A year ago, my high school did what every school should do when cursed with a racially insensitive logo.
It dropped it.
In one sweet day last February, Denver South waved goodbye to Johnny Rebel, the Confederate soldier who somehow invaded the school decades earlier.
Mr. Rebel, in the perceptive words of student protesters, "represents someone who was willing to fight and die for the suppression of African-Americans."
He was a daily insult to hundreds of South students. He was a hindrance to the school's future.
Johnny Rebel is remarkably similar to the Fighting Sioux logo that currently drains the prestige of the University of North Dakota.
UND plays Colorado College on Friday night at World Arena. Unfortunately, UND players still skate around wearing an antique logo that should have been dumped years ago.
Dr. David Gipp laughed as he considered North Dakota's long, expensive, misguided battle to retain the Fighting Sioux logo.
It was a pained laugh.
"We're in the 21st century and people here need to start getting real," Gipp said from his office in North Dakota. "When students go out in the real world, they find out that diversity is not an expected thing, it's a reality. It is the reality of the real world."
Gipp is a 1969 UND grad and a Lakota member -- a term he prefers to Sioux -- of the Standing Rock tribe. He serves as president of United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota.
The words fighting and Sioux don't belong together, Gipp said, and the Sioux don't want to be seen as whooping, violent characters from a John Wayne western.
They want to be seen, Gipp said, as peaceful, intelligent men and women residing in today's America.
"The Fighting Sioux moniker grates at the integrity of Native American people," he said. "It's bad for North Dakota. It's like living on an island when there's a real world that we have to deal with."
The battle to retain the Fighting Sioux logo has become a massive mess. Gipp is quick to say he doesn't speak for every Native American. The issue is controversial, he said, even among the Sioux.
UND also battles the NCAA, which in 2005 described the logo as "hostile and abusive" to Native Americans.
That description, which is accurate, only strengthened the resolve of many North Dakota supporters to keep the nickname.
I traveled to Grand Forks last winter for the CC-UND hockey series and talked with a dozen fans. The conversations were remarkably similar.
The logo offends and insults thousands of Native Americans, but that truth fails to sink into the minds of many UND fans. If the logo is meant to honor the Sioux, that's all that matters to many UND fans.
Keeping the Fighting Sioux logo is a crusade for thousands of North Dakota residents. It's a worthless crusade. It's a doomed crusade.
It's time to try listening. It's time to employ the gift of empathy, which allows a person to reach outside his or her own sensibilities and beliefs and consider the sensibilities and beliefs of others.
That's what happened at Denver South. Students engaged in a peaceful protest, allowing officials to see why a Confederate soldier from the 19th century had no place at an urban high school in the 21st century.
"It's the Confederacy and it's slavery," South's basketball point guard Brandon Swain told me last month as he described what the Johnny Rebel logo meant to him. "It's one class more dominant than the other class.
"It was negative, and you never want to see anything negative about your school."
On the night I talked with Swain, I visited my high school for the first time in years. Denver South is a majestic, neo-gothic structure on the edge of a lake, and it was the scene of many of the best -- and worst -- days of my life.
It's a place where students of all cultures gather each day to learn about the world. And it's a place where a Confederate soldier doesn't -- and didn't -- belong.
It felt great to walk into the building, especially considering Johnny Rebel had walked out.
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