(CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, ILLINOIS)(October 6, 2006)

First, a little history. We are Illini in my family. My mother came first as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois; I stayed home to care for a relative. In our phone calls my mother regaled me with tales of Chief Illiniwek and the Fighting Illini. And as I recuperated from a football injury I dreamed of walking across the field at Memorial Stadium. It was a dream that came true.

I remember retired Coach Ray Eliot calling us “the Men of Illinois,” and then current coach Pete Elliot sending me to the showers and telling me to hit the books (he was right, of course). Being a fighting Illini even for one year (the varsity won the Rose Bowl) was a great honor that I remembered fondly even forty years later.

And so I have watched with dismay the efforts of the NCAA and Native American “activists” to remove Indian names from our schools and sports teams and particularly to consign Chief Illiniwek of the University of Illinois to the dustbin of history.

Chief Illiniwek—a student who entertains at football games and dances an Indian dance at half time--and who once embodied the University of Illinois as the emblem on almost every document and artifact—is being phased out in deference to the ultimate God of our era: political correctness.

While puny North Dakota is fighting to retain their Indian name for its university, the never-very-brave Illinois administrators are capitulating and the Chief is all but kaput. The Fighting Illini won’t fight. (I hope they do better on the football field but I am not a sportswriter.)

But before the Chief is history, I want to remember him and condemn the inglorious way in which our history is being trashed by the ignorami of modern existence. The Chief can’t be erased so easily; his loss will mark a great passing of our respect and reverence for the prairie and those who peopled this land before we arrived.

Robert Frost wrote “We were the land before the land was ours.” Our land belonged to the native tribes before it belonged to the settlers. The Illini. I wish Carl Sandburg the prairie philosopher was alive to chime in on this controversy. He would have something to say, born as he was on the prairie in Galesburg, Illinois. He would probably opine that there is great injustice in robbing us of our remembrance and reverence for the past by seeking to mollify changing tides of public opinion and surrendering to a false standard of public morality.

Unlike the civil rights controversies and our evolving racial progress, that eliminated derogatory racial stereotypes, except perhaps The Jeffersons, the Chief has always been in exactly the opposite position: a place of hollowed honor at the center of the University's being as a place of world class higher learning—but a university with a cornfield stuck straight in the middle of the campus to remind us of our ties to the land, our ties to the history of this land and our ties to the future of this land.

From dust to dust, we are still the land; we are only temporary stewards of our land. And a nation that cannot distinguish between Amos ‘n Andy and Chief Illiniwek has lost its moral compass and its core of community intelligence. Political correctness does not preserve history; political correctness erases history.

The Chief is a reminder, but not a symbol of what his detractors claim. The Chief reminds us of the majesty of American Indian life and heritage. He was—until erased from stationary, logos and almost everywhere else—a reminder that people were here before us, and that we came from somewhere else, and we are product of the Chief’s past as well as our own European heritage.

My mother’s Greek-American ancestors who came to Chicago a century ago would be delirious with joy if the U. of I. adopted the Evzones as a symbol, and had a man running across the field in a skirt and fez. Silly as it seems. Italians, Germans, Swiss (lederhosen and yodeling?) and Polish, not to mention African-Americans, would all be delighted to feature some traditional costume as a symbol of a great university. Where’s the shame in being the icon of the University of Illinois? The true shame is in coldly exorcising the Chief, and with him a piece of American history, from our consciousness. It is removing the Chief that is an act of racism, not retaining him.

Why not go all the way? And sell naming rights? Maybe that would be real payback. How does the General Motors Illinois football team sound? Or the Coca Cola Illinois basketball team? Nothing to compare with the majesty and history of the Fighting Illini.

Congress, indeed, chose to place an Indian Woman on the new Quarter. She wasn’t portrayed in a business suit, with dress-for-success accessories. Was that an insult to Sacagawea? I don’t think so. Remembrance is never disrespectful. History is not all neat and tidy, and it is good that we are reminded of that sometimes unpleasant and uncomfortable fact. We were the land.

And so, this Homecoming season, I will be in Memorial Stadium, watching as Chief Illiniwek performs tomorrow, possibly for the last time. Red Grange will be there with me. And all of the other Men of Illinois. And, most hallowed, also there present will be the men for whom the stadium itself is named, the brave men who died to keep our world free and safe for free and independent thought—and remembrance. I will not allow the transitory and temporary administrators who are afraid to fight for our history rob me of the great remembrance of the Illini tribes and the noble Fighting Illini who honor them.