The Atlanta Braves, the second-best baseball franchise of the 1990s and early 2000s after the New York Yankees, capped a lengthy rebuilding project with a victory over the Houston Astros in this year’s World Series. These new-look Braves, which began winning National League East titles in 2018, recalled the worst-to-first Braves of 1991 in that each core group took four full seasons to claim a world championship. Both dynastic iterations of the Braves also featured an energized fan base that swung their arms forward in a chopping motion, the “tomahawk chop,” in recognition of momentum shifts or superlative plays.
This celebratory gesture, like the team’s nickname, may not be long for the sporting landscape. The Atlanta version of the tomahawk chop appeared in 1991 and quickly drew ire from Native American tribes and activists. Its origins in Braves lore have sometimes been traced to Deion Sanders, who had gone to college at Florida State University, where fans of the Seminoles, a nickname that has endured thanks to the approval by the actual Seminole tribe, performed the chop, which received neither Seminole approval nor even university sanction. The Sanders connection is tenuous, but the fact remains that organist Carolyn King’s repetition of the “tomahawk song” led to astronomical sales of foam tomahawks at Fulton County Stadium. The history of Turner Field, which replaced Fulton County Stadium in 1997 before closing in 2016, occurred entirely against the backdrop of the chop and concluded its tenure as Atlanta’s home field with a fan-led “final chop.”
Aside from three short playoff runs in the early 2010s, there was little to chop about in Atlanta during the period between the dissolution of the franchise’s original title-winning core in 2005 and its resurgence in 2018. As the Braves’ fortunes rose, so too did public concern about the chop, which led St. Louis Cardinals pitcher and Cherokee Nation member Ryan Helsley to remark during the 2019 playoffs that “it’s a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general.” The National Congress of American Indians issued several harsh denunciations during this year’s playoffs, urging Fox to refrain from showing the chop on television even as former president Donald Trump and wife Melania showed up to participate in one.
Since the chop’s emergence in 1991, Atlanta Braves officials have defended not only the team’s nickname but the persistence of a gesture that, not coincidentally, moves a whole lot of merchandise. And MLB has backed them, right up until this month, when commissioner Rob Manfred stated that the Atlanta-area Native American community “is wholly supportive of the Braves program, including the chop.” Such support means something — right up until the moment it doesn’t, as the examples of the Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians) and Washington Football Team (formerly the Redskins) indicate. Both teams held the line on their nicknames, quite vigorously in the case of Washington in light of its more obviously pejorative connotation, until they no longer could.
Strangely enough, the Atlanta Braves and the Washington Redskins nicknames share various points of connection. The Braves, playing in Boston and having cycled through a host of nicknames such as the Red Stockings (the franchise predates today’s Red Sox by 40 years, having been founded in 1871), Doves, Rustlers, and Beaneaters, finally settled on “Braves” in 1912 because then-owner James Gaffney constituted one of the “braves” of the Tammany Hall political machine in New York, which used Native American imagery on various seals and symbols. They have operated under that nickname ever since, save for a four-year interlude as the “Boston Bees.” Prior to relocating to Washington, the football team, also initially known as the Braves, played their games at Fenway Park and effectively melded the Braves and Red Sox nicknames into “Redskins,” completing the package with coach William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, a former Carlisle Indian football player of now-disputed Native American ancestry.
Such nicknames, uncomfortable as they sound to certain audiences in 2021, nevertheless contain volumes upon volumes of cultural history. The Cleveland Indians landed upon their moniker after an 11-year run as the “Naps” in honor of star second baseman Napoleon Lajoie, turning back the clock to revive the “Indians” nickname that had been applied to the defunct American Association version of the team, the Cleveland Spiders, in recognition of the play of Louis Sockalexis, a member of the Penobscot tribe who briefly excelled on the diamond until complications from alcoholism brought a premature end to his career.
Lacking the sort of formal arrangement that the Florida State Seminoles have with the Seminole tribe, the Atlanta Braves likely recognize that the alteration of their nickname and the end of their fan-led chop are faits accomplis. These traditions may not disappear today or even next year, but we should assume they are on the way out. The process of dispensing with Native American team nicknames, which began in the early 1970s with Stanford University and Dartmouth College moving from “Indians” to “Cardinal” and “Big Green,” respectively, only goes in one direction, little different than the effacing of various “Lost Cause” statues and monuments that once dotted the landscape of the South.
As a historian, I keenly understand that the pastness of the past, whether good or ill, always remains at risk of disappearance, of forgetting, of being enveloped by an endless present piled up atop our screens and before our eyes. And as a native of southwestern Pennsylvania whose family relocated to the tidewater region of North Carolina during my childhood, the fast-rising Atlanta Braves and their “tomahawk chop” through my beloved 1991 and 1992 Pittsburgh Pirates puzzled me as much as the Confederate statues I encountered in places such as Richmond. This was cultural baggage, certainly, but it was also cultural connective tissue — the stuff of living history, vivified ghosts recalling whatever this region had once been and perhaps still aspired to become.
But the Braves, unlike the statues, represented a positive force for regional unity. If you, like me, lived in some forgotten hamlet halfway between Richmond and Atlanta during the late 1990s, you had little in the way of professional sports to watch save NASCAR, WCW pro wrestling, and the Braves — the latter two of which were actually owned by Atlanta media magnate Ted Turner and thus broadcast across the country on TBS, his nationwide cable channel.
At least in those days, that part of the South remained an alien country to people like me, not quite as impenetrable as the stuff of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction but nowhere near the barren monoculture that most parts of this country would eventually become. As I watched this iteration of the Braves seize the pennant and then the World Series, I felt as if I was witnessing the last gasp of a past that, once effaced, will disappear as if it had never happened at all. Had William Faulkner somehow survived into the present, he might have revised that line from Requiem for a Nun to read, “The past is never dead because we forgot it was alive in the first place.”
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
