Illinois Rejects Illini Mascot

The nature of PC and its thundering-herd academicide acolytes, including the politically tone-deaf cringing clueless NCAA, reveals itself again as the
University of Illinois jettisoned its human mascot "Illiniwek" after more than eighty years of prancing across the gridiron.

Those with a smattering of any knowledge of the actual history of the Middle West know that Pere Marquette and Joliet encountered the Illini tribe in what is now northern Wisconsin in the late-1600s. The Illini told him of the existence of the Mississippi River and invited him to come south to their homeland there to preach. Fr. Marquette and Joliet did so and called the land "Illinois" territory. Decades later, subsequent explorers found that the Illini had disappeared, being exterminated as a tribal entity by fellow tribes along the Mississippi. Just one of numerous ethnic cleansings these "noble savages" employed during their halcyon days of pre-conquest bucolic bliss.

Of course, the PC program of "printing the legend" of a peaceful native-American landscape disrupted by mean colonists from Europe appears to continue marching forward. I hope that the Field Museum in Chicago does not "update" its excellent set of dioramas depicting the historical territories and cultural artifacts of tribes in the Upper Middle West, including the Miami, which edged the Winnebago out of my home town of Milwaukee in the eighteenth century, if memory serves. Of course, the Marquette University "Warriors" have long since been neutered into a wildlife trope.

How the city in South Florida got the name of a tribe which migrated from Ohio to Wisconsin defies historical logic, but I live just up the road from Miami, [and just adjacent Delray Beach, which got its name from a Detroit suburb named "Delray"].

Still, historical memory is being airbrushed, and ideology is replacing actual archeology on the fronts of political rectitude. A friend of mine told me he was part Delaware Indian, and when I congratulated him, he retorted that the Delaware were a slave tribe. We all know what happened to the Mohicans.

I still cannot fathom why native Americans permit their heritage to be hijacked by the likes of Russell Means and others pushing an agenda which includes denying any depiction of their warrior spirit. Or are they being used by manipulative politico-scholars aiming at revisionism across the board of American history?