Wahoo is Insulting, Not Symbol of Cleveland Pride
 
To the Editor:

Every summer when I was a kid, my family packed up the sunscreen and went to watch a baseball game. Half the time it didn’t matter if our team was winning or losing. We went to watch our team play. This was before Jacobs Field grew god-like at the cusp of downtown. Our stadium was near the lakeshore, spitting distance from the rancid waters of Lake Erie. It was old and crotchety and open-air. Almost every seat, except the really expensive seats, was a sunburn seat. Baseball was my family’s game and the Indians were my family’s team. Sometimes we only managed to make two games a season, sometimes more. But even if we didn’t make it to the stadium, we watched the game on TV.
All of our hats and t-shirts and pennants had the same design: the Cleveland Indians symbol, Chief Wahoo. Outside of Cleveland, when I saw someone with an Indians hat, I stopped them. Asked them if they were from Cleveland and, if they weren’t, wanted to know what they were doing with our hat on. If the person I stopped was from Cleveland, we talked neighborhoods and food and the strange twists of fate that made a person leave home. We felt we had things in common.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned of the controversy surrounding sports teams and their use of American Indians as mascots or symbols. Almost immediately my heart fell. Because I knew the person talking, the one who explained that using such symbols is a sign of disrespect, an act based on stereotype, I knew this person was right. And I didn’t want to hear it. 
Growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s meant growing up in a city that everyone else called “the armpit of America.” We were one of the first cities to declare bankruptcy, or get pretty close to it. Our river, the Cuyahoga, caught fire from the weight of its pollution, and as a city, we didn’t tend to get mentioned in first-class circles. 
When you grow up in a place like that, you either try and leave it for something you imagine will be better, or else you get proud. Proud like when someone in your family gets kicked around a lot and it makes you protective. 
For me and my family, Cleveland Indians games were where we went to be proud about Cleveland. In the stands were people like us. And when our team did well, Cleveland did well. We were a city with great baseball, not a city of high unemployment and a crumbling downtown. The players were our guys and every time Oscar Gamble ran around the field and his hat flew off the perfect billow of his Afro, we screamed for him. This was who we were, a working man’s game with a player who couldn’t even keep his hat on. 
I hated realizing that Chief Wahoo, a symbol of pride for me, one that had nothing to do with real Indians and everything to do with Cleveland’s struggles and glory, was a symbol of disrespect to others. I hated knowing this and for a while, I pretended I didn’t know it. Sheepishly, I pulled out my Indians hat when the tribe was playing and sat there, feeling the weight of its history settled on my head.
But pretty soon, I couldn’t wear it anymore. As I learned more of what this country had done to American Indians, understood that for most of its life the United States had a policy of trying to exterminate or find some way to make disappear the people who first lived on this land, I felt ashamed. Sure, being from Cleveland used to feel like being from the city that everyone kicked around, but it wasn’t the same. No one was marching down Euclid Avenue trying to kill us. No one was trying to take away our land and make us move to Youngstown or Toledo. A lot of folks thought we were a joke, but it didn’t stop us from living.
Chief Wahoo is a big-toothed happy savage. It’s the kind of imagery that’s historically been used in this country to make real Indians seem stupid. Kind of primitive. Not really worth the same time and land and money as the rest of us smarter people. It’s a cartoon symbol that has a painful history attached to it. And by choosing to wear it on our Cleveland hats and t-shirts and jackets, we’re keeping alive that painful history. When many of the Native peoples in this country have the highest poverty rates, the highest infant mortality rates and the lowest life spans and when U.S. federal policy most often continues to maintain the myth that the Indians are all gone, wearing Chief Wahoo is a slap in the face to those Native peoples struggling against their disappearance.
This is a hard one. When I put away my Chief Wahoo hat and promised never to again wear anything from the Cleveland Indians, I felt empty inside. Because however valid my reasons for electing to never wear my hat again, there wasn’t anything to take its place. For many of us Clevelanders, living at home and far away, and even now in a spiffier Cleveland with a spiffier sports stadium, our baseball team is the symbol of who we are and who we’ve been. We’re a working class city, a city tied to a steel industry that became a rust belt and then shook itself off and got strong again. There’s a lot to be proud of coming from a place like Cleveland. What would make us prouder still would be to find a symbol of our fierce stubbornness that doesn’t depend on stereotyping anyone else.
And that’s a hard task. No one chose Chief Wahoo to be the symbol we all gathered around. It just kind of happened. And now it needs to unhappen. Our city’s history deserves something that lets us be proud and fierce without compromise. And every time we put Chief Wahoo on our bodies and pennants, we compromise our integrity. For a lot of our recent history, not many folks thought Cleveland had much integrity. We’ve already proved them wrong in a lot of areas, like showing you can bring a dead lake back to life. Cleveland isn’t the only city that uses American Indian symbols for its sports teams. But let’s be the first to proudly and publicly change. We’ve been a leader in a lot of things. I want us to be a leader in this.

–Susan Raffo 
attended Oberlin 1981-1983
Minneapolis, Minnesota.