A controversy over a mascot at the U. of North Dakota turned surreal when a benefactor threatened to withdraw $100-million
By ANDREW BROWNSTEIN
Grand Forks, N.D.
The message came in March, when winter lingers and the frost
still covers the silent prairie that surrounds the University of
North Dakota.
The sender was anonymous. The recipient was Ira Taken Alive, a
former student at the
university who is a Lakota Sioux and the son of a tribal elder
at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
"I assume this is the guy who wants to change the Fighting
Sioux name," the e-mail message began. Mr. Taken Alive, a
junior in 1999, when he received the message, had challenged the
name of the university's sports teams, which he felt demeaned his
people and stood as a barrier to the progress of American Indians
in general.
As he sat in front of his computer, he read on: "There are
many people who want your head, no joking. I am not one of those
people, but I have heard some nasty talk by people about doing
stuff to you. So take this from me, a concerned human being,
watch out for your life."
University officials were never able to trace the source. But Mr.
Taken Alive says he had had enough -- of the endless debates, the
taunts, the vandalism to his car -- that came from fighting the
Fighting Sioux. In the fall, he transferred to another
university; he returned quietly last summer to finish his degree.
Mascot controversies come and go in academe. But words can be
costly in the ancestral home of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, on
a campus where American Indians are the largest minority group.
This past December, it looked like the name debate might exact a
very specific price: $100-million. That was the amount that Ralph
Engelstad, a Las Vegas casino owner, had promised to his alma
mater, largely to build a luxurious new hockey arena that would
bear his name.
In a sharply worded letter addressed to the university's
president, he threatened to abandon the half-completed project,
which he was personally overseeing, if the university dropped the
Fighting Sioux name.
President Charles E. Kupchella, following protests by students
and tribal leaders, had formed a commission that had been
investigating the naming controversy for five months. He planned
to announce his decision after New Year's. But a day after he and
members of the State Board of Higher Education received the
letter, the board launched a pre-emptive strike, voting 8-0 to
keep the name.
It has not helped public relations at the university that its
benefactor has a troubled past in the area of racial
sensitivity. In 1988, Nevada authorities discovered that Mr.
Engelstad had held two parties on Hitler's birthday, and kept a
trove of Nazi paraphernalia at his Imperial Palace hotel and
casino. He
was fined $1.5-million for damaging the reputation of the
State of Nevada.
That the episode has turned surreal is a fact that not even the
university's seasoned flacks try to conceal. "Oh, it's
strange," says Peter B. Johnson, the college's spokesman. "It
could be a movie script."
Grand Forks, population 49,000, sits where the Red Lake River
meets the Red River of the North. But the university here may as
well be the convergence of two worlds.
For most of the athletes and fans on this campus of 11,000, the
Fighting Sioux name is a source of pride and honor. The
powerhouse men's hockey team won Division I's "Frozen
Four" championship last year; over the decades, the team has
sent 54 players to the National Hockey League.
The university can also lay claim to being one of the top
institutions for American Indians in the country. It houses 25
American Indian programs -- mostly financed with federal grants
-- including Native Directions, a quarterly student
magazine of American Indian life and culture; an Indian studies
major; and the Indians Into Medicine program, which credits
itself with training a fifth of the Native American doctors in
the country.
Yet, there is a disconnect. Many of the 350 American Indian
students at North Dakota say that beneath the campus's Main
Street friendliness lies a dark current of racism, a facet of
university life that the name controversy has brought
uncomfortably to the surface.
"They say they keep the name to honor and respect us, but
those words have lost all meaning," says Alva Irwin, a
Hidatsa Indian and senior majoring in social work and Indian
studies. "How can they honor us by keeping something we
clearly don't want?"
Once known as the Flickertails, the university's intercollegiate
sports teams have been called the Sioux since 1930, when the name
was changed to strike fear into the hearts of the Bison at rival
North Dakota State University, in Fargo. There were no protests
at the time, because there were virtually no American Indian
students here. Native Americans didn't start attending the
university in large numbers until the 1960's.
Once on campus, they saw that the use of the name extended far
beyond athletics. In 1972, fraternity members at the now-defunct
King Kold Karnival created a lurid sculpture of a naked Indian
woman, with a sign reading "Lick 'em Sioux"; an
American Indian student was briefly jailed after he got into a
fight over the sculpture with fraternity members, sending three
of them to the hospital.
Tensions ran high again in 1992, when
onlookers at a homecoming parade performed the Atlanta
Braves'"tomahawk chop" as dancing American Indian
children passed on a float, and then yelled at them to "go
back to the reservation."
