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THE LATE REUBEN SNAKE, ONETIME chairman of the American Indian Movement and member of the Winnebago nation, said that to be an Indian meant “having every third person you meet tell you about his great-grandmother who was a real Cherokee princess” and “nine out of ten people tell you how great Jim Thorpe was.”
A description using the terms “full-blood” or “pure-blood” was something Thorpe dealt with incessantly throughout his career, a notion in Anglo culture that an Indian untouched by white heritage was more mysterious, exotic, and perhaps dangerous.
As he trained for a variety of track-and-field events, Jim became obsessed with winning gold medals in Stockholm, where the games would be held, but his motivations were more practical than egotistical. “I wanted to win those events for one reason. It wasn’t to be acclaimed the greatest all-around athlete in the world for the mere glory that accompanied that title. I wanted to win so that it might serve as a diploma to get me a job as an all-around coach in some university.”
Then and for the rest of his life, Thorpe would encounter people who expected him to look and act like the stereotype of an Indian, and for various reasons—to appease them, to show pride of ancestry, to make a buck, or all three at once—he often obliged.
The notion that Thorpe was all brawn and little brains could not have been further from the truth. In his athletic endeavors, he had an uncommon ability to see and think his way through whatever he faced. Abel Kiviat, his shipboard roommate, recalled that Thorpe could watch another athlete do something once, think about the performance, and duplicate it.
Citius, Altius, Fortius was the Olympic motto—“Faster, Higher, Stronger.” Thorpe, after day one, was faster, longer, and stronger.
A stunning photograph was taken of Jim standing on the stadium infield then. At first the viewer is drawn to the odd mix of socks and shoes, but soon the eyes move up to see his relaxed stance, hands on hips, left foot slightly forward, and then the majesty of his rugged face. Here is the beauty that poet Marianne Moore captured so well when she was his teacher back at Carlisle—Thorpe’s “equilibrium with no stricture… the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.” Now
Disentangling fact from fiction in accounts of Thorpe’s career was always complicated by the mythmaking of the sporting press, the fact that Jim at times was an unreliable narrator of his own life, and the tendency of Pop Warner to put the best light on his own actions, giving himself the role of white savior.
One oft repeated story was of the time Jim stayed out late drinking and McGraw blasted him, saying he should stay away from alcohol because firewater was the undoing of Indians. To which Thorpe reportedly replied, “What about the Irish?”
As for the Indian part of the name, sports teams the country over called themselves Indians, but few claimed authenticity like the Oorang Indians. Every member of the team, led by Jim Thorpe, the player-coach, was an American Indian.
As historian Philip Deloria put it: “Indian athletes were expected to display white cultural understandings of Indianness to their predominantly white audiences.”
Thorpe in the flesh, in action on the field, thrilled observers in a way only the most charismatic athletes could, not as an agent in the quotidian act of winning and losing games, but as a work of art.
The pervasive view of the debilitated Indian athletes failed to consider the corrosive effects of a dominant culture that left them straddling two worlds, constantly fighting against the odds, romanticized and dehumanized at the same time.
The indigenous ballplayers understood the contradiction of performances that helped them survive financially and to some extent celebrated their history while also serving as a form of minstrelsy accentuating dominant stereotypes of the American Indian. Finding it necessary to perform for white audiences, to redeploy a phrase Jim used fatalistically after his Olympic medals were yanked, was viewed as “just another event in the red man’s life of ups and downs.”
Throughout his career, coaches and sportswriters remarked on his inconsistency of habit and mind, but in truth it was persistence that defined his life.
Jim spoke out, organized, and helped create a sense of community among the diverse Indians in Los Angeles, an important urban center for indigenous people. He became known to some as Akapamata, the Sac and Fox word for “caregiver.”
Jim Thorpe was told by his mother that he was the reincarnation of Black Hawk, his tribal ancestor in the Thunder Clan of the Sac and Fox nation. Black Hawk the warrior, Thorpe the athlete, the best-known American Indians of their times, both paraded through white America as noble oddities, one a prisoner of war, the other a prisoner of fame. The myth in each instance outlived the man.
I would like to say this,” Grace said. “What does the word great mean? Webster’s dictionary defines it like this, and I quote: ‘Remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness.’ My father had his faults. Who doesn’t? He was not a businessman and he left only a small estate when he died. He dug ditches to support his family during the Depression when he was too old for athletics. But in his chosen field he had no peers. He stood alone. He was remarkable in magnitude, degree, and effectiveness. He was great.”
