By Lori Lesko
When Bruce Kafer was a little boy growing up in Berea, he wondered why he “looked different”, why his skin was darker than the other kids’. His adoptive mother told him he was born an American Indian.
“I didn’t know any more about my Native American heritage than the typical Indian stereotypes of feather headdresses, bows and arrows and Thanksgiving,” said Kafer, an outreach coordinator at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Brecksville.
He eventually learned his birth mother, Norma, was from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and after seeing the resemblance, Kafer felt connected to the Oglala Lakota community. He also felt the first stab of discrimination, from seeing that some homes on “the Rez” had no indoor plumbing to “the looks” he felt while dining out in town with his wife Cyrene, a light-skinned Italian-American.
Named Walks with Shield in a sacred ceremony, Kafer said he is “affirmed as a warrior for my people.” He has devoted his life to educating others on the prejudice and racism directed toward Native American.
That’s why Kafer wants the Cleveland baseball club to change its’ name, “Indians,” and retire team mascot, Chief Wahoo, a cartoonish depiction of an Indian brave, to its final hunting ground.
He is not alone. This past spring, American Indians and members of the Catholic community came together to celebrate the 10th Annual Conference on Racist Imagery in Popular Culture at Baldwin-Wallace College, on the eve of the Cleveland baseball team’s home opener.
Three diocesan Sisters of Notre Dame watched the traditional dance and music and heard Steve Blake, of the Red Lake Nation of Anishinabe from Minneapolis-St. Paul pray in his native tongue.
Notre Dame Sister Mary Jessica Karlinger has no American Indian bloodlines, but as a retired high school history teacher, has long been moved by the injustices against Native Americans since the Mayflower and inaccurate historical accounts which have distorted the picture. She explains that although she does not speak for her community, the Sisters of Notre Dame have been supportive of her work.
“I am struck by the number of times I have heard Native people say they feel shamed by the stereotyped caricatures they see of themselves … the silly use of things sacred to them: paint, feathers, the drum, song, dance. There are anecdotal accounts of Native children telling their parents that after experiencing a Wahoo day at school, they are ashamed to be Indian,” Sister Karlinger said.
Kafer and Lani Moran-Samqua of the Red Lake Nation, Minnesota have been there, done that.
“So what is it like for a Native American to grow up in a school that has an Indian mascot?” asked Kafer who felt uncomfortable watching the Berea High School “Brave” dance at halftime. “It negatively affects your self-esteem.”
Moran-Samqua, like many children living on Reservations, were sent away to boarding schools by the federal government to learn the ways of the mainstream society. They were forbidden to speak their Native language or celebrate their cultural heritage.
A few years ago Moran-Samqua accompanied several youngsters to Arrowhead Stadium for a Kansas City Chiefs football game.
“The kids were uncomfortable hearing insults like, ‘those lousy Chiefs’ and ‘kill the Chiefs’” she said. “We never went back.”
Notre Dame Sister Mary Renee Pastor teacher at St. Francis School on Superior Avenue and 71st Street, said that working in the African-American community since 1984, has made her sensitive to racism and that has extended to Chief Wahoo.
“The fans of Cleveland would back that team no matter what the ball club’s name was,” Sister Pastor said.
Notre Dame Sister Mary Luisanne Breen has been devoted over the years to non-violent protests at Greater Cleveland abortion clinics.
“The Indian issue and Right to Life issue are all related,” Sister Breen said. “Everyone is made in the image and likeness of God—from conception to death.”
Sister Breen said she “had been thinking about what they could rename the team and I thought ‘Muskateers’ would be good because of being one for all and all for one.”
Kafer pointed out that Chief Wahoo is used as a marketing gimmick to sell team merchandise.
“The reality is, the larger white society still has the power to ignore realities for Native Americans, and is also motivated by capitalism,” Kafer said. “Chief Wahoo is one of biggest sellers of sports logo and ‘memorabilia.’”
Team spokesman Bob DiBiasio said the club reviewed the corporate use of Native American symbols a few years ago, and concluded that “neither the ‘Indian’ team name or its Chief Wahoo logo was meant in disrespect to anyone.
“We believe that it’s an individual perspective issue,” DiBiasio said. “If something is not meant to be demeaning, how can it be demeaning? When people look at the Chief Wahoo logo, they think baseball.”

God-given dignity
Not everyone.
In 1993, the diocesan Commission on Catholic Community Action (CCCA) called for the end to the Chief Wahoo mascot, declared offensive to the religious and cultural heritages, as well as the continued use of the name “Indians.”
The resolution further states that Catholic social teaching emphasizes the God-given dignity of every person, recognizes the importance of respecting the sacred symbols of all people and opposes stereotypes that demean and degrade.
The CCCA document also cites a 1984 Pastoral Letter issued by the Black Bishops of the U.S., which states that without justice, any meaningful reconciliation is impossible. It also refers to a 1979 Pastoral Letter of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, urging its members to “try to influence the attitudes of other by rejecting racial stereotypes and racial slurs and jokes.”