As recently as this past fall, says one student, Michael Grant,
fraternity members dressed as cowboys and Indians flashed a cap
gun at his wife and infant daughter. "Do you realize what
would have happened if I had been there?" says Mr. Grant, an
Omaha Indian and a sophomore majoring in Indian studies. "I
wouldn't be here, man. I'd be in jail."
The name always takes center stage whenever the Bison come to
town. In the 1990's, North Dakota State fans started chanting
"Sioux suck" during games, and, over the years, the
slogan has taken on ever more
inventive permutations.
For years, it was impossible to drive down Interstate 29 from
Grand Forks to Fargo without seeing the abandoned barn with the
giant slogan painted on it. And then there's the T-shirt worn by
North Dakota State fans. It shows a stereotypical
American Indian suggestively between the legs of a bison. A
caption reads, "We saw. They sucked. We came."
"It's like we're not even human," says Anjanette
Parisien, a Chippewa senior majoring in biology and Indian
studies.
Earl Strinden doesn't see it that way. The semi-retired chief
executive officer of the university's alumni association and Mr.
Engelstad's friend for 40 years, Mr. Strinden helped clinch the
1998 deal that culminated in the $100-million pledge.
Wearing a sports coat in the school's signature green, he marches
over to a framed map of the Dakota territories that graces a wall
in his campus office. He points to faded print marking what was
once the Great Sioux Nation. "This is Sioux territory, for
crying out loud!" he says.
The point is made again and again by alumni: The Sioux are
indelibly etched into the state's lore and culture. To rid the
campus of the name would be to rob the state of one of its great
traditions and to further isolate American Indians.
"When the hockey team plays in Boston, the people will
think, 'Fighting Sioux, what's that?'" Mr. Strinden says.
"They'll want to find out about the Sioux. There are those
on this campus who want to make sure that Native Americans are
always victims."
During the interview, two American Indian students in his office
nod vigorously, as if the notion of hockey as export of Indian
culture is self-evident.
"If we lose the name, it's going to help erase our
culture," says Greg Holy Bull, a Lakota Sioux and a graduate
student in fine arts.
At the Dakota Student, the semi-weekly student newspaper,
the subject of Mr. Engelstad and the name is something of a
newsroom obsession. One Sunday, staff members vowed not to talk
about the issue all day. The silence lasted until 3 p.m.
When Evan Nelson, the sports editor, first came to the
university, he thought "the whole issue was garbage."
But after working the sports beat for a year and a half, he came
to view the name as "deplorable."
"It was hearing all those ignorant bastards -- the alumni,
the athletes, the fans -- talking about Indians that did it for
me," says Mr. Nelson, a junior and a communications major
from Sioux Falls, S.D.
He raised eyebrows among his sources with a recent column, in
which he wrote that the state board's decision on the Fighting
Sioux name was "an act of malice and contempt." The
racism behind the name is subtle, Mr. Nelson says. "There
are no hate crimes. It's not like the Deep South in the 60's,
where police were brushing crowds with fire hoses." It's the
"Injun" jokes and terms like "prairie
nigger." It's in the oft-repeated comments that Indians are
all drunks or are going to college on the government dole. It's
the person who will wear a jacket with the mascot of an Indian,
but won't talk to one.
"My grandparents have been telling me since I was 2 years
old that the Indians are stealing from us," he says.
"This is a very white-bread part of the world."
To the majority of students -- 82 percent, according to a recent
poll -- the issue has nothing to do with racism. It's just the
name of a sports team. Kim Srock, a sophomore discussing the
debate in Jim McKenzie's advanced-composition class, expresses
annoyance that so much is being made of a five-letter word.
"It's like, get a life," she says. "This is a game
-- it's not about Indians. They're like a bunch of crybabies. Get
over it."
If the subject of race is the university's most divisive issue,
hockey is its No. 1 passion. So it makes sense that the biggest
controversy in recent years would be a combination of both.
The joke in this corner of the world is that children learn to
skate before they can walk. The enthusiasm for the sport is hard
to miss. On game day against the rival Golden Gophers of the
University of Minnesota, ticket lines will start forming around
noon, even in the sub-zero chill. Local merchants sell coffee and
barbecued ribs as tailgaters, often in green and white face
paint, warm themselves near bonfires.
They come to see players like Jeff Panzer, the center and a Grand
Forks native, who is Division I's top scorer and a leading
candidate for the Hobey Baker trophy, college hockey's equivalent
of the Heisman.
The new arena, now estimated at over $85-million, promises to be
an even bigger draw. Billed as one of the finest hockey stadiums
in the nation, the complex will house 11,400 fans, 48 luxury
skyboxes, and a second ice rink for Olympic-style play.
The man whose name the arena will bear and whose shadow looms
large over the nickname debate was himself a Fighting Sioux
goalie from 1948 to 1950.
