time finding a spot to park my car - I must have parked at least a dozen blocks away from Progressive Field because a flood of fans descended downtown for the opener - some thin 20-ish-looking young man with black-rimmed eyeglasses spotted me wearing a gray tee-shirt emblazoned with an American Indian design on the front, and he yelled at me, "Get out of here, you Dago-Indian-(n-word)!"
I was shocked. "Wow," was about all I could think - and although nothing else of this type of vitriolic fervor came out of my day at Progressive Field, my mind was clouded-up by the young man's comment. I'd never been verbally attacked like this before - with such horrible racist ranting.
Although I wanted to, I chose not to stand with the protesters around Progressive Field. I situated myself fairly far away, but close enough to hear and see the interaction between the protesters and the Cleveland Indians fans walking into the stadium. It was a brisk day and I was wearing a light jacket, so I zipped it up, covering the Indian design on my tee-shirt. I had no interest in getting into an altercation with a mad fan of "the tribe" - what some people in northeastern Ohio call the Cleveland Indians. For the most part, it was a peaceful demonstration and the fans were cordial enough. Most were there to see a baseball game (the Indians lost their home opener to the Tigers 8-4). But there was name calling and some words yelled at the protesters - and the demonstrators carried an array of picket signs and chanted at the fans, as well. I didn't see any arrests and overall, it appeared that the demonstration was successful. I got there late, though, just a few minutes before 4 p.m., and the first pitch was scheduled to be tossed at 4:05 p.m.
I was there to try to get a feel for what was going on - sort of as a news reporter. My only bad experience was with the unkind words a geeky looking kid hurled my way. Looking back, I sort of had to add some dark humor to it all. And this was: The FBI considers anyone who murders three or more people to be a serial killer, and the kid who yelled his racial slur at me covered three ethnicities at once - Italians, American Indians, and African-Americans - with his hot-tempered, nasty, ridiculous comment to me. So I guess according to FBI standards, he is a serial racist. I felt sorry for him a day or two later....One can only feel sympathy for another harboring such racial hatred.
Writer Jacqueline Keeler, who also attended the Cleveland Indians home opener, writes in The Daily Dot: "Many Indians fans identified themselves as belonging to European ethnic groups that are still real, cohesive communities in this shrinking, rust belt city. One told protesters he would be fine with the mascot being changed to a diminutive, buck-toothed Slovak (which he identified as his ethnic group) with "white socks and white shoes," a reference to a local stereotype about Slovaks."
"Peter Pattakos, the Cleveland Frowns blogger who is (a Cleveland-area attorney and a) Greek-American and describes himself as a "Cleveland sports fan, living and dying with these teams for better or worse," dismisses this analogy: 'It's very hard to transpose the context of the immigrant experience to Native Americans who have a very unique history with the United States. They are a group that the U.S. tried to extinguish as a particular race of people. It's a useless comparison.'" Keeler writes.
"Indeed, while each group is subjected to particular prejudices and hardships, Slovaks have widely been embraced by the American melting pot as white. Native Americans continue to be marginalized, years after their land was taken from them and their people decimated," Keeler writes.
"The Indians fans' treatment of the Native American protesters belied not only an ignorance of this history but also a crucial lack of empathy. 'Go back to where you came from!' fans yelled. Those activists have been working to fight the logo since 1968, and were they to look for jobs in today's Cleveland, it's unlikely that they would be welcomed with open arms," Keeler writes.
Well, my father was Czechoslovakian and despite the stereotype above, he was hardly "diminutive", standing over six-foot and weighing more than 200 pounds. He played college football after he returned home from WW-II as an Army paratrooper in the European theater. I remember him - once in a while, anyhow - wearing white socks, but I don't recall that he had any white shoes. He didn't have buck teeth but he had a gold tooth - sort of a war badge from a nasty fight from his younger days. And no, I wouldn't be okay with the Cleveland MLB team adopting this ethnic group as a team name and mascot.
My maternal grandparents, however, just happened to be Indians. They ventured to the north from the south during the Great Depression, when being Native American wasn't a very good thing to be. Neither really had much great zeal about their ethnicity, since Indians weren't respected or treated very kindly back then, either in the north or south. Or probably anywhere else, for that matter. The only time they discussed their ethnicity was during the most dire of times, when there was a family crisis involving a child or grandchild, or during periods of a financial burden. This is what older family members have related to me (my maternal grandfather died before I was born and I was really too young to get to know my maternal grandmother before she passed, as well, so all I have to go on here are accounts from other family members).
I guess I come from an odd ethnic mix. What is, is. And love happens.
Around Cleveland, the consensus of people seem to want to keep Chief Wahoo as their MLB team's official mascot. Two Cleveland-area daily newspapers, The News-Herald and The Morning Journal conducted a telephone survey of what to do with the red-faced, silly smiling face with the lone feather popping up in back of his head. Overall, 230 responses were recorded and some of them featured online by the two dailies include the following:
* "Chief Wahoo should stay as it is. He's part of our tradition. We love him. We honor the Indians by having him."
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