It was inevitable, like the Eye of the Night rising in dark skies, or The Whisper of the Great Spirit sweeping across the plains.
The Cleveland Indians will drop their name, the team announced yesterday, a year after casting mascot Chief Wahoo out of the tribe.
For some time, the radical Left has been on the warpath against sports teams that use Indians names, Indian mascots, and Indian anything else. Such names are “cultural appropriation” at best and “racist” at worst — or maybe both — so the ballclub was bound to sit down and smoke the peace pipe.
Long-term Campaign
It was, again, inevitable given that the Washington Redskins jettisoned their venerable name, and that professional sports are thoroughly woke and fully support left-wing moonbattery.
In 2019, the team tomahawked Chief Wahoo, the team’s wildly popular, grinning mascot. Since then, the smoke signals have been unmistakable. The team name would go the way of the great herds of Plains buffalo.
The team and owner Paul Dolan larded their statements with all the buzzwords treasured as wampum, beads, and gewgaws on the leftist reservation.
“Since July, we have conducted an extensive process to learn how our team name affects different constituencies and whether it aligned with our organization’s values,” the team statement said. And so the team dropped its name because “our organization is at its best when we can unify our community and bring people together — and we believe our new name will allow us to do this more fully.”
Speaking with a forked tongue, owner Paul Dolan described his pow wow with Indians and “civic leaders”:
Hearing firsthand the stories and experiences of Native American people, we gained a deep understanding of how tribal communities feel about the name and the detrimental effects it has on them. We also spoke to local civic leaders who represent diverse populations in our city and who highlighted the negative impact our name has had on our broader population and on underrepresented groups across our community. I am truly grateful for their engagement and input, which I found enlightening and insightful. When a sports team is aligned with its community, it unlocks the ability to unite people from different backgrounds and bring people together in support of their home team. While Indians will always be a part of our history, it is time to move forward and work to unify our stakeholders and fans through a new name.
That’s the long way of saying the radical Left decided the name should change, and so we’re changing the team name.
Yet Dolan most certainly didn’t speak to your average Indian, who has more things to worry about than mascots and team names. Grinding poverty and low life expectancy on reservations is one of them, along with chronic diabetes and alcoholism.
When the radical Left was hectoring the newly named “Washington Football Team,” a Washington Post survey showed that 90 percent of Indians were not offended by “redskins.”
No matter. Once the radical Left began its Ghost Dance, the Indians knew they were in trouble. So out came the tomahawk one more time to dispatch what was left of The Tribe: it’s name.
Fan Reactions
Longtime fans were not, to say the least, happy about it.
“Blah, blah, blah. A bunch of PC garbage,” one tweeted.
Said an Indian fan:
This is embarrassing to us Natives. I want a list of which tribes you talked to. I guarantee you didnt get the majority on this. This makes us look weak minded. 100% a publicity stunt and a way for them to sell new merch. If we wanted it changed it wouldve been done decades ago
Another fan tweeted a passage from George Orwell, while yet another wrote that it was “the death of baseball in Cleveland.”
An Italian woman suggested a new name, the Italians, and a new team logo, an Italian fellow who looks suspiciously like Chief Wahoo.
“Hey @Indians,” she tweeted, “please consider this as your new logo/name. We are OK with it because we are not insecure activists. FYI NOBODY thinks of native Americans when cheering for our baseball team.”
