In 1926, a St. Louis YMCA official and an Ojibway Indian guide launched a program that today involves some 180,000 fathers and their children across the nation. The program, long called Y Indian Guides and Princesses, includes several thousand Chicago-area dads and their kids, the latter usually ages 5 to 11. To many of those fathers and children, the program is a remarkable, enduring and beloved success.

The program is steeped in Native American lore, from Indian parables discussed at meetings of neighborhood "tribes" to Indian-themed events at overnight weekend trips, usually to YMCA campgrounds. These events transport fathers and kids outside mainstream culture and teach participants about another American culture's customs and values.

Fathers and their children spend time together--this isn't a drop-off-the-kids program--in an atmosphere that's educational, enjoyable and respectful of peoples and traditions quite apart from their lives.

And yet a program boasting all those attributes evidently can't survive a cluster of overly earnest adults faced with a handful of complaints that the program is insensitive to Native Americans. The complaints amount to a dozen or so e-mails and letters over the last five years. In the face of that underwhelming rebuke--it's not even clear that the complainants understood the program--the Chicago-based YMCA of the USA is phasing out the Indian name and theme. The program will survive, but with a sanitized theme; participants who stick around may, for example, wind up as explorers or naturalists--which sounds suspiciously like Scouting Lite.

Although the decision to drop the Indian theme was reached last year, many participants are just learning about it this autumn. The decision to ethnically neuter the program has stirred strong, often heartfelt reactions in many Chicago-area communities. A spokesman for YMCA of the USA acknowledges that "We've heard from far more parents [upset about the change] than we ever have from Native Americans [upset about the program]."

Understandably so. This is a time, as polling results issued last week by a think tank named Public Agenda attest, when many parents are upset that they're less successful than they'd like to be at conveying good values to their children. The Indian Guides and Princesses program has always been about conveying values, with Native American culture a helpful new vehicle for parents who want to teach honor and respect for other people's ideals.

Still, dropping the Indian theme no doubt is seen as a great victory by the relatively small number of activists from the American Indian Movement and other organizations that claim to own Indian culture. What's disturbing is that their triumph also may be a great loss for other Native Americans, some of whom have gladly participated in the program through the years.

That's because, rather than instilling stereotypical notions about Indians, the Y program has taught many kids about fragments of a culture that's both native and foreign. Countless American parents grew up thinking Indians were little more than the bad-guy savages depicted in old TV westerns. Thanks to the Y Indian Guides and Princesses program, children of thousands of those parents instead have grown up with a deeper appreciation for Native American values and traditions.

Whether to promulgate or isolate that culture is in dispute. The activists want only Indians to employ Native American symbols. But in one recent test of what most American Indians really think, the activists lost--big.

Early this year, Sports Illustrated magazine sponsored a poll, conducted by Peter Harris Research Associates, of a national sample of Native Americans, more than three-fifths of whom lived on reservations. Despite assertions from activists that Native Americans are offended by Indian nicknames, mascots or symbols, 83 percent of the Native Americans interviewed said professional sports teams should not stop using them. That's right, 83 percent.

The head of one we-know-better activist group brushed off that repudiation of her group's claim that Indian culture is off-limits to outsiders; there are, she sniped, "happy campers on every plantation."

Not that every borrowing of Indian lore is fair play. The Chief Illiniwek mascot at the University of Illinois, for example, still seems like a caricature, designed merely to fire up sports fans without serving any educational purpose.

But the YMCA program is leaps and bounds beyond that. Sure, because this is a program built around kids, some of its elements are hokey; the term "princesses" probably could use fixing. But that's the rub: Rather than fixing or enhancing a program that has strong educational components, YMCA of the USA has disappointed thousands of participants by wiping out the Indian theme altogether.

This being a free country, YMCA of the USA can choose any theme it wishes for its programs. May whatever new theme its officials select succeed wildly, with even more fathers and kids developing strong parent-child bonds.

And yet this is the kind of message-sending decision that should give the rest of us pause. Do we want programs that give kids an early appreciation of another culture bled so dry that they placate every potentially aggrieved party? What reflex is it, exactly, that often makes us recoil at a name (such as Y Indian Guides) that includes an ethnic identifier? Should we celebrate and explore our differences--or should we timidly homogenize them?

It's clear how officials at YMCA of the USA would answer those questions. In essence, they already have. It is probably too much to hope that they would revisit their decision and recognize that, like many grown-ups who are forever determining what children should or shouldn't encounter, they have overplayed their hand.

Those officials hope local YMCAs go along with their dropping of the Native American theme--although local Y's do have the freedom to continue the program on their own. Perhaps some in Illinois or elsewhere will choose to do so.

And in the future, as its still-to-be-divulged new theme succeeds or fails, YMCA of the USA will learn whether it is smart to calibrate national policy to satisfy a handful of complainants and their dubious assertion that a cultural theme insults rather than inspires. Regrettably, the organization also may learn whether ditching an identity that has taught hundreds of thousands of families to respect Native Americans only makes that imperiled culture easier to ignore.

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