Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots

The Tribe

The Tribe It is opening day 1999 at Jacobs Field, an impressive, five-year-old stadium in downtown Cleveland and the home of the Cleveland Indians baseball team. According to tradition, it always snows on opening day, but there are no snowflakes in sight. It is an ordinary chilly Monday morning in mid-April and even though the game won’t start for hours, the restaurants and bars around the stadium are already filling up with fans who gather to eat Polish sausage and hash browns for breakfast while they talk over the tribe’s chances for a pennant. A store that sells Indians merchandise is already open too, and doing a brisk business . The fans all wear hats and jackets decorated with the Indians’ logo, a bright red cartoon Indian nicknamed Chief Wahoo who sports a single feather behind his head. He grins so expansively that his cheeks swell outward on both sides of his face as if he’s a red chipmunk. His nose is large and his eyes are oddly triangular . Is he shifty, or simply surprised at how well the team is doing this year? Hard to say, but he certainly gets around. He’s on every hat, the back of every jacket, on banners above the street, on garbage cans, on cars. Outlined in neon, he’s also in the historical museum. One of the few concessions that team owner Richard Jacobs made to Wahoo critics, when the new stadium was built in 1994, was not to remount the thirty-foot neon Wahoo sign that has been a Cleveland landmark since the sixties. Instead, the neon monstrosity or masterpiece, depending on your point of view, graces the historical museum and museum visitors can voice their approval or criticism in a comment book placed nearby. Hours before game time, another group gathers outside the stadium. Like the fans, they have come for opening day, but they don’t intend to enter Jacobs Field. They are here to take part in a protest organized by the Committee of 500 211 Years of Dignity and Resistance. Many wear baseball hats with the Chief Wahoo logo slashed out. They refer to Chief Wahoo as “little red sambo” and their banners show the cartoon Indian reprinted with stereotyped Asian, Hispanic, and black features. Printed underneath this series of images, which would never be seen in public any more, are the words, “This Honors Who?” “This is not about baseball,” says Juan Reyna, a Mexican Apache who heads up the group. “This is about racism.” Reyna has been arrested twice at Jacobs Field for protesting, the first time at a World Series game in 1997. That time, the protesters were burning a straw effigy of Chief Wahoo when they were arrested. The case came up in April 1998, was shown on Court TV, and was thrown out after the prosecution presented its arguments. Three days later, protesters gathered outside the stadium for opening day. But when they started to burn another straw effigy, five of the demonstrators were arrested for suspicion of arson. They were held for a day and then released. They were never charged. One of those detained was Juanita Helphrey, a Hidatsa woman from North Dakota, now the minister for racial justice of the United Church of Christ. The United Church of Christ, whose national headquarters is across the street from the stadium, has been generous with financial and organizational support for the anti-Wahoo movement. Helphrey recalls that she got through the three hours she spent in a small room under Jacobs Field by singing church hymns and powwow songs from her childhood. The following morning, at the arraignment, she learned that the complaints against her said she was violent and had resisted arrest. Actually Helphrey, a quiet woman with long gray hair, says that she went willingly and was not handcuffed. Before the 1999 opening day demonstration begins, there is a press conference at which their lawyer announces that the five protesters who were arrested the previous year have filed a suit against the Cleveland police department for false arrest. THE TRIBE 212 Another lawsuit against the baseball franchise uses Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title II guarantees “full and equal enjoyment” of places of public accommodation to all persons regardless of race, religion, color, or national origin. The lawsuit charges that the use of Indian imagery keeps Indian people, who...