Sioux on warpath over strip club

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=CPR0WGUK5I0Y3QFIQMFSM5OAVCBQ0JVC?xml=/news/2004/10/19/wcrazy19.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/10/19/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=71978

The headdresses worn, with little else, by dancers at the Crazy Horse club in Paris have provoked a complaint from descendants of the Sioux warrior after whom the cabaret was named without their permission.

Elders of the Oglala Sioux tribe sent Alfred Red Cloud, one of its senior members, to France to deliver a letter appealing to the club to stop using a name "sacred to our people". Red Cloud, who described himself as an emissary on behalf of "my ancestors, my people and my tribe", was greeted cordially by staff of the club when he presented the letter while attending an American cultural festival in Paris at the weekend.

Red Cloud, who lives on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, said: "We don't want to close this establishment, just to change its name. The family was never asked for permission for the name to be used." Red Cloud, who described himself as an emissary on behalf of "my ancestors, my people and my tribe", was greeted cordially by staff of the club when he presented the letter while attending an American cultural festival in Paris at the weekend.

In the letter, Harvey White Woman, a descendant of Crazy Horse, who died in 1877, and an executor of his estate, suggested that the dancers' feathered head wear amounted to an abuse of a native symbol. He said: "I want the young people of my tribe to remember him as a strong leader and warrior and not some nightclub in Paris."

Q.E.D.

avoid using a racist headline. Oy.

I always thought that was ironic, given the destruction alcohol wreaks on native people...