Sometimes We Get to Be the Hero: Jacoby Ellsbury and the Importance of Indigenous Representation
This article was written by Christopher D. Chavis
This article was published in Native American Major Leaguers (2025)
Jacoby Ellsbury celebrates, holding the 2007 American League Championship Series trophy. With a .438 batting average and .500 on-base percentage in the World Series, he was a key contributor to the team’s championship victory, his first of two with the Red Sox. (Steve Babineau/Boston Red Sox)
Representations of Indigenous people in sports and media have never been particularly robust. When we are depicted, it’s usually through the usage of crude stereotypes that render us as caricatures, side characters to support the hero, or a villain for the heroic cowboy to overcome. It’s rare that we are depicted as heroes. For any Indigenous baseball fan in New England in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Jacoby Ellsbury was our hero.
Before moving to New Hampshire in the fall of 2008 to attend Dartmouth College, I had grown up in rural southeastern North Carolina, far removed from any professional baseball team, in the Lumbee Tribal homeland. Perhaps ironically, the closest team for much of my childhood was the Atlanta Braves. (Though to a poor rural kid, that 300-mile distance may as well have been 3,000 miles.) I watched baseball with my grandfather growing up, but after he died when I was 9 years old, I quit watching. My connection to the game was through him, not through a love for any particular team.
It wasn’t until I got to college that I finally found my team, just a two-hour drive down Interstates 89 and 93, the Boston Red Sox.
By then, Ellsbury was in his second full season in Boston. He had speed, talent, and an undeniable spark, and within Dartmouth’s Indigenous community, he quickly became a shared figure of admiration. He was good and his promise to get better was evident. We organized trips to Fenway Park to see him play. We wore his jersey. We followed his stat lines.
He was a tribal citizen with ties to his Navajo community. He wasn’t a caricature, he wasn’t a stereotype, and he wasn’t relegated to the bench. He was the starting center fielder and one of the best players on the team, with a bright future ahead of him.
He was also a player whose Indigenous identity was not central to his public perception. He showed that representation does not mean tokenism. He was not the “Indigenous Red Sox player,” he was the “Red Sox player who happened to be Indigenous.” He did not hide his heritage or try to downplay it, but it did not solely define him. Ellsbury stood on the shoulders of players like Charles Albert “Chief” Bender and Louis Sockalexis, who had faced relentless stereotyping in the early decades of professional baseball.
This resonated with Indigenous students at Dartmouth, an institution that has its own dark history with Indigenous people. Originally founded in 1769 to educate English and Indigenous youth, Dartmouth did not fully commit to its charter mission and begin actively recruiting Indigenous students until the early 1970s. Around the same time, it also retired its “Indian” mascot, a move that continues to spark controversy decades later. During my time on campus, a vocal minority of students still clung to the imagery, reprinting it on T-shirts or cheering it at games, even in the face of opposition from Indigenous students and faculty.
Our experiences on campus were a reminder that representation could never be taken for granted, that in some spaces we were still seen as symbols, not as students. In that context, watching Jacoby Ellsbury excel wasn’t just a sports story. It was a counternarrative. It was a statement of a truth that was evident to us, that Indigenous people could perform at the highest levels while being our authentic selves.
But even our heroes face setbacks. Ellsbury missed all but 18 games of the 2010 season with an injury. It was a setback that made his epic return in 2011 all the more sweeter. He went from simply excelling to being one of the best players in the game itself. Most of us are familiar with his stat line – .321 batting average, 32 home runs, 105 RBIs, and 39 stolen bases, accolades that came with an All-Star selection and ultimately a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger. Disappointingly, though, he finished second in the American League MVP vote to Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers. I still argue that that was decided incorrectly.
I graduated from Dartmouth during the 2012 season and the less said about that season the better. However, I continued to follow Ellsbury and the Red Sox from law school in Michigan and cheered when they won the 2013 World Series. That World Series win was a crescendo and the end of Ellsbury’s run in Boston. He left town for the New York Yankees, a path upon which I could not follow.
The last time I saw Ellsbury play in person was a warm summer afternoon in 2015. By then I had graduated from law school and taken a job in Augusta, Maine. I sat in the outfield bleachers at Fenway Park as Ellsbury came to bat in pinstripes. A sad sight to behold.
But even that sight can’t change what Jacoby Ellsbury meant to both my college experience and baseball fandom. Jacoby Ellsbury was more than an athlete. He was a point of connection, a source of pride, and proof that representation, real, respectful, and rooted, matters.
For an Indigenous college student trying to find his place, Ellsbury offered more than inspiration. He offered affirmation. He showed that we don’t have to be the caricature, the villain, or the side character. Sometimes we get to be the hero.
CHRISTOPHER D. CHAVIS’s love affair with the Boston Red Sox began as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where his frequent trips to Fenway Park instilled in him a love of the Olde Towne Team that spawned a deep interest in baseball history. A public policy professional by day and amateur baseball historian by night, he can usually be found reading a book or watching a documentary about the Sox. He lives in Rancho Cucamonga, California with his wife, daughter, and two cats – Teddy and Yaz. He is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.