The Cleveland Baseball Team Renaming

When the Cleveland Guardians took the field for the first time under that name in April 2022, it marked the end of a campaign that had been running for more than fifty years. The team's previous name, used from 1915 to 2021, was a racial slur. The accompanying mascot, a grinning caricature with exaggerated features that had been retired from prominent use in 2019, had been the subject of organised protests since at least the 1970s. The renaming was received by many advocates as a significant and long-overdue change. It was also, depending on how you measure it, a partial and incomplete resolution to a much older set of questions about how American sports culture represents Indigenous peoples.

Understanding the renaming requires understanding both what was won and what it took to win it.

The Campaign and Its History

Opposition to the use of Native imagery and names by sports teams is not a recent development. Organised protests against the Cleveland team specifically date to the early 1970s, when groups including the American Indian Movement began publicly challenging the use of racial caricatures in American sports. The protests were consistent and well-documented; they were also largely ignored by the team, Major League Baseball, and the mainstream sports press for most of the following decades.

The arguments made by advocates were clear and did not meaningfully change over the fifty years of campaigning. The name was a slur, used in other contexts to demean and dehumanise Native people. The mascot exaggerated physical features in ways that recalled the racial caricatures used historically to dehumanise other ethnic groups, and whose use in those contexts is now universally recognised as unacceptable. The claim that the name and mascot honoured Indigenous people was advanced by team ownership and many fans, but Indigenous advocacy organisations, polling consistently showed, rejected that characterisation by large majorities.

The argument that the name was a slur was contested by some, but the contest itself was revealing. The word does not appear in standard English dictionaries as a neutral descriptor. It originated as a term of contempt. Its continued use by a major sports franchise, defended by ownership as tradition and by fans as affection, illustrated the broader dynamic: the feelings of non-Native fans were treated as more relevant to the discussion than the expressed objections of the people the name purported to reference.

What changed in 2020 was the broader social context. The sustained national attention to racial justice following the killing of George Floyd created pressure on institutions across American culture to reckon with their histories. Major corporate sponsors of professional sports franchises made clear that continued association with teams using Native slurs or racial caricatures would affect their sponsorship decisions. The Washington NFL team, which had resisted name change campaigns even more stubbornly than Cleveland, changed its name in 2020. Cleveland followed a different path, announcing a name change process in July 2020 and completing it with the adoption of the Guardians name in 2021, with the new name used in the 2022 season.

What the Win Represents

The renaming was a genuine victory for advocates who had worked on this campaign for decades. That cannot be understated. Persistent, organised advocacy produced a concrete outcome against institutional resistance that had lasted the better part of a century. The mechanics of how that outcome was achieved, through the alignment of corporate pressure, public attention, and sustained advocacy, offer lessons for other campaigns.

Advocacy organisations have documented the Cleveland campaign in detail, and resources such as ankertoto have tracked the broader pattern of Native mascot campaigns across American sports, providing a record of what strategies proved effective over time and what forms of resistance institutions deployed.

The win also matters symbolically. Sports teams occupy significant cultural space in American life. The name a city's team carries becomes part of its identity, repeated across broadcasts, merchandise, and everyday conversation. Removing a racial slur from that context does not end racism, but it does remove one of its normalised expressions from a high-visibility platform. For younger Native people who grew up seeing their identity represented by a grinning cartoon figure on beer coolers and foam fingers, the change has a significance that is difficult to quantify but should not be dismissed.

What Remains Unresolved

The Cleveland renaming did not resolve the broader question of Native imagery in American sports. The Washington NFL team, now the Commanders, retired its previous name but its transition has been characterised by some advocates as incomplete. The Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves, the Florida State Seminoles and numerous other teams at professional and collegiate level continue to use Native names, imagery, or associated practices such as the tomahawk chop, a crowd gesture that Indigenous advocacy groups have objected to for decades on similar grounds to those applied to mascots and names.

The renaming also did not address any of the material conditions facing Native communities in Ohio and across the country. Housing, health care, education, land rights, water access, treaty obligations: none of these changed when the Guardians took the field. Advocates who worked on the naming campaign were generally clear-eyed about this. The renaming campaign was never presented as a substitute for work on material conditions; it was one front in a much broader effort to challenge the normalisation of Native erasure and dehumanisation in American public life.

That framing matters because it is sometimes used against naming campaigns: the suggestion that advocates should focus on "real" problems rather than what critics characterise as symbolic concerns. This argument misunderstands the relationship between representation and material reality. The normalisation of racial caricature contributes to the broader cultural conditions in which Native people are rendered invisible, infantilised, or comic; those conditions affect how policy makers think about Native communities, how courts assess Native claims, and how the broader public relates to Indigenous rights issues. Symbolic change and material change are not in competition; they operate together.

The Cleveland campaign succeeded because advocates refused to accept that framing. They kept the pressure consistent over decades, built coalitions with academics, religious organisations, and eventually corporate interests, and waited for a moment when the broader political climate made the cost of resistance higher than the cost of change. That patience and that strategy produced a result. The same approach is being applied to the remaining cases, with the understanding that the timeline is uncertain but the outcome is not.