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Atlanta Over the course of the next three days, a baseball stadium will turn out its lights, thousands of spectators will turn on their phones’ flashlights, and they will perform a completely pointless, absurdly antiquated ceremony. The commissioner of baseball rubber-stamped the tomahawk chop earlier this week. It will be shown on televisions both domestically and internationally and will serve as a reminder that, despite all the efforts to eliminate superfluous American Indian symbolism, it is still ingrained in sports.
On Tuesday, Major League Baseball issued a feeble, mealy-mouthed defense of the chop, a mainstay of Atlanta Braves games, that was based on logical gaps the size of canyons and embodied the tail wagging the dog. And a large, majority-white crowd will pack a stadium in the middle of the suburbs, bend their arms 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal, and scream in defiance of those who see it for what it is this weekend as Truist Park hosts the Braves and Houston Astros in Games 3, 4 and 5.
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Of course, like the Chief Wahoo emblem, the former Washington Football Team moniker, and innumerable other instances of Native American imagery in sports, this is something that will eventually fade. That’s what confused me so much about Commissioner Rob Manfred’s position. It was like seeing a real-time anthropomorphic pretzel twist itself to attempt to explain why MLB was supporting the chop.
“It depends on how the community views the gesture, and Atlanta has done a fantastic job with the Native Americans,” Manfred added. “I believe the Native American community to be the most important group to decide whether it’s appropriate or not, and they have been unwaveringly supportive.”
Manfred was speaking about the Braves’ “developed cultural working relationship… that has resulted in meaningful action” with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a tribe with headquarters in North Carolina, during the previous year and a half. EBCI Night on July 17 and the formation of a Native American Working Group were two of such actions.
The Eastern Band chief fully about-faced it as well. Richard Sneed declared to the Associated Press this past week, “I’m not offended by somebody waving their arm at a sports game.” He continued, “the least of our problems,” referring to poverty and violence in the indigenous community as though eliminating the chop and plainly more significant, deeper problems are somehow incompatible. Before forming a stronger alliance with the Braves, in October 2019, Richard Sneed told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “That’s just so stereotypical, like old-school Hollywood.”
Even if we were to believe Manfred when he said that local tribes approved of the chop, it is ridiculous to think that only tribes within a three-hour radius of Atlanta are worthy of listening to while the game is being aired to a nationwide audience. “Reduces Native Americans to a caricature,” declared longstanding Muscogee (Creek) Nation chief James R. Floyd two years ago.
Floyd’s voice matters because, despite not being a member of a local tribe, he formerly was. Federal recognition for 574 indigenous groups exists. In Georgia, there are none. The disgusting way American Indians are treated in Georgia is one of the Braves’ main reasons for insisting on preserving the chop and the league’s backing. Georgian land was taken from thousands of Creek people in the early 1830s. More than 16,000 Cherokee were driven from Georgia five years later and sent on the 1,200-mile, nine-state trek to their new home in Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears. Numerous deaths occurred.
The Forest County Potawatomi are one Wisconsin tribe that operates a casino in the Milwaukee region. Other than when the Braves or Cleveland Indians visited, as Atlanta did in this year’s division series, the tribe has been advertising its casino on the left-field wall at American Family Field for years. There was nowhere to see the advertisement that had covered the wall for the Brewers’ 11 home games before the NLDS.
If not the Cherokee, then the Creek, and if not the Creek, then the Potawatomi, and if not the Potawatomi, then the National Congress of American Indians, which urged Fox, the World Series broadcaster, “to refrain from showing the ‘tomahawk chop’ when it is performed during the nationally televised World Series games in Atlanta,” in a statement released Wednesday.
Examine MLB’s own social justice website, which offers a roadmap to “having conversations about race,” before you write this off to a mob or cancel culture. The opening two bullet points are:
That is the situation that exists this week. The Braves last made it to the World Series in 1999. Everything has changed. The bullhorn of social media can be used by indigenous people to magnify their views. Remember, up until a month ago, the Cleveland Indians were the Cleveland Guardians? Cleveland realized years ago that a name change was necessary and started a process that everyone will get acclimated to sooner rather than later.
We have seen it; hence, we know this. The Braves used an American Indian mascot named Chief Noc-A-Homa for many years. He crouched in a teepee, wearing a headdress, and celebrated home runs with smoke signals and fire breathing. He also acknowledged flirting with several women while working and missing three team tournaments in 1985. The Braves retired the character once the employee was fired, not recasting the part.
The Atlanta Braves fixed the problem almost 35 years ago. It seems strange to refuse to do so now, like a concoction of cowardice and conceit. The group was prepared to point supporters in the proper direction back in 1985. As of right now, it isn’t, and the MLB seems unwilling to require it.
The chop is certain to disappear, just as it will during Kansas City Chiefs games and at Florida State University, where the Seminole tribe grants permission for chopping at Doak Campbell Stadium, where it began.
Until that happens, fans will ignore the real issues in indigenous communities, where poverty and violence against women and inadequate education leave Native Americans terminally vulnerable, and teams will continue to promote the same hollow arguments the Washington Football Team did before it changed its name.
The ease of stopping the chop is what irritates me the most about it. Such a gesture would be modest. No one of those generational issues affecting American Indians would be resolved by it. But for a people who have already lost so much, it would, to many, restore at least some degree of dignity.
Fans of the Braves will go on a journey that we are familiar with when that inevitably happens. Indignation and denial first. Fans don’t go to games simply to chop, so they’ll haggle, get depressed, and eventually accept. They go to watch their beloved team, chop or not, because Freddie Freeman and Ozzie Albies are obviously not as good of choppers as Ronald Acuña Jr.
It’s what gave Tuesday’s Manfred’s tack such beauty. With thirty years to come up with the perfect response, his main arguments were that American Indians in the area are entirely in favor of the chop (which they most definitely haven’t) and that teams make their own decisions (which they don’t).
“The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop,” stated Manfred. “That’s somewhat the end of the story for me.”
About one thing, at least, Manfred was being honest. The story is almost over. Though it will sound like the tomahawk chop, the sounds coming from Truist Park this week is actually the start of its death rattle. The chop is not going to last long in Atlanta or, hopefully, in the sports world.
