"Brad Doty," 2/22/2007

(Chief opinion: For)

You have just taken another step along the way of removing the last vestiges of the Native Americans from the face of the Earth.

Do you not get the historical significance of this?

Without Native American icons on sports teams, the race will fade in the memory of the culture. Schoolchildren will feel Native Americans were about as real as Elizabethans. And their kids will know even less of them.

I hate the genocide and continent theft that my forebears wreaked on the previous inhabitants of this land.

Now people like you are beginning to wipe out their last memory in the American culture.

I think that Bill Clinton was a bit too conservative. I hate that George Will is on the same side of this issue as I am.

I think the racist position is to discriminate against noble Native American mascots and leave derogatory, mostly white, mascots standing. And yet that is the NCAA's position.

Oklahoma Sooners cheated to grab land (next to the Native Americans whose good land had already been seized and were forced to live in that near-desert or die) sooner than they were supposed to. The Fighting Irish is known as a drunken, quarrelous symbol. Nobody's quite sure what a Tarheel is, but they are left alone. Other mascots do silly and disrespectable antics on the sideline. Yet they are left alone. Florida State bought the approval of the Seminoles.

And a noble warrior like Chief Illiniwek is wiped off the map without even consulting the University's Native American studies program. There was nothing derogatory about the Chief! To say he is derogatory is to say that Native American culture is somehow beneath Europen American culture. I reject that.

True, they should have gotten an authentic outfit and dance from a vestige of one of the Illiniwek nations, like the Peoria. There are still Native American pow wows where men do fancy dances and other dances. The right thing could have been done.

This was a bad thing that was done here.

Brad Doty
BS 85, MS 87

Read this and tell me who's racist and not supporting Native Americans.

http://www.honorthechief.org/undletter.html

"Brad Doty," via the web.