The recent decision by the State Board of Higher Education to instruct University of North Dakota President Robert Kelley to retire the UND sports nickname Fighting Sioux fills me with hope - and some dread.

On the one hand, I applaud the 8-0 decision of the statewide board, which gives Kelley the political cover he will need to make the controversial change. It took considerable courage for the board to make that vote. Each member deserves public praise, whether you agree with the decision or not.

It was not really a vote about the nickname and logo but rather about stopping the hemorrhaging - and about the credibility and integrity of higher education in North Dakota. Thus ends a prolonged crisis over a sports moniker that has distracted UND from its true mission, damaged its standing as the state's premier institution of higher learning and moral instruction, divided Grand Forks, hurt UND's and North Dakota's image in the national arena, and cost the state millions of dollars. All this for an athletic nickname.

On the other hand, in the wake of the historic decision, I can feel the winds gathering of a backlash against the Indians of North Dakota and their leadership. In the long run, white-Indian relations will likely improve, not so much because of the decision, but because of what it symbolizes. In the short term, however, I fear that Fighting Sioux diehards will project their frustrations onto the last people who deserve to receive them: the American Indian citizens of North Dakota.

Here's what bothers me. By granting (October 2007) UND the opportunity to "convince" the Sioux (Lakota and Dakota) Indians of North Dakota that the name and logo were not objectionable, the NCAA put the shoe on the wrong foot, and potentially worsened, rather than improved, relations between the two cultures in North Dakota. Just think for a moment of how insane it is for white folks to venture out into Indian Country to tell Indians how they ought to think about a nickname and an icon borrowed from their culture.

For more than two years, UND's athletic, alumni and administrative leadership have been engaged in a full court press in Indian Country to persuade North Dakota's Dakota and Lakota tribes to endorse Fighting Sioux, against their better judgment.

The process seems to me to degrade everyone involved, and it does not seem fundamentally different from the treaty charades of the 19th century, in which white men who wanted something (usually land) showed up in Indian Country with flattering rhetoric, presents, big promises and veiled threats, then complacently smoked "victory" cigars on the way back to "civilization," with land cessions or trespass agreements in their pockets.

Back then, if the established Indian leadership refused to cooperate, the white negotiators sought other "leaders" who had more pliable principles or picked off the rank and file with promises and annuities.

The agreement reached between UND and the NCAA in 2007 unfairly shifted the political burden of the Fighting Sioux controversy onto the backs of the Native American community and North Dakota's Indian leadership. Although this may be seen as a form of empowerment, it had the effect of forcing the Dakota and Lakota to make the final decision in a university's quarrel with the NCAA.

If the Dakota and Lakota refused to endorse Fighting Sioux, suddenly they would become responsible for decision that had the power to frustrate, outrage, offend and disappoint literally thousands of white people.

That's exactly what has happened. Anger that should be directed at the NCAA or UND's leadership now gets redirected at the Indians of North Dakota. That's a miscarriage of justice and moral responsibility.

Over the last two years I have heard lots of grumbling - some of it racist.

The non-binding plebiscite on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation has only made things worse. On April 22, members of the tribe voted 774-378 to endorse Fighting Sioux. That has enabled white diehards to argue that the Indian leadership at Spirit Lake and Standing Rock is "out of touch" with the Dakota and Lakota rank and file, and that leaders like Standing Rock's nationally respected Ron His Horse Is Thunder should step out of the way and "let the people decide."

I'm always amused when white Americans insist that people of other nations should be allowed to override their constituted leadership, while we supinely allow our government to carry us into one bad situation after the next. I would, for example, have loved a national plebiscite on Iraq, Afghanistan, enhanced interrogation techniques, the bank bailout.

It is all too easy for white folks to find fault with Indian leadership - the stereotyping runs deep in non-Indian "understanding" of life on the reservation. Some Fighting Sioux diehards are now pitting the people of Spirit Lake against those of Standing Rock, and the rank and file of both reservations against their elected leadership. Divide and conquer - it's a very old habit. Why do we do it? Because there is something we want.

The state board's gutsy decision May 14 may lower the temperature a bit and return some of the responsibility to where it belongs. I hope so.

The important thing is that the long paralysis is coming to an end, and the resolution - however frustrating in the short term - is good news for UND and North Dakota.

Now the narrative can shift from a quixotic fight to save a problematic nickname to all the good and important things that are happening at UND. Those achievements have been eclipsed by the controversy. Now the state of North Dakota has effectively cast a vote in favor of Indian cultural sovereignty and against continued appropriation of Indian traditions and iconography.

We all know that North Dakota has an "image problem" in the national arena - from bitter windswept winters to the Legislature's decision not to pass legislation protecting the gay community against discrimination, from National Geographic's "Empty Prairie" thesis to the new disclaimers and admonitions that our lawmakers have mandated at North Dakota's sole abortion clinic. Rightly or wrongly, Fighting Sioux has been regarded nationally as a sign of the stuckness of white-Indian relations in North Dakota. This decision may be a harbinger of better relations to come.

Above all, the decision indicates - in a small, but symbolically important way - that we have reached the end of the long dark era in which white people presumed that they could simply take whatever they wished from American Indians.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at Bismarck State College, and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)