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To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools (Sport and Culture Series, V. 2)
To Show What an Indian Can Do Sports at Native American Boarding Schools - Sport and Culture Series, V. 2 Author:John Bloom Sports/Native American Studies A compelling and inspiring account of Native American student athletes. Between 1899 and 1917, the football team of Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian School rose to national prominence, competing-and winning-against the country's most formidable programs: Harvard, Army, and Pennsylvania. Under Carlisle's legendary c... more »oach, Glenn "Pop" Warner, players such as Gus Welch, William Henry "Lone Star" Dietz, and most notably Jim Thorpe-perhaps the century's greatest athlete-became household names. Together with other athletes, including Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Charles Albert "Chief" Bender and distance runner Louis Tewanima, they helped change the country's attitudes toward Native Americans. The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture upon them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sport in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity. John Bloom is author of A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture (Minnesota, 1997). Sport and Culture Series, volume 2 Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press Announcing a new series Sport and Culture Series editors: M. Ann Hall, University of Alberta, and Toby Miller, New York University This series offers a forum for the in-depth consideration of sport, a subject that is the most universal part of world entertainment culture, engaging broad theoretical and political concerns about culture and globalization, race, and gender. The first volume in the series was Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story by Leslie Heywood (see page 40).« less