And now for a short rant ...

My grandmother, half Cherokee and an elementary teacher, devoted a large part of her history teachings to American indians. Her kit included some of the stereotypical stuff: Feather headdresses, gourd rattlers, etc. To be authentic, she could have focused on the Cherokee and any other tribe -- talking on and on about how different they were so that no one would leave the class with misperceptions.

Or she could have attempted to open up the small amount of space in her students' minds that they would have actually set aside for stuff like this. Give them the basics, let them incorporate it, let the interested ones study the specifics later.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram had a story today about the struggles of McMurry University as the school failed to get the NCAA to change the new rule barring Indian mascots.

I realize that I'm getting hacked about this issue about two years after the fact, but it's difficult to believe it's still happening.

After losing two appeals, the Div. III school in Abilene decided "to hell with it" and dropped the "Indian" nickname and image from all uniforms and scoreboards. They also refused to come up with another mascot. So, for right now, it's just McMurry. (I feel sorry for sports writers having to work their way around this, but that's something else.)

The ridiculous part: in the early 1900s, McMurry's founder was huge admirer of Indian culture and turned the mascot into a way for students to learn about American indian history.

Every year students set up an Indian village, beat a war drum all night, etc. My sister, was one of McMurry's last "Reservation Princesses" -- what they then called their homecoming queens. (Now they call them "homecoming queens.")

Yes, "reservation princess" is kitschy. But a lot of Indians spent a lot of time on reservations, making the best of it. Is there really something humongously offensive about pointing that out?

Why this sucks on a national note: Something that was once a part of everyone's national heritage has been taken away, so that a bunch of morally vain preeners with their head up their ass can decide the proper way to celebrate something.

While they could have just gotten rid of the worst offenders, they instead made the gutless move of telling everyone they had to drop Indian nicknames, and then made another gutless move by allowing Florida State to keep theirs.

The end result here is not that anyone will turn out to be really keen on celebrating Indians the "right" way. People will decide to drop all of it just to avoid trouble, and something that was a distinct part of Americana will be relegated to university library stacks and tourists with nothing better to do.

The "angry" key is pulling me in.

And that ends the rant for now. Thanks for coming!

On a side note: Expresso coffee grounds give a pretty kick the second time around. Something tells me I shouldn't go for a third.