The headdresses worn, with little else, by dancers at the Crazy Horse club in Paris have provoked a complaint from descendants of the Sioux warrior after whom the cabaret was named without their permission.

Elders of the Oglala Sioux tribe sent Alfred Red Cloud, one of its senior members, to France to deliver a letter appealing to the club to stop using a name “sacred to our people.”

As admirers of the nude cabaret muttered about “politically correct killjoys,” the Crazy Horse management met Monday night to consider its response.

After 53 years, a name change for the nightclub off the Champs-Elysees seemed unlikely.

Red Cloud, who described himself as an emissary on behalf of “my ancestors, my people, and my tribe,” was greeted cordially by staff of the club when he presented the letter while attending an American cultural festival in Paris at the weekend.

Red Cloud, who lives on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, said: “We don’t want to close this establishment, just to change its name. The family was never asked for permission for the name to be used.”

In the letter, Harvey White Woman, a descendant of Crazy Horse, who died in 1877, and an executor of his estate, suggested that the dancers’ feathered head wear amounted to an abuse of a native symbol.

He said: “I want the young people of my tribe to remember him as a strong leader and warrior and not some nightclub in Paris.”

In America, the tribe brought a legal case against a New York drinks company, which agreed to stop marketing a product as the “Original Crazy Horse Malt Liquor.”

The Crazy Horse cabaret was rather grandly described as “the art of the nude” by its founder, the late Alain Bernardin. The shows are now owned by Bernardin’s three children.

A spokesman said that he could not comment until the Bernardins had decided on a reply to the letter.