http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/sports/baseball/04roberts.html?ref=sports

October 4, 2007
Sports of The Times

Chamberlain Offers His Tribe Hope

By SELENA ROBERTS

WINNEBAGO, Neb.

They sell dream catchers here. In a brick gift store below a hill filled
with swirled haystacks that resemble Cinnabons, a shelf holds a palm-sized
wooden rim with feathers and beads surrounding a net.

It is a fear filter, of sorts, designed to trap nightmares so the sweetest
images can slip on through, so joyful thoughts can reach pillows.

In his flat-billed Yankees cap that always seems a half size too big, with
an arm already rated somewhere between fable and holy, Joba Chamberlain has
all but passed through a dream catcher. In essence, he is a dream come true
for American Indians who have been forever marginalized by cultural
fatalism and outside bias, forever freighted by historic atrocities and
benign neglect.

To watch Chamberlain is to spy on hope, to witness a revolution in belief
among his Winnebago tribe.

“I think he shows that everyone can do it — even if you’re from around
here,” said Aaron Lapointe, 16, a high school sophomore on the reservation.
“It’s good just to see that he is a Native American, that he is the same as
me.”

Same, not better. Same, not separate. That is an important distinction for
many tribes long ambivalent about fame in a white man’s world, long
mistrustful of an America that has mistreated them.

“One of the things we try to instill in the kids around here is to quit
trying to play the big victim all the time,” said Jerome Lapointe, Aaron’s
uncle and the managing editor of The Winnebago Indian News. “We have to get
over that.”

In many ways, they have. The Winnebago don’t view Chamberlain as an
aberration. With the help of satellite dishes that look like buttons on
every home in this six-block town, they see him as a trend in optimism
every time his image flashes on “SportsCenter.”

“I think Joba symbolizes possibility,” said Brian Chamberlain, Joba’s
cousin, who lives and works on the reservation. “Here, you have successful
people who are taking care of their daily lives. Then you have others who
are trapped in addictions, and the gap between them is widening, but as a
whole, we as a tribe, we are progressing.”

•

Progress is the cellphone tower built last year among the cornfields that
means fewer trips to the Missouri River to pick up a signal. Progress is a
new Dollar General Store to provide another shopping destination outside of
the usual hub: a corrugated steel building on the highway that multitasks
as a gas station, grocery store, cafe and casino.

Where else can you purchase pizza, burgers, soap and luck?

It’s not perfect, not with a poverty rate double the national average. All
issues aren’t solved, not when the tribal casinos have taken hits from
competition in Iowa. But the economy is slowly churning. Ideas are all the
rage. Education is a hotter topic for children. Joba fits right into the
equation.

“He represents another chance, another angle at our kids getting an
education,” Jerome Lapointe said.

Joba was not born on the rez like his father, Harlan, but he is of the rez
as a member of the Winnebago. There are a few more Yankees caps, a few more
jerseys worn on playgrounds these days. But there are no signs of the Joba
mania that has swept Manhattan. No Book of Joba banners hanging over a
billboard advertising a powwow. No Joba the Heat posters next to the
sketches of proud chiefs lining the public school walls.

Joba is celebrated in more subtle ways. Earlier this week, the tribal
council held elections. In the final tally, Joba picked up two votes — and,
no, he wasn’t running for office.

What Joba means to the Winnebago is obvious. His visibility is important to
non-Indians, too. With every pitch, he peels back the stereotypes of the
American Indian athlete as problematic, as fearful of success, as
self-loathing.

“It seems like the reservation is their comfort zone more than it would be
for an inner-city kid,” the former Montana State basketball coach Mick
Durham told me a few years ago. “To me, I just think they get the
government checks, and they stay. I don’t know. I guess it’s the way
they’re raised.”

•

Durham has never been alone in this unsettling view. College coaches
routinely skip talented rez athletes when looking for scholarship material.
Only three-tenths of one percent of all college scholarships in Division I,
II and III are awarded to American Indians, according to N.C.A.A. records
compiled for 2004-5.

Joba can’t transform the numbers. That’s not his burden.

“Joba just has to be Joba,” Brian Chamberlain said. “That’s enough.”

It’s enough to defy negativity with his every jog to the mound. It’s enough
to pass through a dream catcher.

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