More than just a sports book

Page 14

The American Indian Integration of Baseball

By Jeffrey Powers-Beck, University of Nebraska Press, 257 pages (hc)

$34.95 US

As Suzan Shown Harjo's fight with the Washington Redskins resumed in court in April, attention returned to the issue of Indian mascots and professional sports teams.

On April 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard oral arguments in Harjo et al. v. Pro-Football, Inc., the corporate name of the Washington, D.C. National Football League club.

In a court located near the new National Museum of the American Indian, the three-judge appeal court heard lawyers representing lead appellant Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, make the case that the Redskin's team name is offensive and racist. Team lawyers argued that the name has never been intended or used as a disparaging term. The court is expected to take several months to render a decision.

The Redskins aren't the only team that has angered Native Americans and Aboriginal people beyond the U.S. borders. The "tomahawk chop" employed by Atlanta Braves baseball fans has long been the target of demonstrations and complaints.

Many American sports fans just don't get what all the fuss is about. But a non-Native college professor who describes himself as a "literary historian with a strong interest in baseball and cultural diversity" might be able to help.

Jeffrey Powers-Beck has authored a definitive study of American (and Canadian) participation in what is called organized (or professional) baseball. He is a professor of English and the assistant dean of graduate studies at East Tennessee State University. His book, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, starts with an in-depth look at the racism that greeted Native ballplayers in the stands, the dugouts and in the press when they first ventured onto their fields of dreams.

Powers-Beck also researched, with the help of American Indian leaders and baseball researchers, all the Native players who have ever suited up for a pro-ball club. The list is not short-some 75 names since 1887-and includes such memorable names as Jim Thorpe, Cal McLish, Charles Bender, Louis Sockalexis, Allie Reynolds, Zack Wheat and Rudy York, among others. Ojibway hurler Elijah E. Pinnance of Walpole Island in southern Ontario is also included.

Powers-Beck writes this Canadian right-hander pitched just two games for the Philadelphia Athletics (later to become the Oakland A's) in the fall of 1903. He pitched two games in the big leagues, allowing five hits in seven innings while earning a save and posting an earned run average of 2.57.

"For these meager statistics, Pinnance has never been mentioned in any biographical encycloped

ia of major league players," Powers-Beck wrote. "Yet when the pitcher made his debut against the Washington Senators on Sept. 14, 1903, Pinnance became the first full-blood American Indian to play baseball in the major leagues, an honor often bestowed upon Moses Yellow Horse of the 1921 Pittsburgh Pirates."

Elijah E. Pinnance had just pitched three times in two days down in the minor leagues and had been struck on the elbow by a batted ball before getting the call to "the show." For his big league debut, all he did was come in for the eighth inning and save the game for the Athletics, despite all that.

The author notes that players were taught to play ball in the residential schools and took to it with a vengeance. Throughout the 176-page book (with a complement of another 36 pages of short player bios and other information) the theme remains constant: Native Americans are and have been subjected to a unique brand of racism.

Jeffrey Powers-Beck compared it to the racism experienced by African-Americans after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first black man to play in the majors with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. He concluded the two things were not the same. He takes issue with the conclusion reached b Harold Seymour, author of Baseball: The People's Game, who wrote that, "Prejudice towards blacks was racial, but towards Indians was mainly cultural."

"With all respect to Seymour," Powers-Beck argued, "the prejudice against American Indian athletes was both racial and cultural. The first ballplayers to hear 'Nigger!' from the stands of major league stadiums were not African-Americans, but were Indians."

It is in the epilogue of the book where the author takes on the issue of mascots. Writing about the Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo and the Braves' tomahawk chop, he writes, "They are the familiar sights and sounds of racism disguised as entertainment."

He points out that something very similar to the tomahawk chop greeted Louis Sockalexis when he played for the Cleveland Spiders in 1897.

'While the racial slurs that fans once hurled at Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby (another early African-American major leaguer) in 1947 are now considered anathema in American public life, the racial mockery launched against Sockalexis still lives and helps to sell caps, jerseys, souvenir towels and plastic tomahawks in Cleveland and Atlanta," he wrote.

And, one might add, in Washington, D.C.

The book is not an easy read. It's not at all a typical lightweight sports book. But it is chock-full of interesting history and facts that no baseball fan that cares about fully understanding the true history of America's pastime should be without. And, needless to say, it is an important chronicle of Native athletic achievement and history.