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What: “In Whose Honor?”

When: Tonight, 7 PDT on PBS.

American Indian nicknames, mascots and logos are a vanishing breed in this country, but one controversial symbol that remains, staunchly, against bitter opposition, is Chief Illiniwek, the war-painted dancing mascot of the University of Illinois.

“In Whose Honor?” examines the debate over the Chief--and, peripherally, other caricatures of Native American culture in American sports--by asking that same question, again and again, to two widely disparate sets of responses.

Illinois students and alumni contend the Chief “honors” Native Americans because, unlike the Cleveland Indians’ “Chief Wahoo,” he’s not a grotesque wide-eyed cartoon, but an actual student dressed in authentic buckskin and eagle-feather headdress.

“I can’t imagine the Chief, who deports himself with such dignity, and such solemnity . . . can be perceived as a racial insult or slur,” one Illinois trustee says.

Honor? Dignity? Solemnity?

Charlene Teters, the Native American graduate student who launched the campaign against Chief Illiniwek in 1988, is moved to tears as she recounts taking her two children to a Fighting Illini basketball game. “I saw my daughter try to become invisible; my son tried to laugh,” she recalls. “It still makes me angry, because I know they are hurting other people when they do that.”

The film interviews several wealthy, white Illinois alumni--oblivious to the irony at hand--who speak fervently about fighting Teters’ anti-Chief campaign in order to preserve tradition and culture at the school.

Teters eventually became a national spokesperson for the Native American movement and in one striking scene is seen outside a Washington Redskin game arguing with a black Redskin fan--his face painted, his head topped with a mock Indian headdress.

The film effectively raises similarities between Chief Illiniwek and such old racist stereotypes as Little Black Sambo and the Frito Bandito--and wonders why the Chief and his ilk haven’t followed the Bandito into extinction.

In the words of one Native American activist who is interviewed, “What part of ‘Ouch!’ don’t you understand?”