The National Collegiate Athletic Association rejected on Wednesday the University of North Dakota’s bid to be allowed to continue using its nickname, the Fighting Sioux, in NCAA tournament games even though American Indians have said the name is offensive to them.
The university said it would appeal the decision.
The NCAA announced in August that, effective early next year, it would ban all colleges with “hostile and abusive” mascots or nicknames from holding or playing in NCAA-sponsored tournament games (The Chronicle, August 5).
North Dakota, which fields a men’s ice-hockey team that is consistently ranked among the top programs in the country, maintains that its use of a Native American image does not meet the NCAA’s standard.
“We certainly don’t think anything we do here comes close to ‘hostile and abusive,’” Charles E. Kupchella, the university’s president, said on Wednesday.
But two Sioux tribes have a different view. They wrote letters to the NCAA stating that they did not endorse the university’s Indian mascot.
Bob Williams, a spokesman for the NCAA, said the tribes’ letters were a primary factor in its decision. “From our perspective, not only was there not support for the mascot, there was opposition,” Mr. Williams said.
Eighteen colleges were originally subject to the NCAA’s ban, but Florida State University appealed and persuaded the NCAA in August to remove it from the list. A key element in Florida State’s appeal was backing from the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.
Earlier this month the NCAA also removed Central Michigan University and the University of Utah from the list after those institutions got their namesake tribes -- the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan and the Northern Ute Indian Tribe of Utah -- to support their nicknames.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
