John Bloom. To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools, Sports and Culture Series, vol. 2. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 151 pp. Illustrated. $24.95 . Hardcover.
Although the culture of the Carlisle Indian School may be well known among historians, the popular sports media's history has perhaps a more selective memory for the football, track and other competitive teams for which Native Americans ardently participated before the 1950s. Recent commemorative sport shows for "millennium athletes" seemed to be covered with more modern-day athletes with few of the early parts of the twentieth century (as many commemorative efforts are apt to do). However, there were many great Native American athletes and teams in the first half of the century in scholastic sports as To Show What an Indian Can Do displays. Though sports such as football were introduced by Native American boarding schools as a method for assimilating students into mainstream white culture (and erasing their native heritage) -something one may expect to have caused a lethargic lack of participation in the activity the sports instilled immense competition and pride among its students (p. xii). The main drive of Bloom's book is to explore how Native American students not only excelled at these sports, but participated in them out of pleasure and as a way of formulating an identity for themselves as their native heritage eroded away (p. xii). Parents, who were often the most resistant to their children losing their native heritage through attendance at these schools, discouraged attendance at first, but by the Great Depression encourage it, simply because life for their children would be better away from the reservations' wretched conditions. Another focus of .. . What an Indian Can Do is the coverage of Victorian ideals at these boarding schools. Boys were encouraged to compete in team sports, show individualism and be energetic, while women students were to rest, be at home, be quiet, and participate in more physical education "activities" (rather than team sports). These ideals not only limited competition for women, but speak volumes of boarding school administrations' enforcement of Victorian ideals well into the twentieth century as a way of life.
Bloom concentrates his study on the sports at the Carlisle Indian School, the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and Chilocco Indian School in northern Oklahoma. The former two in particular, played a key role in the establishment of sports programs at Native American boarding schools by using their winning teams as good public relations and fund-raising tools. Carlisle's success alone - even against teams from all-white schools and the perennial powerhouses of the day - encouraged other schools to adapt to the same formula, and one that Haskell, dubbed the 'Carlisle of the West,' instituted. Bloom devotes a large part of his book to the homecoming game and construction of a new stadium at Haskell in 1926. He notes that this homecoming game displayed for administrators the success in their minds of the boarding school program since it exhibited Native Americans (who were often depicted as savages in white American society) as gentleman, who controlled their aggressive behavior, using it only on the football field. But despite all of their athletic glory, most boarding schools did not provide much of an education, as it prepared most graduates for blue-collar work rather than any advanced study.
Read the entire article
