Friday, October 2, 2009

ND Higher Ed Board Lies Again

In this morning's headlines is a story that the ND Higher Ed Board has again extended their "deadline" for getting rid of the "Fighting Sioux" logo. These people have given so many excuses as to their reasons for repeatedly extending the "deadline", we can no longer count them.
Recently someone asked me why I am so adamantly against this logo. (1) We are not the "Sioux"; we are the D/L/Nakota. Not the "treacherous, untrustworthy people" - that's the ND Board of Higher Education. We are "the Allies". (2) The Oxford Standard Dictionary of the English Language - the dictionary used everywhere in the English-speaking world to define words at the highest level - gives "pet" & "caricature" as the 2 lead definitions of "mascot". Living people are neither. The Vikings are dead; we are not. Neither are our cultures. Make pets & caricatures of dead cultures if you will, but not of ours, which are still living. (3) We Indns get no benefits from this mascot. We get no payments. We get no classes or anything having the logo on it free of charge. Nothing. But the U of ND gets millions of dollars. While we Indns are forced onto welfare or ultra-low-wage jobs. (4) Many of us are against this entire situation. We never gave our permission to be logo-ed. And just because someone else did it 40-50 years ago, when the vast majority of Indns lived in fear of their lives, let alone jobs or such, if they did not accept the proposal to become 'mascots', especially means it is unacceptable now.
So - get rid of the logo now, & stop meddling in our cultures again! Hechetu chto!

No comments: