'It’s pretty astounding:' Celebrating demise of 'Indians' after years of fighting
Jacqueline Keeler, Cleveland born, is happy her hometown team won’t be called the Indians anymore.
She is an activist and journalist who is Navaho and Yankton Dakota Sioux. She is editor-in-chief of Pollen Nation magazine, which is dedicated to fighting the invisibility of Native people, and a founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which seeks to end the use of stereotypical representations in popular culture.
Jacqueline Keeler, Cleveland born, is happy her hometown team won’t be called the Indians anymore.
She is an activist and journalist who is Navaho and Yankton Dakota Sioux. She is editor-in-chief of Pollen Nation magazine, which is dedicated to fighting the invisibility of Native people, and a founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which seeks to end the use of stereotypical representations in popular culture.
© Jacqueline Keeler Jacqueline Keeler’s son, Joneya Kinyaani, protesting at Nike headquarters in October 2014, when he was 11.
The American League baseball team in Cleveland announced this week that it will jettison the moniker it has used since 1915, though not until after the coming season. The change was not unexpected — the team had said over the summer that it was reconsidering use of its team name — and yet the news took Keeler by surprise.
“I have to say, I didn’t think this day would come, almost,” she says. “It’s pretty astounding.”
She gives thanks to advocates in the Native community who fought the good fight for more than 50 years. Credit should also go, she believes, to activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. The nation looked at the issue of systemic racism with fresh eyes following the death of George Floyd.
“I credit the activism of the Black community, which is always changing the parameters of what is acceptable in this country, and putting their bodies on the line to do so,” Keeler says. “Before, teams could always string us along and just claim they were doing it to honor us, or because that’s what their fans wanted. But the Black Lives Matter movement really changed that.”
The Washington Football Team cast aside its team name in the weeks after Floyd’s death. That’s also when the Cleveland baseball team said it would look into a change of its own. That came a couple of years after a move away from Chief Wahoo, the big-toothed, red-faced caricature that served for so long as the team’s cartoon logo.
LATEST UPDATES: What we know about Cleveland baseball team dropping 'Indians' nickname
VIDEO These sports nicknames have racially insensitive origins
The Chief’s idiot grin was part of the culture that greeted Keeler’s parents when they arrived in Cleveland circa 1960 as part of the federal government’s so-called American Indian Relocation program.
“Basically, it relocated young Native people from reservations to urban centers,” Keeler says. “They brought about 20,000 Native people between the ages of 18 and 30 to Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on its front page in 1957, reported the news this way: “Cleveland is going to get some new Indians, but this is no baseball story. Honest Injun.”
That tells you a lot about the era when Keeler’s parents met and married in Cleveland. Some years later, they joined other members of the local Native community in protesting the Cleveland club’s team name and its malignant mascot.
The family moved to Denver when Keeler was 4. As she grew up, she heard her parents talk about the protests, and the community work, in which they had been a part.
“When a game was on, they’d go on about it,” Keeler says. “But I just kind of ignored it, because it was before my time, and I didn’t watch much professional baseball. But then I went off to school at Dartmouth and got confronted by the mascot issue there. And I had to take a stand as an undergraduate.”
This was the mid-1990s, long after Dartmouth had shed its “Indians” team name.
“The college had stopped using it 20 years before I got there, but the alumni kept trying to bring it back. They would hand out ‘Dartmouth Indians’ T-shirts to freshmen. I tried to explain the issue to my Irish-American roommate from Massachusetts, but she didn’t understand it at all. She wanted to wear the shirt because it was free. That was shocking to me. I didn’t think it was a hard issue to understand.”
Years later, in Portland, Oregon, where she now lives, Keeler was taking her children on the city’s light rail system for a visit to the zoo.
“A little blonde girl in the family sitting across from us was wearing a Cleveland Indians hat with Chief Wahoo. I was horrified that my children were seeing this. So I asked the father if they could please take the hat off her head. I said, ‘We’re Native Americans, and I don’t want my children to see that.’ He refused. That was when I realized, ‘Wow, this is really bad.’ ”
Soon Keeler was an activist herself. Mascotry is a made-up word meant to convey the act of white fans in war paint who mock Native people while purporting to honor them. Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry uses social media to spread the word, often with the hashtag #NotYourMascot, which it launched for the Super Bowl in 2014.
That is also the year her group originated the hashtag #DeChief, for the act of unstitching Chief Wahoo from Cleveland caps — de-chiefing them — and leaving behind only a ghostly outline. As it happens, that is the year that her son and daughter joined her for protests outside Nike headquarters, in suburban Portland, where they urged the company to step selling merchandise with the Chief on it.
