Hail to the Chief

Take me out to the ballgame,

take me out to the crowd.

Buy me some peanuts and a racist mascot hat,

I don’t care about Standing Rock’s pipeline spat.

For its root, root, root for manifest destiny;

If they aren’t treated fair, who cares?

For its one, two, ten thousand treaties we’ve broken

At the old political game.

Outside of family, baseball is my oldest love.  Growing up, I loved hustling out the bunt or tasting dirt after a headfirst slide. I loved Omar Vizquel enough to name a cat after him. I loved The Natural, Field of Dreams, Major League, and later on loved 42 and Moneyball. I loved mowing grass because it reminded me of outfield landscape designs at major league ballparks. 

I loved baseball so much that I went against my cardiologist’s orders and played as a senior in high school, strapping a protective plate over my defibrillator for one more summer in the sun. I loved my team, the Cleveland Indians, more than any amateur or professional sports assembly. 

This past week, Chief Wahoo has been featured for hours and hours of live television and post-game interviews. The red-faced mascot of the Cleveland Indians is everywhere, paraded through Ohio cities on t-shirts and flags and carved pumpkins. 

At the same time as this World Series, a tiny community of Standing Rock Sioux fight to retain confidence that they will be able to drink clean water and therefore live. 

23.6 million people watched game five between the Indians and Cubs on Sunday night. 

8,250 residents live on the Standing Rock Reservation. 

What image of Native Americans do you think prevailed this past weekend? A blatantly racist Chief Wahoo patched onto hats and arm sleeves, or a courageous group fighting for the environment and for their own human dignity against a country that treats them as if they were expendable? 

I grew up ninety miles south of Cleveland, in an area rich with Native American history. A local musical, Trumpet in the Land, annually tells the story of a brutal massacre of 96 peaceful members of the Lenape (Delaware) tribe. But this isn’t the history that filled my life. Instead, I often saw the mascots of other local teams we played in sports—mascots like the red-faced Indian Valley Braves, or the similar mascot of the Coshocton Redskins. 

“We are what we eat,” I was so often told as a child those days. I consumed endless images of racist depictions of Native Americans, from local and professional sports media markets. Such great consumption of these images allowed me to very easily label Native Americans in dehumanizing ways. 

A college summer spent building relationships with the Ojibwe people in Red Lake, MN helped me to vomit up all those consumed images. Yet it is so hard to reject Wahoo when the mascot is everywhere. 

Regardless of whether or not Cleveland wins this series, the world will win if Paul Dolan chooses this winter to rid the team of the chief and to consider an alternative team name. More than that, wouldn’t it be amazing if the front office was able to imagine not just a reactive response to criticism, but instead took steps to stand with Native American communities after years of affirming a racist profile picture for millions to see. 

Cleveland, you have the world’s attention right now after back-to-back seasons of major sports success. The microphone is there, right in front of you, with tens of millions listening. 

You can be a prophet of equality; you can lead the way. 

Seize the moment. 

Speak. Act.

Do it for the next generation of kids who otherwise will experience racism as normal behavior.