Mr. Engelstad, the grandson of a Minnesota potato farmer, made it
big in construction and real estate. He earned his fortune in
1967 selling 145 acres to Howard Hughes, who used it to build the
North Las Vegas Airport.
Mr. Engelstad's view from the top floor of the Imperial Palace
hotel and casino, looking out on the lights of the Las Vegas
Strip, couldn't be farther from the snow-crested prairies he left
behind. Opened in 1979, the Imperial became known for room rates
geared toward the middle class, celebrity impersonators, and an
antique-car collection now considered the third-largest in the
world. Included among the old Cadillacs, Duesenbergs, and cars of
former U.S. presidents were a growing number of autos that once
belonged to leaders of the Third Reich. The collection includes
Hitler's 1939 parade car and a Mercedes owned by Heinrich
Himmler, the commander of the S.S.
Mr. Engelstad's collection of Nazi memorabilia grew in the
mid-1980's, as he planned to accompany his cars with a public
museum. The hotel's collection, which became known as the
"war room," included Nazi knives, propaganda posters,
uniforms and swastika banners.
During this period, Mr. Engelstad drew national attention when
local reporters revealed that he had held two private parties in
the war room on April 20 -- Hitler's birthday -- in 1986 and
1988. The festivities featured "a cake decorated with a
swastika, German food, and German marching music," according
to License to Steal: Nevada's Gaming Control System in the
Megaresort Age (University of Nevada Press, 2000) by Jeff
Burbank, which devotes a chapter to the controversy over Mr.
Engelstad's memorabilia. "Bartenders wore T-shirts bearing
the words, 'Adolph Hitler-European Tour 1939-45.'"
"A life-size portrait of Hitler, with the inscription, 'To
Ralphie from Adolph, 1939,' hung on the wall," Mr. Burbank
wrote. "Beside it was a second painting with a likeness of
Engelstad in a Nazi uniform and with the message 'To Adolph from
Ralphie.'"
Gaming Control Board agents found a plate used to print hundreds
of bumper stickers with the message "Hitler was Right"
that were sent out from the hotel. In the media onslaught that
followed, Mr. Engelstad released a statement saying, "I
despise Hitler and everything he stood for." He insisted the
parties were "spoofs" designed to celebrate the
purchase of several new additions to the hotel's Third Reich
collection.
But the damage had been done. The board, citing harm to Nevada's
national image, fined Mr. Engelstad $1.5-million, which he paid.
(Mr. Engelstad, who seldom grants interviews, declined repeated
requests for comment.)
The timing could not have been worse for the university. Mr.
Engelstad had pledged $5-million for the old hockey stadium,
which the university renamed in his honor. In October 1988,
panicked officials sent a delegation of seven to Las Vegas on a
university jet to determine if the relationship with Mr.
Engelstad should continue.
Elizabeth Hampsten, a professor of English and then president of
the University Senate, was a member of the delegation. The tour
of Mr. Engelstad's facilities was notable for its brief duration
and for the fact that Mr. Engelstad was running the show: They
saw what he wanted them to see, she says. In some cases, the
evidence wasn't all that flattering. In his office, she recalls,
were a larger-than-life-size painting of a naked woman in the
tropics, and a bust of Hitler wearing Mr. Engelstad's hat. In the
war room, she remembers seeing a Nazi propaganda poster of a
train with several children staring out the windows.
"With my limited German, I knew the caption said 'summer
holiday,'" she says. "Of course, we now know it wasn't
a summer holiday. I asked him if he knew what it meant. He said,
'No.' I asked him if he wanted to know. He said, 'No.'"
Within months, the offending artifacts were removed, and the
walls of the war room were painted white.
The university panel ultimately decided that Mr. Engelstad was
not a Nazi sympathizer, but had merely shown "bad
taste." The philanthropic courtship resumed, eventually
leading to the $100-million pledge for the arena.
Ms. Hampsten objected to the process by which the university
cleared Mr. Engelstad, although, she admits, not "loudly
enough." "I felt that we didn't have enough information
to make that determination. It was a whitewash."
"We should have put a stop to it then," she says. When
I talk to people at other universities, they can't believe it.
We've become a laughingstock."
David H. Vorland, director of university relations, was also part
of the delegation. Like many current university officials, he
portrays Mr. Engelstad as a misunderstood businessman -- a loner,
a tad eccentric perhaps, but nothing more. ("Did you know
that he also had a birthday party for his dog?" he asks.) As
evidence of Mr. Engelstad's compassion, Mr. Vorland cites the
fact that the casino owner won an award from former President
George Bush for his widespread employment of people with
disabilities.
