Chief Wahoo
Chief Wahoo was officially retired following the 2018 season,[2][3][4] with it also barred from future National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum plaques and merchandise sold outside of Ohio.
The character came to be called "The Little Indian", eventually becoming a fixture in the paper's coverage of the team, including a small front-page visual box where his head would peek out to announce the outcome of the latest game.
Journalist George Condon would write in 1972, "When the baseball club decided to adopt an Indian caricature as its official symbol, it hired an artist to draw a little guy who came very close to Reinert's creation; a blood brother, unquestionably.
Ohio sportswriter Terry Pluto has described comics of Chief Wahoo that would run on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the 1950s, with the character's depiction signifying the outcome of a game.
[15][16][17] By 1973, when the team was bought by Cleveland businessman Nick Mileti, they had introduced additional depictions of Chief Wahoo, some of which showed the character at bat.
[18][19] When Cleveland Municipal Stadium installed a new computer-programmed monocolor scoreboard in 1977, newspaper articles described how it could display animated depictions of Chief Wahoo yelling "Charge!
[14] Bavasi recalls expressing concern that it would offend Native American groups, but that player Bert Blyleven reassured him, "Nah, it shouldn't.
[33] According to a senior vice president and historian at the Western Reserve Historical Society,[34] the acquisition of a neon Chief Wahoo sign was debated for several reasons.
The sign is displayed with written materials that show several points of view, including "The Legacy of Racism Continues", "Chief Wahoo: Brief History of a Civic Icon", and "Enthusiasm!
During the years the team trained in the Grapefruit League, a mural of Chief Wahoo was displayed on a nearby municipal water tower, which was touched up at least once in 1993.
[40] An early piece of Chief Wahoo merchandise depicts a squatting Native American figure holding a stone tool in one hand and a scalp in the other.
[41] Produced in 1949 by Rempel Manufacturing, Inc., of Akron, Ohio, the rubber Indian figure (marketed as "Big Chief Erie")[42] was based on an original sketch by Plain Dealer cartoonist Fred G. Reinert.
[44] The West Side Leader of Akron, Ohio declared this design "a lot better than the previous freebie shirt, which featured representations of three racing hot dogs".
The 1928 season saw modified club uniforms whose left breast bore a patch depicting the profile of a headdress-wearing American Indian.
[31] On January 29, 2018, the Cleveland Indians announced they would remove the Chief Wahoo logo from their on-field baseball caps and jerseys starting with the 2019 season.
In 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton threw the first pitch at Jacobs Field, he wore a hat with the letter-C logo worn from 1978 to 1985 instead of Chief Wahoo.
[67][68][69] A White House aide described the decision as one taken "in recognition of the sensitivities" involved,[67] and it spurred public debate on the issue of Native American names and images in sports.
[71] This caused some sportswriters to assert that the office of the Major League Baseball commissioner understood "on some level, that Chief Wahoo is the wrong message".
[74] In 2009, when the Cleveland Indians moved their spring training operations to Goodyear, Arizona, the Chief Wahoo logo was not used on the outside of the local stadium where they practiced.
[77] Cleveland sportswriter Paul Hoynes wrote that the Chief Wahoo logo was not used in Goodyear "because of the heavy population of Native Americans in Arizona.
"[77] In 2013, Chief Wahoo was still used on the Cleveland Indians' spring training web page, where the logo was framed within the name of their host city,[80] but has since been replaced.
[89] In Meadville, Pennsylvania, the adult children of a 74-year-old Cleveland Indians fan hired chainsaw artist Brian Sprague to carve a 7-foot (2.1 m)-tall maple tree stump into a full-body statue of Chief Wahoo.
[50] Elements of Chief Wahoo were incorporated into a collage that appeared in the Tribe Tract & Testimonial,[62][93] a fanzine that is now collected at the Cleveland Public Library.
[95] In 1987, Cleveland players Joe Carter and Cory Snyder were scheduled to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated posed in front of a stained-glass rendition of Chief Wahoo.
[98] In 2011, artist Cyprien Gaillard installed Neon Indian, a 12-metre (39 ft), neon-outline Chief Wahoo replica atop the abandoned Haus der Statistik building in Berlin's Mitte district.
[99] The Wall Street Journal said that the project "combines a symbol of the American Rust Belt with a souvenir of Communist town planning", and was "meant to reflect on the broader subject of urban decline.
"[100] In another work, titled Indian Palace, Gaillard silkscreened the logo onto a salvaged window from East Berlin's demolished Palast der Republik.
"[101] In an article on Gaillard's work, Indian Country Today Media Network said it was up to the viewer to decide "whether it is a clever re-imagining of a controversial symbol or merely a callous and harmful repetition.
The use of "Indians" as the name of a team was also part of the controversy, and led over 115 professional organizations representing civil rights, educational, athletic, and scientific experts to publish resolutions or policies stating that any use of Native American names or symbols by non-native sports teams is a harmful form of ethnic stereotyping that promotes misunderstanding and prejudice and contributes to other problems faced by Native Americans.
The team owners and management have defended their use as having no intent to offend but to honor Native Americans, upholding many fans' beliefs and continued support.
