Those devotees of Exeter Chiefs who made a round trip of not far short of 1,000 miles to support their team against Glasgow Warriors yesterday, travelled with stentorian demands ringing in their ears. They were told by the host club what not to wear and what not to sing.
Al Kellock, of Glasgow Warriors, had asked Exeter fans “not to attend the game on Saturday [wearing] faux Native American headdresses” or to chant the Tomahawk Chop during the match. At Chiefs games, you see a good few fans wearing colourful homemade headdresses — just as wearing something colourful to identify with your team is two-thirds of the fun of going along in the first place.
A simple “please” in his baleful release was apparently beyond Kellock, nor did he say anything remotely welcoming to those engaged on the round trip to support rugby, to add to the occasion, and to add to Glasgow’s coffers.
“We are making this request out of respect for the Native American community, whose views on their imagery and cultural heritage we support, and the Glasgow Warriors supporters who have called for us to act on this matter.” He is alleging cultural appropriation.
“During this period,” Kellock continued, “several supporters asked that we ban headdresses and the Tomahawk Chop, and in October the Scottish Rugby Blog wrote an open letter reiterating these calls.” Not exactly a raging torrent of public reaction there, but all hail the “several”.
Exeter added the label “Chiefs” at the start of their existence as a Premiership club in waiting. The Chiefs label goes way back into Devon rugby history. Gradually, the number of headdresses has grown — some of them homemade, others wonderfully ornate — and the sound of the Tomahawk Chop often rings around the terraces, without the chopping actions familiar to decades of American sports crowds. It is just a simple chant.
Exeter are a wonderful club; passionate, considerate, charitable. It is crystal clear that nothing in their set-up is intended to make fun, to dishonour.
Cultural appropriation? Exactly when does cultural celebration, the sense of sharing and the sheer delight in different cultures, end and appropriation start? Where would we be in this world without the keenest interest in other cultures? Nowhere.
And where does it end? If wearing a toy headdress is appropriation then I can think of 100 other offences in sport alone. South African rugby players are famously interested in the Scottish rugby culture of earning money. They have come over in droves and qualified for Scotland under rugby’s shaky residential laws, and stood there in a line in their Scottish kit roaring Flower of Scotland before international matches. Then retired and gone home. Surely, through the Glasgow prism, that is one of the greatest instances of cultural appropriation that sport has seen?
In his outstanding documentary on the BBC last week, David Baddiel investigated what he described as the “toxic world of anger, hatred and outrage” which these days descends on anyone not espousing any cause, or rejecting any action, with the right level of anger, hatred and outrage and those who see malevolence at every turn.
Baddiel’s Jewishness alone has been enough for him to cop a horrific barrage of the worst kind of abuse. He also showed us more gruesome examples, such as that of the Smith family, who maintained a homely social media profile of fun and games, and in return their house was almost burned down. Does rugby really need to go down the route to banish, cancel and to drain itself of colour?
I have my own sense of anger, hatred and outrage. Some decades ago — and I can even remember where I was at the time — I read Dee Brown’s staggering Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. It is the story of the savaging of the Native American tribes, over the period of decades in the 19th century when they were driven out of their traditional hunting grounds and away from their traditional ways of life, by the palefaces, the American government and army. It is the greatest book I have ever read.
The brutality, the slaying of women and children, the merciless nature of it all, was almost impossible to absorb, and still is. So too the gullible reliance of the Indian chiefs on treaties they had signed, which proved utterly worthless within minutes of them signing.
These days, the deprivation of life in the reservations is still ghastly, the number of people of native Indian extraction who ascend into major posts is tiny. The number of dispossessed youngsters who are unemployed or on drugs or struggling in other ways is colossal.
Last week, it was impossible to find a Native American spokesman in any of their various bodies who would condemn fripperies when their people are depressed and dying. All these issues are just so vast. Surely to goodness we need all our energies for the real dark hearts of racism, violence, abuse, deprivation.
The last time England’s rugby team toured South Africa under apartheid, in 1984, everything felt uneasy because of the implied support it gave to the apartheid regime. I had written a few words against the tour, bought township rock music from Soweto, paid for a black family to take the Table Mountain cable car because they didn’t have enough. Ceaseless campaigning? No, horrible naivety.
When you saw apartheid at first hand, the shocking inequalities, visited the Hector Pietersen Memorial in Soweto, when you saw the old right-wing guard flourishing the old flags and the old anthems under the noses of the new ANC, all those bleeding heart gestures, sideline interventions, token banning of fripperies, seemed so pathetic.
Mr Kellock, it is all so infinitely deeper than your fruitless, humorless, bleeding-heart banning.
Perhaps Exeter should borrow a whole set of proper headdresses and put them on show at Sandy Park, together with an exhibition set up by Native American experts, revealing some of the history and some of the appalling tragedy. What they categorically do not need to do is change their happy culture in any way.
Glasgow Warriors are examining appalling history through a narrow slit, and therefore missing the whole point.
Those devotees of Exeter Chiefs who made a round trip of not far short of 1,000 miles to support their team against Glasgow Warriors yesterday, travelled with s
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