On Indigenous Peoples' Day and The Cleveland Guardians
Or, why this Italian-American from Cleveland thinks we should let go of Columbus Day, and why he's glad the Cleveland Indians have a new name
Some nice Italian women dancing the Tarantella, Apollon Mokritsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Monday was Columbus Day in the United States. On Friday, President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples' Day. He also acknowledged Columbus Day as a celebration of Italian heritage. On October 3, the professional baseball team in Cleveland played their final game as the Cleveland Indians. Next year, they will return as the Cleveland Guardians.
These events may seem disparate to many but are inextricably linked to me. Both changes are the results of decades-long efforts by Indigenous people to stop using symbols and names referring to Indigenous people that are offensive to indigenous people. The changes are both examples of how culture evolves and changes over time, including what is socially acceptable and what is to be celebrated. They reflect an expansion of knowledge and understanding of historical events by increasing numbers of the populace. And both changes piss off lots and lots of people.
As an Italian-American born and raised in Cleveland, I’m intimately familiar with the part of the world that celebrated Columbus and cheered the Indians. I admittedly took a lot of pride in the fact that an Italian “discovered” America. I thought the Cleveland Indians was a name that honored a member of the Penobscot tribe, Louis Sockalexis, who played for the Cleveland Spiders in the late 1890s and is thought to have been the first professional Native American baseball player.
In a detailed and well-researched 2014 piece, longtime sports writer Joe Posnanski demonstrated that it’s neither wholly true, nor wholly false that the team was named after Sockalexis when they decided on the new moniker in 1915. But what is true is that the name was certainly not meant to honor him.
One: A year earlier, the Boston Braves had a miraculous season — coming from last place on July 4 to win the pennant — and so Native American names were in. Two: It was a glorious opportunity for HI-larious Native American jokes and race-specific cliches and insults that fit well in headlines. For instance, there was this one-liner in the Muskogee paper:
“If we were an Apache, we’d sue the Cleveland club for libel for naming that team Indians.”
You will notice there is no mention in this cartoon of Louis Sockalexis, nor was there in any of the national stories about the name change. In fact, in my national search of more than 300 national newspapers, I could not find a single mention of Louis Sockalexis in the entire year of 1915.
So like Posnanski, I was disabused of this notion.
I would also learn that Columbus was a genocidal religious fanatic who truly believed himself to be an instrument of God and who denied discovering the New World his entire life. Columbus’ voyage was premised on faulty mathematics. He thought Earth was much smaller than it is, and much smaller than his contemporaries believed. This miscalculation gave him the confidence that he could sail around the entire globe and reach the prized Indies. It’s a myth that Columbus was mocked for supposing the world was spherical. That was an accepted fact. Ancient Greeks had supposed Earth was spherical. He was laughed at because of his math. It wasn’t that people thought they’d sail off the earth into an unknown abyss, it was that they thought the sea was so vast they’d never make it to the other side. In order for Columbus to accept he’d discovered the New World, he’d have had to admit his initial calculations were wrong, and this is something he could not do. He also wasn’t the first European in North America. Norse settlements dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries have been discovered in Canada and North America.
It’s often said that antipathy toward Columbus is a fairly new phenomenon and that we’re applying 21st century morality to a 15th century explorer. But that simply isn’t true. A Spanish priest and contemporary of Columbus, Bartolome de las Casas, wrote History of the Indies, in which he shatters the notion that Columbus improved the state of things. In his book Columbus Day: A Clash of Myth and History, journalist Norman Solomon cites de las Casas at length:
The most important document of the era is the multivolume "History of the Indies" by Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish priest involved in the conquest of Cuba. After owning a plantation with Indian slaves, Las Casas had a change of heart and began recording what he'd witnessed.
He described a cooperative Indian society in a bountiful land, a generally peaceful culture that occasionally went to war with other tribes. Yet there'd been no subjugation of the kind brought by Columbus.
Writing in the early 1500s, Las Casas detailed how Indian people were basically worked to death -- "depopulated" -- with men in gold mines and women in the fields.
Las Casas witnessed Spaniards -- driven by "insatiable greed" -- "killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples" with "the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty." The systematic violence was aimed at preventing "Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings."
The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades," wrote Las Casas. "My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write."
It may be the case that nothing I’ve said up to this point is new to you. But I felt I had to get some of these foundational facts out of the way. What I really want to discuss is how symbols and icons and different objects' meanings evolve over time. Columbus and the name “Indians” and the logo “Chief Wahoo” for many Italians and baseball fans are mostly abstract icons that symbolize “Italian-ness” or being a fan. They aren’t literal representations of a Genoese explorer or Indigenous culture. These things mean different things to different people, and that’s not a justification but merely an observation and a reality.
The problem is, they aren’t abstract icons to millions of other people. To Indiginous peoples’ they are hurtful and offensive symbols of colonialism, genocide, and abuse. To even say Columbus “discovered” anything is an erasure of the people who were already living on this side of the planet.
