If I were sending in this column the old-fashioned way — paper, envelope, stamps — it would leave my hands when it disappeared into the mail slot of my local post office. It's an unremarkable little post office in the center of town, across the street from the town common. Outside it is red brick, like much of the rest of the town center. Inside it is dull, gray, functional: rows of mailboxes with numbers and little keyholes, wooden tables crowded with forms, promotional posters for new stamp issues, informational posters stating rules and regulations.

If you're standing in line at the post office, waiting for your turn with the clerk at the window, you might — if the wait is long enough — take a minute or two to look up on the wall to your left, above the level where the posters hang. There you will find the one thing that distinguishes our little brick post office from every other post office in the nation. It is a mural painted mostly in somber greys, browns, and blacks, blending in almost too well with the institutional color scheme around it. The biggest splash of color is in the lower right corner: a red blanket, covering a woman as she nurses an infant. The woman is sitting in front of the wheel of a handcart. The other figures in the picture appear to be men, and several of them are in chains.

The mural in my post office is called "John Eliot Speaks to the Natick Indians." John Eliot was a Puritan missionary who converted a group of Algonquin-speaking Indians to Christianity in the middle of the seventeenth century, and settled these new Christians in special "Praying Indian" towns in what is now eastern Massachusetts. In October, 1675 — during a bloody, brutal conflict between white settlers and the Wampanoag Indians described by historian Jill Lepore as "in proportion to population, the most fatal war in all of American history" — the Praying Indians were rounded up as potential traitors and sent to a concentration camp on Deer Island, in Boston Harbor. Many of those Indians starved or froze to death during the subsequent winter.

My town was one of those communities emptied to the concentration camps of King Philip's War. Originally chartered as one of the best-known and most successful of the Praying Indian settlements, it became part of the spoils for the white colonists when the war was over. The surviving Indians returned to homes and farms in ruins, a broken community that would, from then on, be dominated by white Puritans, their descendants, and the waves upon waves of immigrants who followed.

We, who live in this town now, have been here a long, long time; or we are recent arrivals. Either way, we have — all of us — plenty of reasons to fail to remember that this country was built on blood and conquest, that the land we live on was taken from others, at gunpoint, in chains. To the victors go the spoils, and the amnesia. But when I go to my local post office and see the doomed woman nursing her doomed infant above my head, my amnesia fails: I shiver with guilt. And with recognition. It was not so long ago that my ancestors fled to this shore with the shadow of concentration camps at their backs. Have I not sat on this same ground, with a baby pressed to my breast? Those babies of mine, the two of them, have lived here their whole lives. They walk these streets, play in the gazebo on the town common, clamor to come along on errands to the post office. Have they ever noticed the mural on the wall? No. But they know the nickname of the town's high school sports teams: the Redmen.

My children are sports fans, born and bred. They come by it honestly, through their father, who has diligently cultivated their natural inclinations by spending all the money we should have been saving for their college educations on Red Sox tickets, Celtics tickets, even Patriots tickets. My kids have attended professional hockey games, college hockey games, men's college basketball games. They behaved themselves beyond anyone's wildest expectations at three straight basketball games last year at the women's NCAA basketball tourney. But when we have exhausted our funds and our possibilities to see professional and college games, they go — with tremendous enthusiasm and delight — to see our high school teams play. And they cheer for the Redmen.

It's a slur so obvious, so offensive, that I'm struggling to use it in a public space with my name attached to it. Would I allow my children to cheer for the Yids or the Wogs? Of course not. I would be horrified, and so would almost everyone else in this town. Such a nickname would never be allowed to stand — who would want to be associated with a town where racism was blazoned from the school uniforms and the bleachers that ring the fields? But here we are, and here are my children, who know the names of all the standouts on the high school football and basketball teams. They beg for the helium balloons they sell in the local grocery store, with a profile of a dime-store Indian on them.

At the end of this month, my town will put the question to a vote. Should the Redmen nickname be changed? The supporters of the nickname are numerous and well-organized. They include families who have lived in this town for generations, as well as the town's most famous son, a former professional football player famous for his short stature and last-minute heroics. "Once a Redmen, Always a Redmen" say the bumper stickers around town. The supporters say, "Generation after generation have used the name, and we see absolutely no reason why it should be changed, or why we should be forced to change it." History. Tradition.

Genocide. Racism.

There are still descendants of the Praying Indians living here in town and in the region. When town officials last year decided to change the name (a decision that this month's vote will either confirm or overturn), the chief of the Praying Indians released a statement saying that the nickname was "racist and offensive."

It is shameful that we even need to be told that. It is more shameful that so many of us have been told, and still don't care.

I have always taught my children that words matter, that people's feelings matter, that — in Hillel's famous phrase — we should not do to others what we would find hateful if done unto us. How can I, in good conscience, teach my children that and then let them cheer for the Redmen? What would I do if — god forbid — they themselves wanted to play sports in high school? Can you imagine watching your child run across a field with a racial slur printed on his or her back?

I hope I never have to face that dilemma. I hope my children never have to choose between doing the right thing and being part of the community where they were born and raised. I hope this town votes to bury the old, offensive nickname forever.