A Comeback For The Indian?

To the Editor:

As the father of three children who played seven varsity sports as Newtown Indians at NHS, I got a chuckle from this brief article in a recent issue of National Review. For me they will always be Indians.

“Beginning about 1972, when identity politics became the core of liberalism, ‘bien pensnants’ began to censor the use of the American Indian as a college or team symbol. Stanford dropped it. Other Universities did likewise, as did countless high schools. When Dartmouth dropped its Indian symbol, Dinesh D’Souza, then editor of The Dartmouth Review, phoned dozens of tribal chiefs all over the country. They unanimously approved of the symbol, but this mattered not: The actual Indians had not had their consciousness raised. Now, however, Newsweek finds that the Indian symbol is making a big national comeback. In Marquette, Mich., for example, a decision by the school board to drop the symbol provoked a large protest movement led by the local Indians. Of course, the political correctness of the 1970s was always farcical: liberal virtue purchased at bargain-basement prices, as if the Indian-head nickel had been intended as an insult, or the Pontiac automobile as a slur.”

For those in Sandy Hook, “bien pensnants” – right-minded, e.g. politically correct.

J.J. Leitner

9 Possum Ridge Road                         June 11, 2001