The CCCA resolution further urges, “Cleveland’s professional baseball team to discontinue the Chief Wahoo logo and re-open the dialogue regarding its use of the name “Indians” as matters of justice and sensitivity to Native Americans.”
Former CCCA member Jerome Walcott, currently executive director, Lake County Catholic Commission, said that a coalition of community members and Native Americans met “more than once” with public relations staffers of former team owner Richard Jacobs’ staff.
The ball club hinted that Chief Wahoo might begin to be phased out--and it did seem Chief Wahoo was becoming less of a presence, he said.
But after Larry Dolan bought the team, Chief Wahoo “became more popular than ever” and the coalition had “lost its focus,” Walcott said.
Sister Karlinger had hoped the resolution would open doors to understanding.
Instead in 2002, an anonymous donor who felt strongly about justice for Native Americans provided funding to the Notre Dame College Tolerance Resource Center, to provide books, films and speakers to dispel myths of American Indians.
In March 2003 Charlene Teters, a Native American artist and activist from the Spokane Nation, presented her documentary, “Home of the Brave” at the Tolerance Center. She also spoke at the Baldwin-Wallace forum on ridding the American culture of racist mascots.
Sister Patricia Marshall, director of social justice office of the Sisters of Blessed Sacrament motherhouse in Bensalem, Pa., spoke to Cleveland’s Committee of 500 Years in 2001 about negative stereotypes in the corporate world. Chief Wahoo not only insults Native Americans, but hurts those who perpetuate the symbol, she said.
“As Catholics, we believe along with other Christians, Jews and Muslims, that we are all sons and daughters of the same God; and as brothers and sisters, we should respect each other,” Sister Marshall said.
“The mindset that it is okay to use Chief Wahoo for our financial benefit … is not the teaching of Jesus which is to love one another,” she said.

Opening doors to understanding
Navajo Chris Begay, chair of the 500 Years Committee, teaches Native American culture and dance in Greater Cleveland and often protests against Chief Wahoo on the designated spot at the Northeast Quadrant of Ontario Street.
On a Friday evening last season, Begay held a sign with a cartoon-like white man, accompanied by the words: “Cleveland Caucasians.”
That kind of reverse racism makes people see Chief Wahoo in a different light, he said.
Activist Ferne Clements, secretary of the 500 Years Committee and member of the Racial Justice Ministry Team, United Church of Christ said, “Most people just ignore us, but once a drunken fan walked by and challenged, ‘Why don’t you Indians go back to Wyoming?’” Clements said. “But the worst is, when parents try to shield their children from us.”
At age 10, Begay fought a classmate in a Cleveland public school who asked whether he was black or white. “He said, ‘You can’t be an Indian. They were all wiped out a long time ago,’ Begay said. “If we can’t define who we are, how can we address our major issues?”
Bill Schubmehl, a member of St. Malachi Church and the 500 Years Committee, has protested Chief Wahoo every Opening Day since 2000 when he learned a cousin was Native American.
To name a ball team after a race of people “is just plain wrong,” said Schubmehl who took tickets and passed out flyers at the March 30 event.
A Cleveland woman known as Faye Yellow Eagle Brings Them was 14 when she boarded a train in Rosebud, South Dakota with her parents and six brothers and sisters, bound for Cleveland, one of eight cities designated for little publicized Indian Relocation Program. The plan, which began in the 1950s and lasted into the 1970s was aimed at breaking up Indian reservations and assimilating Native Americans in the mainstream society.
One of about 2,000 American Indians representing 75 tribes living in Greater Cleveland, Brings Them remembers the train stopping at the Terminal Tower and walking up the ramp outside to see impossibly tall buildings on Public Square and people walking in a big hurry.
“We were from a land of the Plains, of wide open spaces,” she said. “They put us up in a hotel on Euclid Avenue for awhile until about 20 to 30 families were relocated to the row houses at East 30th Street and Central Avenue.
“We didn’t follow baseball and mostly stayed inside because we didn’t know the territory,” she said. “It was kind of scary and we were all lonesome for home.”
Her parents and several siblings eventually returned to South Dakota.
Years later, her son’s fifth-grade teacher taunted that he was “just a Wahoo,’” Brings Them said. “He would come home and cry that he hated school. When I found out I told the principal. My son called his new fifth grade teacher a pilgrim because he liked Indians.”
Sister Karlinger said, “Catholics as much as other people are comfortable with Indians as images on a TV screen or shirt, statues or bobble head dolls on a shelf, dancers at a powwow. We are not comfortable with the Indians who challenge our historic control over them, who resist our attempt to define their own reality for them.
There is a “disconnect” between what we say we believe about the dignity of every person and what we as Catholics in Northeast Ohio actually do when it comes to American Indians, Sister said.
Lesko is a freelance writer.