ST. LOUIS — I remember feeling so uncomfortable by others being so gleefully comfortable.
Atlanta. Cardinals at Braves. Postseason, 2019.
Of course, I’d seen the “Tomahawk Chop” for decades on TV. I was a boy when the Braves became good in 1991, and the chop and chant seemed so cool then. But years later in the press box at the Braves’ stadium, surrounded by the sound of Atlanta fans doing their version of a Native American chant, it just felt insensitive. It just felt wrong.
Sure, each one of those fans would give you some ready-made excuse why it’s OK to do the chant (“We’re not mocking Native Americans, we’re honoring them. … Many Native Americans have said they don’t have a problem with it. … Stop being a snowflake.”). But all of it — the music, the chant, the chop — just seemed like an antiquated part of sports’ past that somehow survived into the present.
If anything, it felt like something that surely wouldn’t be happening in the future. But how soon into the future?
Slowly, belatedly, but ultimately, teams are making changes. Washington’s NFL team name, for instance, no longer is a word deemed by many as a slur for Native Americans. And on Monday, the Cleveland Indians announced they will stop being the Cleveland Indians (well, after the 2021 season).
This announcement sparked innumerable opinions across the country. Mine? It’s a good move. An overdue move. Because if fellow American citizens find the Cleveland Indians name to be racist, to be hurtful, to be demeaning, then it shouldn’t be part of Major League Baseball. We’ve just become so used to having Indians as part of the game, and it’s been so widely accepted, that many people just assumed there isn’t a problem with it.
So why now, they’d ask, in 2020, more than a century since Cleveland has been the Indians, is it suddenly wrong? That’s the thing — it’s always been wrong, but only now are enough people realizing this. Only now are influential people realizing this. Influential people being influenced by society — team owner Paul Dolan told The Associated Press that his “awakening or epiphany” came following the killing of George Floyd this summer.
“It was a learning process for me,” Dolan said, “and I think when fair-minded, open-minded people really look at it, think about it and maybe even spend some time studying it, I like to think they would come to the same conclusion: It’s a name that had its time, but this is not the time now, and certainly going forward, the name is no longer acceptable in our world.”
Baseball is one of those rare parts of Americana that is beloved because it’s the same as it always was, yet is appreciated for simultaneously evolving. Baseball always will be seventh-inning stretches and five tools and three strikes and so on. But the way the game is played, consumed, analyzed and honored is ever-changing, and generally for the better (though that will be debated if the designated hitter becomes permanent in the National League). And in this pivotal American year, we’re realizing that some of the stuff in our game needs to be reevaluated.
“Now that Cleveland has taken action, all eyes now turn to the Braves,” Ryan Cothran, editor and owner of the site called Braves Journal, said Monday. “Being a Braves fan, I know a little of the history behind the name. It started innocently enough, as Brave simply means ‘North American Indian warrior.’ However, where the Braves started to go wrong was in 1966 with ‘Chief Noc-a-homa’ and then again in 1983 with the short-lived ‘Princess Win-a-Lotta’ — yes, it’s real. . . . The Seminole chant immediately became the most notorious and polarizing display in Major League Baseball. From there, it was tomahawks across the chest, foam tomahawks given away at each game, and the chop heard a dozen times each home game to the point of ad nauseam.
“Last year, the Braves cut back on the chop, which was easy to do considering there were no fans. Some are suggesting that the Braves will be next in line in the name-changing game. That could very well be the case, but the Braves are making efforts to reach out to local Native American organizations to amend relationships.”
And, sure, that’s cool that the Braves are reaching out. Much was made about the team’s partnership with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, as the team’s website states, “to produce a Syllabary T-shirt to help bring awareness to the native language.”
But no matter how sensitive the Atlanta organization becomes, and no matter how things are explained, if the team is called the Braves, it will lead to misrepresentations of Native American culture that can be insulting and hurtful.
“Time will tell, but if the Braves do change names,” Cothran said, “there’s no better fit than to honor Hank Aaron by becoming the Atlanta Hammers.”