Her children, at that moment, became the third generation of her family to take up the fight. This made her proud and sad at the same time.
Keeler thinks this latest move by the Cleveland baseball team is a sign that perhaps her children’s children will not have to live with Native mascotry. The big-league holdouts in Atlanta (baseball), Chicago (hockey), and Kansas City (football) are on the clock.
“The reasons that teams always gave to continue the mascoting of Native people,” she says, “are all untenable now.”
The American League baseball team in Cleveland announced this week that it will jettison the moniker it has used since 1915, though not until after the coming season. The change was not unexpected — the team had said over the summer that it was reconsidering use of its team name — and yet the news took Keeler by surprise.
“I have to say, I didn’t think this day would come, almost,” she says. “It’s pretty astounding.”
She gives thanks to advocates in the Native community who fought the good fight for more than 50 years. Credit should also go, she believes, to activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. The nation looked at the issue of systemic racism with fresh eyes following the death of George Floyd.
“I credit the activism of the Black community, which is always changing the parameters of what is acceptable in this country, and putting their bodies on the line to do so,” Keeler says. “Before, teams could always string us along and just claim they were doing it to honor us, or because that’s what their fans wanted. But the Black Lives Matter movement really changed that.”
The Washington Football Team cast aside its team name in the weeks after Floyd’s death. That’s also when the Cleveland baseball team said it would look into a change of its own. That came a couple of years after a move away from Chief Wahoo, the big-toothed, red-faced caricature that served for so long as the team’s cartoon logo.
LATEST UPDATES: What we know about Cleveland baseball team dropping 'Indians' nickname
VIDEO These sports nicknames have racially insensitive origins
The Chief’s idiot grin was part of the culture that greeted Keeler’s parents when they arrived in Cleveland circa 1960 as part of the federal government’s so-called American Indian Relocation program.
“Basically, it relocated young Native people from reservations to urban centers,” Keeler says. “They brought about 20,000 Native people between the ages of 18 and 30 to Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on its front page in 1957, reported the news this way: “Cleveland is going to get some new Indians, but this is no baseball story. Honest Injun.”
That tells you a lot about the era when Keeler’s parents met and married in Cleveland. Some years later, they joined other members of the local Native community in protesting the Cleveland club’s team name and its malignant mascot.
The family moved to Denver when Keeler was 4. As she grew up, she heard her parents talk about the protests, and the community work, in which they had been a part.
“When a game was on, they’d go on about it,” Keeler says. “But I just kind of ignored it, because it was before my time, and I didn’t watch much professional baseball. But then I went off to school at Dartmouth and got confronted by the mascot issue there. And I had to take a stand as an undergraduate.”
This was the mid-1990s, long after Dartmouth had shed its “Indians” team name.
“The college had stopped using it 20 years before I got there, but the alumni kept trying to bring it back. They would hand out ‘Dartmouth Indians’ T-shirts to freshmen. I tried to explain the issue to my Irish-American roommate from Massachusetts, but she didn’t understand it at all. She wanted to wear the shirt because it was free. That was shocking to me. I didn’t think it was a hard issue to understand.”
Years later, in Portland, Oregon, where she now lives, Keeler was taking her children on the city’s light rail system for a visit to the zoo.
“A little blonde girl in the family sitting across from us was wearing a Cleveland Indians hat with Chief Wahoo. I was horrified that my children were seeing this. So I asked the father if they could please take the hat off her head. I said, ‘We’re Native Americans, and I don’t want my children to see that.’ He refused. That was when I realized, ‘Wow, this is really bad.’ ”
Soon Keeler was an activist herself. Mascotry is a made-up word meant to convey the act of white fans in war paint who mock Native people while purporting to honor them. Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry uses social media to spread the word, often with the hashtag #NotYourMascot, which it launched for the Super Bowl in 2014.
That is also the year her group originated the hashtag #DeChief, for the act of unstitching Chief Wahoo from Cleveland caps — de-chiefing them — and leaving behind only a ghostly outline. As it happens, that is the year that her son and daughter joined her for protests outside Nike headquarters, in suburban Portland, where they urged the company to step selling merchandise with the Chief on it.
Her children, at that moment, became the third generation of her family to take up the fight. This made her proud and sad at the same time.
Keeler thinks this latest move by the Cleveland baseball team is a sign that perhaps her children’s children will not have to live with Native mascotry. The big-league holdouts in Atlanta (baseball), Chicago (hockey), and Kansas City (football) are on the clock.
“The reasons that teams always gave to continue the mascoting of Native people,” she says, “are all untenable now.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'It’s pretty astounding:' Celebrating demise of 'Indians' after years of fighting
No comments:
Post a Comment