Farewell to the Chief
I have a confession to make. Chief Wahoo is in my storage unit.
I remembered he was there when the news broke on Sunday that the Cleveland Indians would no longer be them. It was a long-overdue decision that follows on the heels of the Washington Football Team getting rid of its shameful name and presages the demise of the Braves, Chiefs, Blackhawks, Warriors and Seminoles.
Six years ago, I wrote a piece for ESPN on the debate—and need—to change the names of teams that have appropriated Native American names and culture. The basic point, as expressed by Suzan Shown Harjo, the poet and activist who won a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, was, “How would you feel if you had your home taken away from you and then watched as your identity was stolen for profit? It’s adding insult to injury.”
Consider that the Cleveland baseball team plays on an Algonquin burial ground, that the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium is on land taken from the Osage, that Braves Field is on a tract taken from the Creek Indians, that the Blackhawk logo is modeled after a Sauk chief who fought to keep his people from being expelled from Illinois. The ground beneath FedEx Field, where Washington plays football, once belonged to the Piscataway tribe.
But given the current political, cultural and epidemiological climate, the worst theft involved intellectual property. After all, the Constitution was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy. The horrible man who is now President has respect for neither our Founding Fathers nor Native Americans. After the news about Cleveland’s baseball team dropped, the Imbecile-in-Chief tweeted: “Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for ‘Indians.’ Cancel culture at work!”
It’s not cancellation, it’s evolution. Cleveland manager Terry Francona loves Cleveland and his team, but he’s never loved their name. “I think it’s time to move forward,” Francona said last July. “You don’t want to be too old to learn or to realize that, maybe I’ve been ignorant of some things, and to be ashamed of it, and to try to be better.”
When I was a baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, I loved going to Municipal Stadium in Cleveland because it was like taking a trip back in time, and I thought of Chief Wahoo as a tradition, not an abomination. This was back when Super Joe Charboneau became an overnight sensation. A few years later, when I was the SI baseball editor, we decided to put Cory Snyder and Joe Carter on the cover of the 1987 baseball issue, and I had a hand in the cover shoot.
I’m ashamed to say, we chose to use an image of Chief Wahoo as the backdrop. Photographer Lane Stewart’s first idea was to paint Wahoo on some barn siding to give it an old-time feel. But that didn’t quite work, so Wahoo was painted on some plexiglass so that he could look over their shoulders. To make matters worse, the cover billing was INDIAN UPRISING. Just seeing it again makes me cringe:
Wahoo now makes me feel like a Yahoo.
After the shoot, Lane presented me with the barn siding, and it hung in my office until I left SI a few years later. It was too big for our house—thank heavens for that—so it ended up in storage. He’s now in a room with a lot of other things I’ve left behind—files, LPs, books, out-of-style clothes and furniture.
My awareness of how wrong he was, of how wrong I was, isn’t locked away, though. To paraphrase Francona, if you’re thinking right, your thinking changes for the better. My later piece for ESPN was penance in a way.
A lot has happened since 2014, a lot of it bad. But it’s very good that sports teams are finally coming around.
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