Tonight, Toronto plays Cleveland in the opening game of the American League championship series.
Starting today, The Citizen pledges to make its best effort to refer to the Cleveland Indians as simply Cleveland. We'll make the same effort to call Washington's National Football League team as Washington and not the Redskins. Those team names may slip through from time to time inside an Associated Press story but our newsroom staff will make every effort going forward to edit those references out.
Jerry Howarth, the longtime radio announcer for the Toronto Blue Jays, has not referred to Cleveland as "the Indians" in more than 25 years, ever since a listener wrote to him asking him to consider not using that term when calling a game. Other broadcasters on both sides of the border are following his lead.
The #notyourmascot conversation thread on Twitter also encourages sports fans to not use those team names and to stop buying fan merchandise for those teams.
According to a Postmedia story about Howarth's stance, the Ontario human rights commissioner has challenged the Canadian news media to not use those team names.
Closer to home, the challenge to The Citizen was made by local resident Kym Gouchie.
"The media has so much power and influence," she said Thursday. "We trust in the media and the stories you tell, so using the term is telling us you agree with it."
Cleveland's use of Indians is terrible. The team logo features an offensive caricature of a grinning aboriginal man named Chief Wahoo with a feather sticking out of the back of his head. And then there's the actual word.
"Indian was the title given to us and it's not something we accept as our identity," Gouchie said. Put another way, insisting on referring to aboriginal people as Indians is as racist and offensive as the sports reporters and publications that insisted on calling boxer Cassius Clay by that name long after he changed it to Muhammad Ali.
Other aboriginal team names, like Braves, Warriors and Chiefs are still acceptable (for now) because it can be argued they invoke strength, leadership and respect, rather than negative stereotypes.
That's in stark contrast to Redskins, which is simply an even more racist way to say Indians. Some people have created shirts for the Cleveland Caucasians and the Washington Whiteskins to show how ridiculous and offensive their team names are.
Everyone can agree there are far larger and more important issues facing indigenous peoples on both sides of the border but that doesn't mean these words should be ignored.
"Our children are listening to us and when we tell them not to call someone by those names and then they hear teams called by those names, how do you explain that?" Gouchie said. "Let's use this as a teachable moment... and use this opportunity for reconciliation."
In that spirit, why can't Washington change its team name to Warriors?
As for Cleveland, the team could revert back to the Napoleons, their name from 1903 to 1915, before they became the Indians. The Naps, as they were known, were named after their beloved second baseman Nap Lajoie, who is immortalized in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Another prominent sports team is named after an individual, according to Wikipedia. The Chicago Blackhawks were named after the 86th Infantry Division, known as the Black Hawk Division, that fought in the First World War. That group took the name from Black Hawk, a revered Native American figure in Illinois history.
If Napoleons doesn't work for Cleveland, they could be called the Cuyahogas (pronounced KOY-a-HOE-gas), named after the Cuyahoga River which flows through Cleveland and runs a short distance from where the team plays. Wikipedia, citing books on Cleveland history, says the name is either from "cayagaga," the Mohawk phrase for "crooked river" or the Seneca word "cuyohaga," meaning "place of the jawbone."
Or they could be called the Cleveland Rockers, since Cleveland is recognized as the birthplace of rock and roll and is the home of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.
For the next week however, let's all agree to call Cleveland's baseball team the Losers.
Go, Blue Jays!
