Dianna Hunt
ICT
It was dubbed the Indian World Series, with everything you’d find at a World Series today.
War whoops. Tomahawks. Painted faces. Racial slurs.
The two Indigenous players in the midst of that storied game in 1911 — pitcher Charles Bender and catcher John Meyers — are now featured in a new illustrated children’s book by acclaimed Cherokee author and poet Traci Sorell and Kickapoo illustrator/writer/musician/actress Arigon Starr.
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The book, “Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series,” examines the 1911 series from a historical perspective but also presents the ongoing insults and slurs that Native players in a multitude of sports have endured for more than 100 years.
Sorell and Starr brought a shared love of baseball inspired by their mothers to the project, as well as a desire to tell the untold story.
“My hope is that books like this coming out into the world help young people to see, ‘Oh, things can change,’” Sorell told ICT.
“She said, ‘Native’ and ‘baseball,’ and I said, “Where do I sign?’” Starr said.
Sorell, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, has written a number of acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction for young people, including two books that received recent honors from the American Library Association Youth Media Award, “Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Gold Ross,” and “We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know.”
Sorell is a two-time winner of the Sibert Medal and an Orbis Pictus honoree, and is an award-winning audiobook narrator and producer. She is a former federal Indigenous law attorney and policy advocate.
Starr, a citizen of the Kickapoo Nation of Oklahoma, is creator of the radio comedy series and webcomic, “Super Indian,” which was featured at a special exhibition on super heroes at the Heard Museum in Phoenix in 2015.
Starr is also a musician whose albums — including the debut “Meet the Diva,” “Wind-Up,” and “The Red Road,” — have racked up a string of awards, and an award-winning actress and playwright.
Their joint project, “Contenders,” published by Kokila Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has drawn high praise.
“A lesser-known but significant encounter with all-too-current resonances,” Kirkus wrote, in giving the book a starred review.
“This has broad appeal for history buffs, sports fans, and social-justice minded kids,” wrote The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.
Taunts and sneers
The book tells the stories of how Bender and Meyers became the first two Native players to face off in a World Series.
Both men endured an onslaught of attacks during the 1911 series. They were both called “Chief,” and they’re still identified by that moniker on Wikipedia. The media made jokes about tomahawks and “dead Indians,” and they faced taunts and sneers from fans of the opposing team.
Bender, Ojibwe, known as Albert or Al, is credited with inventing the “slider” pitch and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953 after rising to fame playing for the then-Philadelphia Athletics from 1903-1914.
Bender was born in 1884 in Crow Wing County, Minnesota, and grew up on the White Earth Nation. He was sent at age 7 to Indian boarding school, where he learned to love baseball by watching the older boys play. He even made his own bats and balls, as they did.
He returned to the reservation at age 12, but he and a brother eventually ran away to work on a farm, where they learned about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. They volunteered to go to the school, where Bender caught the attention of acclaimed Coach Pop Warner, who brought him onto the team as a pitcher.
He graduated from Carlisle in 1902 and signed a year later with the Philadelphia Athletics and legendary manager Connie Mack. In all, he pitched in five World Series games from 1905 to 1914, winning three.
“If everything depended on one game, I just used Albert — the greatest money pitcher of all time,” Mack said of Bender.
Bender also played for the Baltimore Terrapins in 1915, and returned to Philadelphia to play for the Phillies in 1916 and 1917. He left baseball to work in the shipyards during World War I, then returned to minor-league teams before moving to the Chicago White Sox as a coach, making a cameo appearance on the mound in 1925 — his last league appearance. In the 1950s, he became a pitching coach for the Athletics.
He died in 1954, one year after being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Meyers, known as Jack, was born in 1880 and grew up playing baseball on the Cahuilla reservation in southern California, catching pitches from his older brother.
He eventually left school and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, where he played on the company’s baseball team. He began playing for semi-professional teams after railroad workers went on strike. He was then recruited to play for Dartmouth College, but left after one season when they learned he didn’t have a high school diploma.
He then moved on to the minor leagues before joining the New York Giants under manager John McGraw. He became the starting catcher two years later, and was what McGraw described as a “vicious hitter,” according to “Contenders.”
He played in the major leagues for nine years. He played and then managed in the minor leagues before returning to work on the Cahuilla reservation. He died in 1971 at age 90.
Both men left their marks on America’s pastime, playing in a combined nine World Series.
In the 1911 World Series, the Athletics won, four games to two, despite a winning run by Meyers for the Giants in Game 1. Bender and Meyers faced off again in the 1913 World Series, with the Athletes winning that one, too, four games to one.
Different paths
Sorell said she learned about the two men when her husband asked her, “Have you heard about the Indian-against-Indian World Series?”
She hadn’t.
“I said, ‘What?’ The series was amazing, but here’s these two men with very different paths coming to the game from very different places,” Sorell said.
She wanted a Native illustrator to handle it, and ran into Starr at a function in Tulsa, telling her, “I have this book I want to get out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any non-Native artist who’s going to do justice for this work. The folks do not all look the same.”
Starr jumped at the chance, and the two began working with an all-woman team.
“We made this very matriarchal-focused book highlighting the achievements of Native people,” Sorell said. “It’s been wonderful to be in the space. Our mom’s brought us to the game. The Tulsa artist fellowship gave us the opportunity.”
Starr said she particularly appreciated the historical elements and research that went into developing the project.
“I had a field day,” she said. “The best thing I love about any of the projects I do is the research.”
The illustrations include historic depictions of the facilities and a series of baseball-card-type illustrations for other Indigenous players over the years, all the way up to Ryan Helsley, Cherokee, who currently plays for the St. Louis Cardinals.
Helsley made news in 2019 when he raised concerns about the “Tomahawk Chop” popular with fans of the Atlanta baseball team. Helsley said the chop was a “misrepresentation” of Native people and “depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way who aren’t intellectual …. It’s just disrespectful.”
And that is the underlying message in “Contenders” – that Indigenous athletes have endured generations of abuse in an effort to do what they love, even today.
“This stuff is still happening – jeering, making fun of these folks – it still happens,” Sorell told ICT. “It demeans who we are as people. We still have these caricatures and these racist images.”
Sorell, who will follow up with a book on mascots in the fall, said pressure needs to be increased on corporate sponsors in professional sports who allow the taunts to continue. The racist mascots for schools could be eliminated even sooner, she said.
“Native people have said, unequivocally, this is not who we are,” Sorell said.
Starr believes they eventually will overcome.
“That is very much how it is today – for athletes, for entertainers, for those of us who work in spaces where we are not the majority,” Starr said. “We are not a stereotype, we are not a caricature, we are not a New Age princess. If that makes us Super Indians – yeah. We rise. We rise.”
More info
The illustrated children’s book, “Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series,” is available in bookstores and at amazon.com. It is written by Cherokee writer Traci Sorell and illustrated by artist/musician/writer Arigon Starr, Kickapoo Nation of Oklahoma. It tells the story of the 1911 World Series and the two Indigenous men who played on opposing teams under an onslaught of racist taunts and slurs.
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