Holding onto symbols that are hurtful to many, and only have abstract value to others, masks actual history we could learn from. Italians in America have benefitted from a decades-long societal evolution where we have come to be seen as “white.” It shouldn’t matter if a group of people is white or not, but it’s undeniable that it does matter. What Columbus Day masks is a time before Italians were considered white—a time that Italians could embrace and use to develop empathy and solidarity with minority groups for whom discrimination has never stopped. But, in order to do that we have to examine the origins of Columbus Day.
On March 14th, 1891, 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans. The murders were in retaliation for the murder of David Hennessey, the police commissioner who had been gunned down in October of the previous year. According to a witness at the time, as Hennessey lay dying, he was asked who shot him, and he said “Dagos.” Anti-italian sentiment was common at this time. Hundreds of Italians were rounded up by police. There were 19 indictments, and ultimately nine men were charged, resulting in six not guilty verdicts and three mistrials. The general public was not pleased, a mob formed, and the following people were lynched:
James Caruso
Loreto Comitz
Rocco Geraci
Joseph Macheca
Antonio Marchesi
Pietro Monasterio
Emmanuele Polizzi
Frank Romero
Antonio Scaffidi
Charles Traina
The story of the lynchings, and the response to them, deserves attention in its own right. A New York Times story published March 15th, 1891—the next day—was headlined “CHIEF HENNESSY AVENGED; ELEVEN OF HIS ITALIAN ASSASSINS LYNCHED BY A MOB. AN UPRISING OF INDIGNANT CITIZENS IN NEW-ORLEANS -- THE PRISON DOORS FORCED AND THE ITALIAN MURDERERS SHOT DOWN.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who of course would go on to be President of the United States, wrote in a letter to his sister Anne that “Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.”
This, obviously, is real discrimination. A fairly well-known scene in a much-disparaged episode of The Sopranos depicting caporegime Silvio Dante ruminating about anti-Italian discrimination is not. In the scene, Silvio makes the classic mistake of thinking the anger towards celebrating Columbus is anger at Italian-Americans, which it is not.
It’s worth pointing out that the perceived slight the crew feels turns into actual violence towards Indigenous people.
In 2019, Brett Staples published an article in the New York Times with a decidedly different story to tell: How Italians Became ‘White’: Vicious Bigotry, Reluctant Acceptance: An American Story. The piece, which I highly recommend, recounts how Columbus Day was in part an effort by then-President Benjamin Harrison to ease tensions with Italians and the Italian government itself. He writes:
The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated on Monday — was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record.
Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.
Also in 1892, the United States government paid $25,000 in reparations to the victims' families. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Tuskegee Institute has identified at least 3,446 Black people and 1,299 white people who were lynched between 1882 and 1964, with the peak occurring in the 1890s. The United States has never paid out reparations to Black families for slavery.
Sometime after he arrived in America and before my grandfather was born, my great-grandpa Giuseppe Ragazzo1 changed the family name from Ragazzo to Rager. The name change was to help him get a job. I never met my great-grandpa, so I can’t ask him why he did this or how it made him feel. But I think it sucks that he felt he had to change his name to be more American. When I was in elementary school, my dad decided we were going to change our name back to Ragazzo. I left school one summer as Joe Rager and I came back as Joe Ragazzo. I know I’m fortunate that I don’t have to be afraid to be who I am. It doesn’t seem like it’s asking very much for everyone to have that luxury and privilege.
I’m extremely proud of my Italian heritage. I love everything about it except maybe the propensity to be quite short. I love being from Cleveland and I loved growing up in the ‘90s watching baseball. There was nothing better in the entire world to me than eating spaghetti and watching baseball.
We should stop celebrating Columbus and embracing him as a great Italian. There are other ways to celebrate Italian heritage. And I wish people would embrace the Cleveland Guardians. To be clear, I hate the actual name “Guardians.” Super lame. But I think change is a good idea.
I get that it’s hard. Change is hard. I don’t dismiss the idea that when you let go of these things, it’s like letting go of a piece of your identity. But I’d encourage you to think about it like this: Almost everyone in America, if you go back far enough, was subject to discrimination and abuse. It stopped through the changing of the culture, and that took real effort and a lot of people weren’t happy about it.
Columbus and the name “Cleveland Indians” are both shrouded in myths meant to make them sound better than they are. Both minimize the suffering and pain experienced by Indigenous people. In the case of Columbus, it also masks the pain and suffering experienced by Italians. We can let go of our adoration of Columbus and celebrate Italian heritage in other ways, and perhaps the best way to honor that heritage is by acknowledging the common experiences that immigrants and Indigenous people have both suffered throughout the course of American history. Rather than continuing to push away those who seem like a threat to our “established” culture, we can embrace them and evolve our culture, thereby strengthening and developing our relationships towards each other.
I know I just wrote about “not knowing your great-grandparents.” I know this one.