Shed no tears.

Cartoonish moccasins, or bare feet, have got no rhythm.

Chief Illiniwek, the longtime mascot - or symbol, as some alumni and administrators have euphemized him - of the University of Illinois' sports teams, is being retired at the school's last home basketball game this evening against Michigan.

Retired isn't quite the right word.

He's being shoehorned out - on account of the NCAA's determination that the chief is a "hostile or abusive" mascot, and its banning Illinois of hosting postseason games until the school stops using Illiniwek in that role.

Maybe that sounds overly PC and out-and-out stone-handed, especially coming from a blowhard getup like the NCAA, which has bigger problems with which to deal than the interdiction of certain mascots and images.

But the tradition of dressing a white student in American Indian garb, in full-feathered headdress, and having him parade around at ballgames, dancing at halftime, charged to lead the university's football and basketball teams on to victory on the court and on the gridiron somehow seems a bit untoward. Not because I say it, but rather because that's the way many American Indian groups say they feel.

Imagine that. Some of them do not approve of having their culture and heritage represented in such a manner, via a partisan caricature that clueless white people in positions of power at the university say honors it.

Many, not all, but many American Indians disagree.

That's reason enough to discontinue the mascot's use, and more noble than doing it because the NCAA's ban pops the school's athletics pocketbook, forcing the issue. Holding on to a tradition that dates back to 1926 solely because it is a tradition isn't a good reason to cling to a stereotype.

Some traditions, after all, are worth dumping.

This is one of them.

The University of Utah got rid of its mascot - also a student done up in Indian regalia - at the same time it lost the nickname "Running Redskins" in 1972. It changed to "Utes," eventually with permission of the Ute tribe's governing body. For a brief time in the early '80s, a Native American student dressed as the "Crimson Warrior" was riding out onto the football field and throwing a spear before games.

A university committee swapped that concept for "Swoop," a red-tailed hawk, a bird supposedly indigenous to the Wasatch Range, in the mid-'80s.

"We don't use a Native American image out of sensitivity to feelings on the issue," says Fred Esplin, vice president for University Relations. "We have consulted with the tribe. We would not use the name without their permission. We would cease using it if they didn't want it."

Utah showed insight where Illinois did not.

The story goes that an Illinois band director and a student, who was a Boy Scout, along with a group of other students, came up with the idea for the chief, the costume and the dances he performed at the games. That's the origin of Illinois' proud tradition. The dances, elements of which have been added and subtracted by each of the students who has portrayed Chief Illiniwek through the years, are hardly the real deal.

None of the students has been American Indian.

Having the chief perform at games might seem to some the perpetuation of a proud and reverential symbol worth perpetuating. Even some American Indians were in favor of keeping it.

But to others, such as the National Congress of American Indians and American Indian student organizations, and the head of the remnant group of American Indians who are mostly in Oklahoma now because forefathers were booted out of Illinois back in the day, it was seen in a negative light, anywhere along a spectrum from irritating to embarrassing to harmful racial stereotyping.

We're talking about the mascot here, the chief, not the nickname "Illini." That nickname was found by the NCAA to depict and represent the name of the state of Illinois, not a group of American Indians, so it can stay in place.

Too many white Americans have a problem with the sensitivities involved with using Indian caricatures to root on college or pro teams, or naming those teams after American Indian tribes, as though those tribes are comparable to all the Bears and Tigers and Lions and Bulldogs and Huskies and Banana Slugs tagged to teams, coast to coast. They ask, "What about the Fighting Irish? What about the 49ers? What about the Boilermakers? The Patriots? The Miners? They're people, too."

Few of those people, though, were persecuted the way American Indians were in such a tragic chapter of this country's history. They generally weren't massacred or rounded up and put on reservations. If there are large subsets among American Indians now, be they a majority or a minority, who glean negative vibes from sporting traditions put in place by team owners or school band leaders or students in less-aware periods of time, those traditions should be shut down.

That's true, even if the empowered mainstream thinks American Indians should embrace its interpretations and representations of others' heritage, culture, and ethnicity, and feel honored by its borrowing of those symbols to root, root, root for the home team.

We've come that far, at least, as a society, haven't we?

The Washington Redskins, notwithstanding.

It's not a matter of being PC. It's a case of opening minds wide enough to understand what people within those groups think and feel about their own heritage and its use by others.

So, Chief Illiniwek will dance no more.

Good.

He should not be missed at Illinois games.

gmonson@sltrib.com