With just half a minute left in a Stanley Cup playoff game at Las Vegas on May 6, Golden Knights defenseman Zach Whitecloud took a check from behind. It was unnecessary. The game was decided, with Edmonton up three. So Whitecloud turned and slashed the arm of the offender, Oilers forward Klim Kostin, then shed his gloves and began to fight.
That was what you would expect of a 6-foot-2 athlete who weighs maybe half a stone over 200 pounds, playing in a adrenaline-fueled collision sport sometimes still governed on the ice by fisticuffs.
What you would not expect of such a man was what Whitecloud did a few days later.
But he is Native. First Nations. Born and reared in Brandon, Manitoba, a city about 30 miles from the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation reservation of a little more than 1,000 people. He considers it home. The reservation knows him as its son. Its council even picked up Whitecloud’s costs to play travel hockey as a kid. Sioux Valley Dakota is quite proud of its first son to make it to the NHL.
So when Whitecloud was apprised of ESPN announcer John Anderson making fun of his name while narrating highlights of the Las Vegas-Edmonton series, he spoke to Anderson — “In our culture, we were raised to be the first ones to reach out and offer help,” Whitecloud explained — and then faced the media about the affront.
He spoke haltingly for a little over five minutes. It was painful for him. It was equally agonizing to watch. At least if you have a heart.
“I’m proud of my culture. I’m proud of where I come from, where I was raised and who I was raised by,” Whitecloud said. “I carry my grandfather’s last name, and nothing makes me more proud than to be able to do that.”
But emotion began to overcome him. So he bowed his head and excused himself from the scrum to seek, as you could only imagine at that moment, some solitude.
Sticks and stones may break bones, but it was never true that words don’t hurt. They scorch. They impale. They damage.
It has been close to 20 years since the American Psychological Association cited growing scientific evidence as grounds to abolish our very American practice of appropriating Indigenous names and employing our imaginations of Native culture for sports. Its reason? Doing so is particularly harmful to Native children’s identity and self-esteem. And it’s damaging to the rest of us because it informs us that to be indecent toward others is something it never is — okay.
But a clinical diagnosis, a data dump, is hard to see and impossible to feel. What was revealed with Whitecloud was real. You saw it. You felt it. It was emotive.
“What they did with Mr. Whitecloud was mock his name, which is even worse,” Ronald F. Levant, a now-retired psychologist who as president of the APA in 2005 issued its famous declaration, told me Friday.
And how Whitecloud reacted, Levant said, “illustrates the depth of the hurt he was subjected to.”
Yet Whitecloud, 26, is in his fifth season in the premier hockey league in the world, where he must play against a franchise the league allows to use the image of a Native man’s head as its logo and a Native name as its moniker.
Sports should do better and can do better. But in just the past two weeks, we were reminded that sports can be as insensitive to the marginalized as ever.
West Virginia Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins spat homophobic remarks Monday toward a Catholic university’s fan base during an appearance on a Cincinnati radio station. His employer suspended him three games, trimmed $1 million off his annual salary and amended his contract from a multiyear deal to a year-by-year agreement.
Longtime Oakland A’s TV broadcaster Glen Kuiper uttered the racial slur for Black folks during a broadcast this month while discussing a visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. It was explained as a slip-of-the-tongue. Kuiper was removed from further broadcasts while NBC Sports California, which carries A’s games, reviews the incident, which to me sounded as if it was taking the public’s temperature. The internet, always undefeated, found what sounded like a second similar utterance from Kuiper.
Kansas City won the Super Bowl again amid protests from Native people to stop offending them with its name and fan hand gesture it calls the “Tomahawk chop,” which Kevin Gover, Pawnee and the undersecretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian, in my film “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” emphatically assures Native people don’t do.
And the Atlanta baseball team shows no signs it will stop using its illusory name for Native people, employing a tomahawk as a logo and encouraging its fans to mock Native people with the chop despite Cardinals reliever Ryan Helsley, who is Cherokee from Tahlequah, Okla., pleading with Atlanta during the playoffs a few years ago to, just, stop.
“It’s a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general,” Helsley said then. “Just depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way who aren’t intellectual. They are a lot of more than that.”
Making fun of Native people is part of Atlanta’s fan experience at its home games. Its executives should watch Whitecloud’s news conference.
And in and around Washington, D.C., after all the local NFL franchise has done to debase itself, suck the lifeblood out of its fan base yet finally rid itself of the last chapter of its racist past, some people, including in the media, have raised the specter of reviving the team’s racist old name. Incredible.
“With this comes an opportunity to allow … everyone to learn from this incident,” Whitecloud said, “ … move forward and make sure that these things don’t happen again.
“It’s just time for everyone to learn.”