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11/26/2005:

"A Dispute of Great Spirit Rages On"

GRAND FORKS, N.D. - Embedded in the granite floor inside the main entrance to Ralph Engelstad Arena, an enormous American Indian-head logo spreads like a welcome mat in front of the larger-than-life statue of Engelstad himself.

A statue of the Sioux warrior Sitting Bull throws a long shadow across the plaza outside the Ralph Engelstad Arena in Grand Forks, N.D.
Every night that the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux men's hockey team plays in its $104 million arena, thousands of fans walk across the likeness of the handsome Sioux face in profile, with its four eagle feathers attached to the crown of the head.

It is humiliating to many of the school's Indian students and faculty members who consider eagle feathers sacred.

"We see the eagle as a messenger," said Margaret Scott, a sophomore nursing student from the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska. "It flies so close to the heavens, he carries the messages and prayers of the people to God. In our culture, eagle feathers can't touch the ground.

"It's like if you put a cross on a shot glass. What they're doing is sacrilegious."

As the N.C.A.A. begins enforcing a ban on Indian imagery that it considers "hostile or abusive," the North Dakota arena and its logo pointedly illustrate the passions surrounding the issue, and the complexities, both political and financial, in resolving it.

The floor, walls and furniture of the hockey arena are plastered with as many as 3,000 of the Sioux Indian logos. It is on each row of seats, on frosted glass doors and pillars, stitched into every two steps of the carpeting that rings the luxury box floor. None of it can be cheaply or easily erased.

And the larger issue of the Fighting Sioux nickname, which has long been controversial here, has again polarized the campus, the town and the state. One online student message board that favored the nickname was titled, "Everyone Who Opposes the Sioux Logo Deserves to Die of AIDS."

About 400 of the university's nearly 13,000 students are Indian, making them the largest minority group on campus. "Unless you're here, you don't know what it's like and how nasty it can get," said a psychology professor, Doug McDonald, who is Sioux. "I've had students in my office in tears because of the harassment we get."
nytimes.com