Today, Explained - Chief Wahoo Strikes Out

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

It’s Opening Day — peanuts, cracker jack, and for some, racism. Sundance, a Native American activist, has been protesting the Cleveland Indians mascot, Chief Wahoo, for years. The team recently announced it would be removing the caricature from its uniforms, but Sundance tells Sean Rameswaram that his fight is long from over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to our podcast. Now, let me tell you about another one. It's called the Google Cloud Platform Weekly Podcast. It's where you can learn more about the cloud. Check it out at g.co slash gcppodcast. 100 years of racism is enough in Cleveland, Ohio. Change the name of your baseball team and change the logo. I love Chief Wahoo. I don't want him to go away. So I want to support the cause for keeping the chief.

I root for the Indians. The mascot is Chief Wahoo. Whether you guys like it or not, it's going to stay. Opening day. We are Native people and our allies standing usually under the trees. There's a statue near us, one of the local pictures. We usually are out there two hours before the game starts. We have people who come past us with Wahoo on. The new Wahoo, which is the red-faced Wahoo, and the ancient Wahoo, which is even more offensive, if you can believe that. We have people come through with red face on, you know, feathers in their hair.

He offends a race of people. Oh, he does not. Give me a break. Costumes, drums. They are predominantly white. Who the fuck are you, loser? You're a fucking loser. We've had people spit on us. We've had things thrown at us. We've had people assaulted. We've had Battery doing the war whoops. Saying, you know,

go back to your own country. And of course, I always agree with that. I certainly will go back to my own country as soon as, you know, as soon as they give it back. Get a job.

You should be honored. If it were me, I would be honored. Oh, if it wasn't for Cleveland Indians, you people would be honored. If it were me, I would be honored. Oh, if it wasn't for Cleveland Indians, you people would be forgotten. It's opening day, so grab you some peanuts and Cracker Jack, and then let's figure out how a red-faced, grinning Indian with a feather sticking out the back of his head is still associated with Cleveland's baseball team in 2018.

You hear about racism in sports all the time. The Washington Redskins' name, the Atlanta Braves' chant, and the Cleveland Indians logo. But here's something you don't hear often. While the team has been called the Indians for more than a century, Cleveland baseball is parting ways with its logo, Chief Wahoo. Chief Wahoo, a red-faced American Indian caricature, will be replaced by a slightly less divisive capital letter C. The team will no longer wear the logo or display it on signs or banners beginning in 2019. It's a big win for people who have been protesting Chief Wahoo for decades.

But even when they change the logo next year, the Cleveland Indians will still be called, you know, the Cleveland Indians. And the team will still be selling merch with Chief Wahoo's face. I'm not a hardcore liberal by any means, but it's hard for me to come up with a defense of or a justification for some of these images. Mike Lewis is not a hardcore liberal who teaches marketing at Emory University. The Cleveland Indians is a brand and people that own brands are very reluctant to change them. You know, people don't want to change the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle or remove the golden arches, right? A brand is a valuable asset. And so there's going to be some stickiness or,

you know, it's going to be hard for those things to move and change. Although Colonel Sanders is like a lady now. Yes, at least for the moment it is. But there's not a lot of evidence that having a Native American mascot is a positive in terms of drawing fans or revenue. So why is it so hard to change then? Sports teams are part of the culture. They're part of the fabric of a city.

The culture and the community are something that these teams have been part of for, you know, over 100 years in many cases. Baseball is a president tossing out the first ball of the season and a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on the Mississippi farm. In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race of the bag. The creed is a rule book, and color merely something to distinguish one team's uniform from another. Baseball is America's pastime, America's game.

Maybe that's why baseball hasn't been that kind to Native Americans. My name is Sundance. I am Muskogee. I am the executive director of the Cleveland American Indian Movement. Do you have a favorite sports team? No, not particularly. I mean, I am a fan of my son's soccer team. Do you have a least favorite sports team or one that irritates you? Well, straight to the point, I think my least favorite team in the area would be Cleveland

baseball. And how did the Cleveland baseball team come to be known as the Cleveland Indians? Do you know that? I do know that. I know both the propaganda around the story and the actuality. The propaganda around the story is that back in 1915, Cleveland had a contest and the fans named the team, the Indians, to honor Louis Sokalexis. He was Penobscot and he played for the

Cleveland Spiders 1897 to 1899. He was taunted on the field and the team was ridiculed as Indians. So what's the real story? Why did Cleveland's team become the Indians? In 1914, the Boston Braves, they won the World Series. Cleveland wanted to capitalize on what they called that winning Indian spirit. The sports writers of the day changed the name to the Indians. The Plain Dealer, a local Cleveland newspaper, announced that the sports writers had chosen that name. On the same page, they had a half-page cartoon that included the fans shouting, Wahoo, over the words, new rooting lingo for the fans.

And this cartoon included a stooped-over character in baseball uniform saying to an umpire, Wakwago. And I'm sorry, you know, my fake Indian is very rusty, so I'm sure I didn't pronounce that correctly. The umpire responds to him, when you talk to me, you talk in English, you wak-yog. Yikes. This is January 1915. That Wahoo logo was a cartoon character in the Plain Dealer that used to announce the scores. And then later, it was adopted by the team. So when we look at the history

of why the team is named the way it is, and why it presents itself in the way that it does visually, you know, with the logo, etc. It's because it sells newspapers. Looking at the logo, it isn't hard to guess why it's offensive, but what bothers you most about it? Obviously, the red face is problematic. The fact that it is an Indian head is problematic because an Indian head is a symbol of genocide. And Wahoo, as a caricature, then mocks mass murder. The red feather in his hair is a spiritual symbol of a lot of different Native people in this country. So they have appropriated spirituality. They are perpetuating a symbol of genocide. This misguided notion that we are being honored makes millions of dollars for Cleveland baseball. And yet native people are the poorest people in the country. So for us to be told then that we're being honored is a slap in the face. As I like to say, they love their Indians. They just don't like real Indians.

So I just imagine that Native Americans weren't included in any of the conversations around this team's branding, around this team's mascot, around the team name? Is that a safe assumption? That is a very safe assumption. Now, you might recall last year, the Major League Baseball commissioner said that he would be happy to meet and talk with, you know, native people who are interested in this topic. Of course, we sent a letter saying, hey, meet with us. That got returned to us, of course. We sent another letter, we sent a fax, left some voicemail. And at some point, you have to decide that no answer is actually an answer. And when did people in Cleveland start pushing back against Chief Wahoo?

The history of this is longer than just our movement. Cleveland AIM has been involved with this since 1970. And prior to that, the National Congress of the American Indian, they began their campaign to eliminate stereotyping of Native people in the media with special attention to sports mascots. So I believe Wahoo has always been divisive. You've been working on having this logo changed for a while, Son Nance. How did you feel when the news was announced recently in Cleveland? It means that there will not be Wahoo on the field. It does not mean that there will not be Wahoo in the stadium.

And it does not mean that Wahoo will not be available for purchase. And it does not mean that people won't be wearing Wahoo. And it does not mean that even if they couldn't wear Wahoo that they wouldn't wear any Indian head that they deemed appropriate. So does this feel like a victory or some sort of appeasement of some kind? I am a patient native person as my grandmother taught me to be. I will take the small victories where I can, you know, but it does raise some questions. On one side of this fight, you've got people like Sundance.

And on the other, you've got people who really love their baseball team and everything that comes with it. So how does one side convince the other? Sundance pulled it off. That's in a beat. This is Today Explained. all the worries about security and whatnot. But there's this podcast that can help alleviate your fears and answer some questions. It's called the Google Cloud Platform Weekly Podcast. It's hosted by a pair of smart people, Melanie Warwick and Mark Mandel. They answer questions, get in the weeds, and talk to other smart people at Google about best practices. Subscribe to the podcast at g.co slash GCP podcast.

