On the Cleveland Indians team name issue, I’m not concern-trolling at all when I say I’m completely unconvinced that this now decades-long campaign to erase ‘Indians’ from the imaginations of American children going forward will aid or benefit any actual American Indians.

The main beneficiaries, clearly, are the 25-54 year old largely white, male, well-off demographic who patronize major league sports product: they will now no longer be made to feel a minor discomfort. They can buy more product with a clean conscience.

If you look at any reasonable sampling of TV/movies about kids from the ‘50s/‘60s (as I do!) it’s pretty jarring how prominent a role ‘The Indians’ seemed to play, or at least was portrayed as playing, in the imagination landscape of kids.

Whether & to what extent this purported fascination with The Indians was synthetic (for marketing purposes), vs ‘organic’ (whatever that might mean) I can’t say. I do say however that just erasing Indians from Our Culture altogether doesn’t seem like a huge win to me.

It occurs to me in thinking about this that the media-push of The Indians on kids back in those days *may have been a politically-correct one*. If kids needed Bad-Guy foils for their play-acting, probably 1800s Indians were seen as better than actual, living Germans. Or Norks.

The Cleveland Indians got their name, I gather, sometime in the 1910s, when the late skirmishes against them were still fresh in some minds. I imagine The Indians would have had the status of a tamed, but now honored, former enemy. Hence all the sports (=simulated warfare) teams.

One or two generations later, this tamed but honored status was, successfully it appears, passed along to kids for their “Cowboys & Indians” games. And so Indians had their, however bowdlerized, spot in American culture.

Now that’s just gone. For honored/defeated enemies we now must (to be safe and offend no one) turn to completely fictionalized sci fi peoples (“Klingons”).

As time has passed this trope has become more one dimensional and thin. Do kids really care about/fear “The Kree”? What’s that line from Guardians of the Galaxy about how the enemy race is thought of as “paper people”? Are those not shades of The Indians we’re showing our kids?

Couple years ago I helped out in the kid’s classroom around Christmastime, for a Gingerbread House activity. Except (of course) they didn’t call it that, they pretended it was about building some traditional Native American house.

Congrats. Totally helps

So nowadays, where can someone see The Indians in Our Culture? In fake/made-up confusing activities & facades that serve mostly as cultural ‘beards’ to cover what, in previous times, were traditions we passed along but are now embarrassed about. OR

You can still, of course, tune in to ‘prestige’ TV/movie product (‘Yellowstone’) to see Indians as downtrodden drunkards who live in trailer parks but might find their place via scheming and gangsterism.

What you can’t ever portray, or convey, least not to kids, is the image of The Indians as honored and worthy former enemies who have a fascinating honor culture and admirable, fearsome bravery. Because that’s ‘offensive’ and ‘racist’.

Actual American Indians helped in this process of cultural erasure & replacement of all ‘offensive’ references to them: approximately zero.