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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON MILLER, GETTY IMAGES
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By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
It’s been a long time coming.
After more than 100 years, Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team announced Friday that it will now be known as the Guardians. The announcement came in a Tom Hanks-narrated video, shown above presented to fans at Progressive Field.
The tireless efforts of Native American leaders, who for many years decried the horrible offense, led protests and negotiated with the team to change its name, have helped correct decades of reducing people to caricature and mascot for sport. Historically, marketing gimmicks have been used to mock first Americans. “They are caricatures, symbols of the European-American narrative that ignores the genocide, disease, and cultural devastation brought to our communities,” Mark Trahant wrote for National Geographic in 2018.
As the former editor of the daily newspaper in Cleveland, The Plain Dealer, I cringe at the language of the team which calls itself the Indians and whose fans are known as The Tribe. For too many years, Chief Wahoo was the mascot and horribly offensive costumes were the norm even as the team in recent years has tried to move away from such racist imagery. For every community member who fought to restore dignity in Native American representation, this is for you.
I remain convinced that the team lost its 2016 World Series run, despite leading the Chicago Cubs, because of the curse of the ancestors. My colleague and longtime Cleveland fan David Beard, in the stands when the Florida Marlins came from behind to take Game 7 of the 1997 World Series from Cleveland, had the same thought. Those celebrations—with that mascot and nickname—were never supposed to happen.
The name change has sparked a national conversation, most of it about the likeability of the new name, the Guardians. I’ve been flooded with messages from people who either don’t like or don’t get the name change. Like it or not, the new name is fitting for Cleveland. In the shadow of Progressive Field, eight 43-foot-tall statues, called the Guardians of Traffic (pictured below), watch over the 1932 Hope Memorial Bridge, also known as the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. My former colleague Steve Litt wrote for cleveland.com that the new name has “pride of place, legacy, nostalgia, stewardship, and strength all wrapped up in one rough, tough beautiful, powerful word: Guardians.
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