Yet Mr. Vorland acknowledges that the episode raises troubling
questions for any university. "We have an alumnus who has
demonstrated major support," he says. "Do you think we
should destroy a relationship with an individual like that
without serious consideration? It would be ideal if he had no
warts. But there are not many people like that, particularly
among those who have battled their way up from modest beginnings
to positions of extraordinary wealth."
A decade later, Mr. Engelstad had the chance to put the past
behind him. That chance vanished when local newspapers published
accounts of his recent letter to the president and the board. To
many in the university, it reinforced fears that Mr. Engelstad
was a ruthless businessman intent on getting his way --
regardless of the impact on American Indian students.
At the time, President Kupchella's commission had finished its
deliberations, and he was planning on announcing his conclusion.
Months before, the president publicly declared his independence
on the issue, wearing a T-shirt at a University Council meeting
that said "I'll decide."
Moreover, he had appeared increasingly open to the idea of
phasing out the name.
In a December 16 e-mail message to William Isaacson, the board
chairman, Mr. Kupchella laid out a possible statement he would
make to the board, arguing that "I see no choice but to
respect the request of Sioux tribes that we quit using their
name, because to do otherwise would be to put the university and
its president in an untenable position."
That e-mail message and Mr. Engelstad's letter were released by
the university after the board's decision.
But in a recent interview, Mr. Kupchella appeared to step back
from the message he sent Mr. Isaacson, saying it was one position
of several he was considering at the time. "However I may
have been leaning, it didn't see the light of day," he says.
In his letter to the president, Mr. Engelstad threatened to turn
off the building's heat and take a $35-million loss. In an
unusual arrangement for a university, Mr. Engelstad has been
paying for the arena as it is built, with a pledge to turn over
the completed facility to the university.
In the letter, Mr. Engelstad also appeared to confirm what had
been rumored for months -- namely, that his gift was made on the
condition of keeping the Fighting Sioux name alive. He attacked
Mr. Kupchella as a man of "indecision." The president
has refused to talk about the correspondence, saying only,
"There's a lot in that letter. You should read it. Read it
twice."
Mr. Engelstad gave Mr. Kupchella until December 30 to make up his
mind. But the board didn't wait that long. It issued its
unanimous edict the next day.
University officials insist that Mr. Engelstad was merely venting
his frustration, and that no deals were made. And board members
say that the timing was an unfortunate coincidence -- they
worried that North Dakota's Legislative Assembly might get
involved, and wanted to save Mr. Kupchella the embarrassment of a
public showdown.
Some faculty members have found an irresistible source of gallows
humor in Mr. Engelstad's intrusion into the naming controversy.
Outside the office of Lucy Ganje, an associate professor of
communications, is a poster of a Rhineland maiden holding a coin
box marked with a swastika. "Heil Benefactor!"
reads the caption. "You must finish the arena, please.
Hockey, hockey über alles!"
Others have taken stronger stands. When Mr. Engelstad, with
characteristic tone deafness toward public perception, recently
donated $261,000 to the university's Nordic-studies effort,
Faythe Thureen, an instructor of Norwegian, threatened to quit.
She said she would not work in the program if his money was used
while the Fighting Sioux name remains.
The board's vote leaves a number of university officials in a
tight spot. Mr. Kupchella has to continue dealing with tribal
officials, his credibility clearly diminished, and he wants to
attract more American Indian students to enroll here.
The president has pledged to make the University of North Dakota
"a premier institution for Native Americans." Leigh D.
Jeanotte, director of Native American programs and a Chippewa,
has ambitious plans to move the programs from their current worn
headquarters in a two-story frame house into a new, $5-million
center.
Even if those goals are accomplished, Mr. Jeanotte worries that
he may be making a Faustian bargain: His peers may think he won
the money on the backs of Indian students who fought against the
name.
Many of those students say they will continue to challenge the
university, and will step up protests when the new arena opens in
the fall. Others feel defeated, perhaps because they hear an echo
of past defeats, when choices regarding their honor were made by
others, and power and money won out over doing the right thing.
"It's hard not to see history repeating itself in Ralph
Engelstad's efforts," says Monique Vondall, a Chippewa and a
senior majoring in English, who conveys the emotional devastation
felt by some students. "People get depressed. Sometimes, I
don't want to get out of bed in the morning."
Even the student-government president, it seems, faces tough
choices. One recent weekend, Berly Nelson, an affable senior from
Fargo and a supporter of the Fighting Sioux name, was invited to
attend a speech on the controversy by the president of the
National Indian Education Association. But he had other plans: He
would be attending an alumni reunion -- at Ralph Engelstad's
Imperial Palace hotel.
"Kind of ironic, huh?" he asks