This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and I'm talking to Sundance. He's the director of the American Indian Movement's Cleveland chapter. He didn't really take up this fight to change the name and the logo and the mascot of Cleveland's baseball team until he became a father. So I had my child, my son, back in 2004. And at that time, the place where I lived had an Indian mascot for the school system. After my son was born, we were coming out of the post office. This is around Christmas time. He was a Thanksgiving baby, so he had to be less than a month old. This carload of people, it's 8 o'clock in the morning.

They are driving down the street, and they see me coming out of the post office with my child. They decide that they have to say something to me. They cross the double yellow line, so no one's coming. They're in the other lane now, and they roll down the window, and they're like, Hey, hey, you look like your Eskimo people. Hey, little Eskimo baby. Hey, little Eskimo baby. Hey, little Eskimo baby.

Are you Eskimo people? I was like, I cannot have my child grow up in this environment experiencing what I'm experiencing. We approached the Oberlin school system and made that change with the help of Cleveland American Indian Movement. The crusade against the school mascot led to my involvement down at the stadium. It's part and parcel, you know, the same thing. Where do you think that sort of racism comes from? You know, we have this propaganda. Certainly in Ohio itself, we have a large number of school systems that have Indian mascots. So many of these sports fans learn this behavior as children. And it is very difficult then to tell them when the school system has reinforced it, local government has reinforced

this behavior. As far as fans go and as far as people go in my opinion everybody has the right to be wrong you know but my issue is institutional racism this racism is is in broad daylight in public pushed by the major institutions of society here is there a version of this that actually works and doesn't offend? Sure. I mean, it's a question of self-identity. If you are a high school on Navajo reservation and you want to call yourself Navajos, I have no problem with that. You want to call yourself Indians, I have no problem with that. If it's not self-identification, then it's cultural misappropriation. I think appropriation can be like a really hard concept for people to grasp. Have you ever convinced anyone to see your side? Oh, sure. I don't know if you recall

that photo that went viral a few years ago with a fan in red face with a drum and feathers, and he was confronted by a local native person. Does this guy look ridiculous? I'm proud to wear this. I'm happy that you're proud to wear it. I'm an Indian fan. That's the way it is. We're here. We're living people.

We're telling you it's offensive. We're not a poll. We're telling you how it affects our families, our people, and affects us as a race of people. Well, that person came back two years later and used my bullhorn to apologize to everybody there and say that he thought that he had been honoring us and he had done that for two decades and that he would never do that again. And over the course of my time, as I mentioned before, I meet people who say, I you know, I'm an Indian. I got some Indian in me or whatever. I got email a couple years ago from this person who reminded me that they had emailed me a couple years prior with a long diatribe and was very rude because they were fans of the Indians. And subsequent to that first email, this person found out that they were Native and wrote me to say that they had changed their mind and that it had to go and, you know, please keep up the fight.

Sundance is the director of the American Indian Movement's Cleveland chapter. We reached out to the Cleveland Indians. They didn't reach back. But if anyone out there at the Cleveland Indians front office is listening, teams do the hard work of rebranding all the time. Here's a by no means exhaustive list. Take it away, Bob. The Stanford Cardinal and the Dartmouth Big Green were each once the Indians.

The St. John's Redmen have become the Red Storm. And the Miami of Ohio Redskins, that's right, Redskins, are now the Red Hawks. And that's not all, Bob. The Syracuse Orangemen became the Orange. The North Dakota Fighting Sioux became the Fighting Hawks. The Marquette Warriors became the Golden Eagles. The Colgate Red Raiders became the Raiders. The Quinnipiac Braves became the Bobcats. The UMass Redmen became the Minutemen. And the Eastern Washington Savages became the Eagles. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Before we go, shout outs to two of our youngest listeners, Ava and Gage Muirhead in Porterville, California. They listen to the show when they get home from elementary school every day.

Sorry about the cursing, y'all. That's it for our podcast today. Before we go, another reminder to check out the Google Cloud Platform Weekly podcast if you want to learn more about improving your business with the cloud and the data. g.co slash GCP podcast.