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February 4 - February 19, 2025
Born in 1887, in the Indian Territory of what later became Oklahoma, Thorpe was the quintessential underdog who rose from nowhere to become the greatest athlete in the world, the Natural who could do anything on the fields of play.
Thorpe’s life spanned a sixty-five-year period when the dominant society believed the best way to deal with Indians was to rid them of their Indianness and make them as white as possible.
where the focus was more on forced acculturation than on education and the methods were crude, cruel, and dehumanizing.
For all of Carlisle’s failings and questionable intentions, some of its students considered their boarding school years among the best of their lives. Jim sometimes claimed that himself.
Pop lied and feigned innocence to save his own reputation while portraying Jim as the ignorant native.
His days were marked by loss. The loss of tribal lands. The loss of his twin brother in childhood. The loss of his namesake son at age three. The loss of his Olympic medals and records. His loss of money and security and equilibrium.
It is also a story of perseverance against the odds.
Andrew Jackson, gained notoriety as an Indian killer, and killing Indians was part of the nation’s providential plan.
where the official policy was to exterminate Indians not in body but in language, dress, behavior, tradition, and soul.
Cut their hair and outfit them in uniforms resembling those worn by the enemies of their forefathers, the U.S. Cavalry. Kill the Indian, save the man.
prisoners
the stuff his people are made of,
at least for now.
one-sided treaties
with more than 150 Sac and Fox killed, many of them women and children.
from Geronimo to Sitting Bull to Iron Tail to Crazy Horse and on to Jim Thorpe, some defanged, all romanticized, exaggerated yet diminished at the same time.
Native Americans suffered from genocide, neglect, and discrimination of other sorts, but were treated separately from African Americans.
His mother died after childbirth when Jim had just reached his teens, and Hiram succumbed to a fatal poison, likely from a snakebite, when his son was sixteen.
was a concept imposed on American Indians by white society.
That was when forced assimilation became government policy through the General Allotment Act of 1887,
Eliminating their communal reservation lifestyle and turning them instead into private landowners was part of that process, along with the educational acculturation of their children.
means of perpetuating the drunken Indian myth of people who were childlike and inferior.
that systemic social conditions were the primary cause of high rates of alcoholism among Native Americans, and that genetically they were not more susceptible than other groups.
“Boomer Sooner”—the celebration of land thieves and their abettors.
“It is inherent for Indians to love games,”
The year before Jim and Charlie began their educations, Congress authorized the Indian bureau to “withhold rations, clothing, and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who refuse or neglect to send their children”
to refashion young Indians in the image of white
people.
back to school which to them is bondage.”
to persuade the Sioux to cede more of their communal land in the name of progress.
The essential contradiction of how white America viewed Indians was evident in that brief introduction, a peculiar combination of a relentless effort to destroy a people followed by mythmaking reverence of those same people.
The Indians themselves were torn between two worlds,
Luther Standing Bear thought there was a more sinister reason having to do with the philosophy of culturally killing them to save them.
“The fact is we were to be transformed, and short hair being the mark of gentility with the white man, he put his mark upon us.”
“It gave us purpose and resolve at a time when purpose and resolve were dead in our camps. It gave us the chance to test our bravery and our will to survive and to excel.”
He was a believer in using the media to spread his vision, inviting big-city journalists to the school and bringing in a local photographer to take before-and-after pictures of his little Indians, here wearing moccasins and long hair, there neatly shaved and uniformed, the photos developed in a way that made their skin look whiter.
The Mercer administration was a mix of good and horrid intentions, just as Pratt’s was,
“But most of the boys complained about having to sleep in the soft beds.
The controversy brought forward essential questions about the corrupting influence of big-time football in the nation’s academic institutions that would resurface generation after generation.
who beat her with a stone thinking it better to have her daughter dead than captured into the white world.
All three believed they were acting from good intentions; all fell short in different ways.
a notion in Anglo culture that an Indian untouched by white heritage was more mysterious, exotic, and perhaps dangerous.
In the press, it was Thorpe’s Indianness that defined him.
“his happiest years were spent at Carlisle.”
American shield.
Three among them, as the Associated Press noted, “had a clearer title to the name Americans than any of their companions”—Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and Andrew Sockalexis, a marathoner from the Penobscot nation in Maine.
Thorpe would encounter people who expected him to look and act like the stereotype of an Indian,
This system showed Thorpe three times better than his closest competitor.
said to replicate the skills of a nineteenth-century cavalryman,
They were ill-fitting, different sizes, different laces.
