Cleveland Indians Nickname
Sockalexis Again
So, you probably heard that Toronto Blue Jays announcing legend Jerry Howarth will not say "Indians," when referring to Cleveland's baseball team during this year's American League Championship Series. He apparently has refused to use the word since 1992, when he received an eloquent letter from a Native American about the hurt caused by such nicknames.
Mainer confronts Cleveland Indians execs…
As my plane winged its way to Cleveland last week, on my way to give a library talk in praise of Maine Penobscot Indian Louis Sockalexis and against the Cleveland Indians’ continuing use of Chief Wahoo, I began imagining myself as being something like the Jimmy Stewart character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
The Cleveland Indians, Louis Sockalexis, and The Name
[Ed Rice note: Just 6 paragraphs into this major piece Joe Posnanski very generously credits me with having an "informative" biography...but then he mistakenly arrives at the conclusion that Sockalexis played absolutely no factor in the team's long-standing "Indians" nickname. To his credit, Joe Posnanski apologized both to me and Bob DiBiasio, Cleveland's vice president of public affairs, when we corrected him with the proof that, yes, an unnamed editorial writer in January of 1915 credited Sockalexis for this "official" nickname, its origins occurring in March of 1897 when the team dropped the informal nickname "Spiders" and adopted a new informal nickname, "Indians," all owing to the presence of Sockalexis. No, it was not meant respectfully at the time.]
The Cleveland Indians need to learn same lesson…
ORONO, MAINE — The Cleveland Indians organization has never had any real understanding — or appreciation — of what it has in the historical figure of Louis Sockalexis, a man who almost certainly broke professional baseball’s color barrier, a man who was definitively the first-known American Indian to play, a man who went through the exact same experience Jackie Robinson endured 50 years after him but never gets any comparable credit for doing so and a man who most certainly did inspire the team’s nickname.
Cleveland nickname does not honor Sockalexis
In Maine, we should be more sensitive regarding disrespectful traditions aimed at Native Americans. And everyone, everywhere in this state should be particularly incensed at disrespect focused at our Penobscot tribe by the Cleveland Indians organization, which continues to claim (and rightly so) that the team’s nickname originated because of a real Indian from Maine.