Say It Ain't Sioux

For years, college and professional sports teams have taken heat for caricaturing Native Americans with their nicknames and mascots. Even so, we still have the Washington Redskins, and the Cleveland Indians haven't scrubbed the cartoon Chief Wahoo from their caps. In other instances, tribes have sanctioned a team's use of a nickname, as with the Florida State Seminoles and the Utah Utes.

But what about the puzzling case of the University of North Dakota (UND) and the Fighting Sioux? Spirit Lake, the Sioux reservation closest to the UND campus in Grand Forks, supports the name. Yet on Jan. 1, the school...