Five Oklahoma Groups Want the Atlanta Braves to Say Sorry for Hosting Georgia Tribe Night
OKLAHOMA CITY — A group of well-known tribe leaders from Oklahoma want the Atlanta Braves to say sorry for celebrating “Georgia Tribe Night” at their stadium last month.
A resolution passed by the Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Tribes on Tuesday asked the Major League Baseball team to say sorry for “honoring fraudulent groups that pose as tribes without federal recognition” and asked the team to have “meaningful consultations” with federally recognized tribes on “how to properly engage with Native Americans.”
The Council is made up of leaders from the Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Muscogee (Creek) people. It speaks for about 815,000 Native Americans living in the United States.
The Braves wrote on X on June 29 that they were “honored to welcome representatives from Native American groups in the state of Georgia, including the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns, the Cherokee of Georgia Tribal Council, the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee, and the Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe.”
574 tribes and Alaska Native groups are recognized by the federal government. These include the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina.
They are not the three groups that the Braves honor. They are recognized by the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns, which is made up of nine people and is supposed to deal with the “concerns of Georgia’s American Indians.”
A Braves spokesperson was asked to speak by email but did not respond.
Cherokee Nation chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said it was “offensive” and “tone deaf at the very least” for a business like the Atlanta Braves baseball team to support groups that are “posing as Cherokee tribes” on his people’s ancestral grounds.
In their declaration, the Tribes say that their ancestral lands included most of the southeast United States, such as Georgia and the Atlanta area. The government moved the tribes against their will.
He said that the Braves already have a bad reputation for how they treat Native American culture, especially when it comes to how their fans use the “Tomahawk chop” sign and how they brand themselves with the weapon.
Indigenous groups and supporters are angry and upset about the team’s name, the fake battle cry, and the phrase “Tomahawk chop.” They say it supports racist stereotypes and doesn’t truly reflect Native culture.
In the past few years, both the Washington Commanders football team and the Cleveland Guardians baseball team have changed their names. However, the Braves have refused to do the same.
Hoskin said that the Braves’ choice to host the tribe night event shows that the team doesn’t care about problems that are important to Native communities, like their sovereignty and their own cultures.
“What the crowd doesn’t understand is that by supporting these groups, the Atlanta Braves are insulting real Indian tribes that speak for real Indians who have a history of suffering with the state of Georgia,” Hoskin said. “But I think they wasted their time and resources by doing that.” They know where to find us if they want to get better.
He said that the Georgia Legislature’s efforts to recognize the three groups do not make them tribal bodies, and there is no good way to make a “state tribe.”
Hoskin said that the Braves’ choice to label the groups as “Cherokee” goes against the work of generations of federally recognized Cherokee people to remind the country of how they were taken away against their will and that there are 468,000 Cherokee citizens living all over the country. Approximately 2,400 of them live in Georgia.
“We are trying to really correct hundreds of years of false information, sometimes on purpose and sometimes to whitewash history,” Hoskin said. “And it gets harder when these groups exist and when a multimillion-dollar company with a lot of power and, to be honest, a lot of responsibility that it’s not exercising spreads this lie in front of tens of thousands of people.” “It hurts feelings.”
Rhonda Bennett, who is on the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns and is council chair for the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee, said the Braves don’t need to say sorry.
“We’re grateful for the praise,” Bennett said.
She said that the tribe’s ancestors stayed in North Georgia after the Cherokee were forced to move to Oklahoma Territory.
Bennett said that the tribe fought for government recognition for almost 45 years but was turned down because they couldn’t show that they got together after being moved. Tribal members who broke a state law against gathering could go to jail, be sent back to Oklahoma, or even be put to death.
She said that a lot of the 700 people who live there now are related to the first chief justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court in Indian Territory.
She said of Cherokee history, “It’s a very sad story.” “It’s sadder when people fight with each other.”
Georgia officials were unfair to her family for many years.
“The Cherokee have had to fight someone every year since the 1800s.” Bennett said, “We don’t want to fight with each other at all.” “We want our Tribe and its history to be respected and kept alive. We also want to live in peace with the Cherokee Nation.”
She said she still has hope that Hoskin will want to meet her someday to talk about their Cherokee history and what brings them together.
Bennett said, “We are still here, and we have been since the beginning of time.”