COMMENTARY : Braves Should Keep Their Proud Name

Throughout American history, nobody gets dumped on the way the Indians do. So we should be grateful this isn’t a World Series between the Cleveland Native Americans and the Atlanta Native Americans. Not only would all that extra lettering send T-shirt prices skyrocketing, you’d have to bring back Custer and hang him in effigy at home plate before each game, just to be fair. Kevin Costner could throw out the first rope.

If only the solution were that easy. For those who care, and rightly so, about the evil of social injustice, this is a tough one. Ethnic, racial and religious bigotry and the perpetuating of stereotypes, while rampant in this country, is repulsive. If you’re insensitive to it, you’re always faulting your accusers for being oversensitive. And vice versa.

Look, nobody’s denying the Native Americans have gotten the worst of raw deals, despite the propaganda to the contrary in our 1950s elementary school textbooks. But isn’t this just a tad ridiculous, suggesting that the Braves change their name and that the Tomahawk Chop be abolished?

I’ll admit, I’m very uncomfortable espousing this viewpoint. The only thing that takes less guts than offending a minority is offending a tiny, politically powerless minority, which is what the Indians are virtually everywhere in this country.

There probably aren’t many Native Americans who subscribe to The Hartford Courant, and being accused of being insensitive to their feelings is a much less risky proposition than, say, predicting there was no way the Boston Red Sox could lose the American League East, as some unidentified bonehead did in this space a month ago. Besides, the mere thought of being on the same side of an issue as Pat Buchanan gives me the creeps.

It’s one thing to pretend that stealing the Native Americans’ land and forcing them to live on reservations was doing the right thing. That’s ridiculous. And we should all be outraged at how Hollywood perpetuated the myth of “white man good, red man bad” in all those John Wayne “Let’s Kill The Injuns” movies.

But how is it offensive that a baseball team is named Braves and uses a hatchet as its symbol? If Native Americans are being so wronged, how come we haven’t heard from Costner or Marlon Brando?

“We’re calling for the Atlanta Braves to change their name,” Clyde Bellecourt, director of the American Indian Movement, said at a Minneapolis news conference before Game 1. “It is wrong for sports teams to be using the symbolism and regalia that we use for ceremonial purposes. Why don’t they call themselves the Atlanta Negroes? Or the Atlanta Klansmen? Do you think that American Jews or blacks would stand for this kind of treatment?”

Of course not. But isn’t there a different connotation to the nickname Braves? No matter what your ethnic heritage, doesn’t that name equate with the courage of a noble warrior? It’s a positive, not a negative, image.

Similar protests have worked on the college campus, universities by their very nature being much more sensitive to such accusations than pro sports teams. Stanford, whose color is red and whose team used to be known as the Indians, is now known as the Cardinal. But St. John’s is still known as the Redmen. And the defending Calder Cup champions still are nicknamed the Indians. Somehow, Springfield Native Americans doesn’t sound quite as catchy.

As a kid, my favorite old movie was “Jim Thorpe, All-American.” Thorpe, for those young readers who only recently found out that Joe DiMaggio is famous for something other than Mr. Coffee commercials, was of Indian descent and made his initial athletic fame as a multisports star at the Carlisle Indian School. It was one of the first movies to portray the American Indian in a somewhat positive light.

Of course, they didn’t get an Indian actor to portray Thorpe. They got Burt Lancaster. In those days -- and sadly, to this day -- the most famous Indian is Tonto, played by the late Jay Silverheels, himself an Indian. Tonto was loyal, brave -- there’s that word again -- and, like most Indians depicted by Hollywood before Costner’s “Dances With Wolves,” the strong, silent type. Things aren’t going well for the Braves. Here they are, in their first World Series since moving to Atlanta from Milwaukee 25 years ago, and they get to the Metrodome and hundreds of Native Americans are outside the main gate carrying signs saying things like “500 Years of Oppression is Enough,” “No Native People Mascots” and “Stop the Tomahawk Chop.”

Now they’re down 0-2, and designated Braves’ first lady Jane Fonda, who was arrested in 1970 for joining a protest with 100 Native Americans, has recalled her radical roots and has promised to stop doing the Tomahawk Chop. If only making peace with the North Vietnamese had been that easy, right Jane?

Call me insensitive, it’s hard to get worked up over Atlanta’s baseball team calling itself the Braves and its fans doing the Tomahawk Chop.

Many things have been done to unfairly disgrace America’s Indians. But this ain’t one of them.