HAIL TO THE ORANGE, HAIL TO THE SIOUX…

3/12/12

Yesterday, the North Dakota Senate voted to require the University of North Dakota to keep its nickname, The Fighting Sioux. The state House has already passed the bill and Governor Jack Dalrymple has indicated he will sign it into law.

I, like many of you, am disheartened by the hypersensitivity and runaway political correctness that has led to the defenestration of numerous venerable college nicknames and, as a proud graduate of that object of Harvard’s undying envy, the University of Illinois, and a fervent fan of Chief Illiniwek, such unabashed silliness hits home. These hebetudinous pursuits of longstanding icons are especially infuriating when one considers that the hyperventilation behind them originates not, primarily, from the native-American community but, rather, from the white, upper class, busybody community with both too much time on its hands and a fervent belief that some self-styled innate moral and intellectual superiority entitles them to dictate how the rest of us should live.

In the case of UND, the efforts to eliminate the Fighting Sioux nickname, efforts that the UND administration vows to continue, are especially fatuous because one struggles to come up with reasons that “Fighting Sioux” is somehow offensive. Would one rather have the “Surrendering Sioux,” the “Yielding Sioux,” the “Timid Sioux,” or the “Pat-a- cake Playing Sioux”? Why wouldn’t one want a proud people portrayed as they were, a nation that was not about to give up, either land or pride, to the greedy designs of the white Europeans without a fight? Or would the politically correct crowd rather just have the Sioux name dropped altogether, to blot out forever remembrance of those original inhabitants of North Dakota?

Clearly, I am almost as much in favor of keeping the Fighting Sioux nickname for UND as I am in favor of rewelcoming Chief Illiniwek and keeping the Fighting Illini, not the, as someone has proposed, the Fighting Farmbots, battling for the national championship in Memorial Stadium and Assembly Hall. However, it is indeed disheartening to see the pols stick their considerable probosces into such, in the great scheme of things, trivial matters as school mascots. Is this something with which the politicians in Bismarck ought to concern themselves? Is there nothing outside the purview of the government? Maybe…if focusing on such jejune matters keeps them diverted from bollixing up things that really matter.