1940

It's been quite a fall for Forty's football fans.

Although the Big Green has had its problems on the gridiron this year and the won-lost record to date is something less than we've become accustomed to over the past five championship years, it was still a typical Dartmouth team in providing us with drama aplenty.

According to DCAC records, something more than 60 of the Class applied for tickets to the Princeton game, indicating that at least 120 of us, counting wives and kinder, returned to the Hanover Plain for that encounter, which saw Dartmouth threatening to bring out a tie up to the last seconds.

Yet, of that number, only about 24 classmates and a handful of wives turned up at the pregame class meeting at the new Murdough Center. They included Bob Austin, Joe Burnett, Art Ostrander, Stet Whitcher, John Moody, Staff King, Dick Bowman, Jack McDonald, Oscar Acer, Ken Arwe, Gordie Wentworth, Hugh Dreyfoos, Bob Gensel, Dick Goulder, John Crandall, and Bob MacMillan, our new and past class presidents, Elmer Brown, Cliff Faldenau, ex-roommate Malcolm deSieyes, and Ruth Porter, Fred's widow continuing his good work as a member of our executive committee. Among those who missed the meeting was Ted Ellsworth, who flew all the way from Dubuque, lowa, to set what must be a class distance record for the occasion and whom I noted singing lustily with the Glee Club on the steps of Dartmouth Hall at the Dartmouth Night rally on Friday.

At the meeting, Art Ostrander was honored for his extraordinary leadership in putting the Class over the top in Alumni Fund Green Der- by. Don Rainie reported that the Class happily is solvent and that he was further gratified when those present voted to increase from $10 to $15 the amount to be allocated for each memorial book purchased for the Dartmouth Library by the class book fund. The move takes account of inflation and permits the continuation of books of substance and beauty as memorial gifts to the College.

That activity, which Don reported is now on a "current" basis, is one of those nice things that go on quietly because somebody like Don "carries the ball." It means that there's a book, with all that books mean in the process of passing the torch of civilization from generation to generation, in Dartmouth Libraries in memory of each of our classmates who have died, reminding new classes that we were here and that we still care.

That's some of the good news from that meeting, held, incidentally, in the Murdough Center in a delightfully pleasant Alperin Conference Room, which looks out through a band of picture windows on a glade of towering white pines.

Now for the bad, to parade my bias. The highly-charged issue of the masthead on the Indian Drum newsletter received another airing after Bob Austin, as the new editor, reported receiving an anonymous letter postmarked Hanover protesting the continued use of the caricature Indian who has been beating the '40 drum for a couple of decades or more. Bob wanted to know the pleasure of the Class. The current heading was reaffirmed 22 to 2 after considerable debate and exchange of strong opinions. I was one of the minority.

As one of the Class who has had several conversations over the past few years with Native Americans, as they prefer to be called, now attending Dartmouth, I have been persuaded - not intimidated - that, whatever our perceptions, the use of the Indian symbol by nonIndians is seriously troubling to them.

I tried to describe my observations and feelings during the meeting, but the right words did not come at the right time. Therefore, because I think the issue is important and because I personally feel strongly, I'm going to take advantage of my role to make these comments here.

Whatever its depiction, the symbol in Indian eyes is way off the mark, particularly in this era of self-awareness among ethnic and racial groups. The caricature of course, is seen - again no matter how affectionately or respectfully intended, as I know our masthead is - as ridicule. And that hurts a people still struggling to find their way in our industrial, urban, and innovative society while still honoring their traditions, such as reverence for the past and its ways, respect for elders, learning from them by emulation, and otherwise holding fast the interlocking fabric of tribal society.

Conversely, even the noblest depiction of the Indian turns out to be mockery in their eyes, because in their current, constricted world of the reservation, or the urban or rural slum where often the non-reservation Indian groups are found, there is all too little chance to be noble and brave in the way of the natural hunter of their tradition. Rather, the sensitive, intelligent Indian is reminded of how little nobility there is in the poverty and frustrations of his peoples.

It is a sad and a complex story, if one will only contemplate it in all its ramifications and with compassion for peoples still caught up in forces at odds with their traditional ways.

One day, surely, their perspective will be different and they may enjoy the Indian symbol as a Scot enjoys jokes about Scots. But even that was not always so. That time, however, must wait until Native Americans have recovered their sense of identity in what has been for them an essentially alien culture since the advent of the European on these shores. Profound cultural changes - and this is one for them - take time, and the most difficult period is precisely such moments of transition to new levels of understanding.

In this context, time and new educational .achievements are needed, so that not only individuals, like those graduating from Dart' mouth, but also the nations of Indian peoples may in a matter of decades find ways of melding their traditional societies into an essential!) European-based culture evolved over 2,000 years of change.

Educational programs like that now offered at Dartmouth, reaching back to its own tradition of mission, are critical in this process. That's why I am saddened when I see what I consider to be the most superficial tradition of an institutional symbol stand in the way of a tradition of substance in terms of man helping man.

To me, at least, there's profound irony in the insistence on a symbol that somehow negates the basic purpose from which that symbol is born - namely Dartmouth's early and now renewed commitment to the education of Indians. It's this sense of compassionate commitment that moved the Trustees in their recent statement about the symbol. It's this sense, in all affection for my classmates, that I'm trying to share here - at the sacrifice of reporting a lot of news from and about individual comings and goings.

Secretary, 4 Parkhurst Hall Hanover, N.H. 03755

Treasurer, 64 North Main St. Concord, N.H. 03301