Film "in whose honor"
... evident that the support for the Chief by the university is motivated by money. Because of the funding provided by alumni, the university is always at their mercy. They wouldn’t want to risk upsetting the alumni for fear that they would stop contributing, and for the alumni the Chief is a symbol of their past and for them a part of their own personal culture and tradition. Over the weekend I did some thinking about the factors that might lead people to think it is acceptable to use Indian symbols as popular culture. I came to the conclusion that because of the relative smallness of the American-Indian population in society, very few people have contact with them. I think that over time and generations the lack of contact leads us to this subconscious feeling that real American-Indians don’t exist, and we begin to familiarize ourselves only with the symbolic images we do see in our culture. Because of this familiarization we don’t really recognize our racial offensiveness, and these symbols become a part of many pe...